JAC Volume 17 Issue 3

"Pedro saw the grape," taught the literacy manuals. But teacher Paulo Freire, with his method for teaching literacy while creating conscientization, enabled children and adults alike, in Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, in India and in Nicaragua, to realize that Pedro did not just see with his eyes. He saw also with his mind and asked himself whether a grape is nature or culture.

Pedro saw that the fruit does not result from human labor. It is Creation; it is nature. Paulo Freire taught Pedro that sowing the grape is a human action, upon nature. It is the hand, multitool, awakening the fruit's potential. It is like human beings themselves, who were sewn by nature over years of evolution in the Cosmos.

Harvesting the grape, crushing it, and transforming it into wine is culture, emphasized Paulo Freire. Labor humanizes nature, and as they labor, men and women become more human. Through labor a knot of relations is established, social life. Thanks to the teacher, who initiated his revolutionary pedagogy with factory workers at Senai in Pernambuco, Pedro also saw that the grape is harvested by landless rural workers who make virtually nothing, and that it is commercialized by middle-men who make more.² Pedro learned with Paulo that, even without knowing how to read yet, he is not an ignorant person. Before learning the letters, Pedro already knew how to build a house, brick by brick. The doctor, the lawyer, or the dentist, with all their studying, were not able to build like Pedro. Paulo Freire taught Pedro that there is no person more cultured than another, that there are distinct, parallel cultures which complement each other in social life.

Pedro saw the grape, and Paulo Freire showed him the bunches, the vine, and the entire vineyard. He taught Pedro that the better inserted a text is in the reader's and the writer's contexts, the better its reading can be understood. It is from his dialogic relation with text in context that Pedro obtains the pretext for his action. Both at the beginning and at the end of learning, only Pedro's praxis matters. Praxis-theory-praxis, in an inductive process which makes the learner into historic subject.

Pedro saw the grape, but not the bird which, from above, sees the vine but not the grape. What Pedro sees is different from what the bird sees. This way, Paulo Freire taught Pedro a fundamental principle of epistemology: the mind thinks where the feet walk. An un-equal world can be read either from the oppressor's angle or from that of the oppressed. Readings result which are as different from each other as Ptolomeu's view is from Copernicus', as the former observed the solar system with his feet on the earth and the latter envisioned himself with his feet on the sun.

Now Pedro sees the grape, the vine, and all the social relations which make the fruit into celebration in the chalice, but he cannot see Paulo Freire, who dove into Love in the morning of May 2. He leaves us an invaluable body of work, and admirable testimony to competence and coherence.

Paulo should be in Cuba, where he would receive an honorary degree from the University of Havana. When his heart, which loved so much, hurt, he asked me to represent him. Having tickets booked for Israel, I could not . However, before leaving I went to pray with Nita, his wife, and the children around his tranquil expression: Paulo saw God.