Paulo Freire (19 September 1921-2 May 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy and the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Biography[]
Paulo Freire was born in Rercife, Pernambuco, Brazil in 1921, and he grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. He worked among the illiterate poor as a social worker after the 1940s, and he helped to educate the oppressed until after the military coup of 1964. He was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days by the right-wing government, and he went into exile in Bolivia and Chile before teaching in the United States and Switzerland. In 1980, he moved back to Brazil during an era of political liberalization, and he supervised the Workers' Party of Brazil adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. In 1988, he became Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo, and he died in 1997.