Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of Hope

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Among the Dead Cities , A. C. Grayling

Towards the Light , A. C. Grayling

The Oresteia , Aeschylus

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

Being and Event , Alain Badiou

On Religion , Karl Barth

The Language of Fashion , Roland Barthes

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

Key Writings , Henri Bergson

I and Thou , Martin Buber

Never Give In! , Winston Churchill

The Boer War , Winston Churchill

The Second World War , Winston Churchill

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

Cinema I , Gilles Deleuze

Cinema II , Gilles Deleuze

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Origins of Analytical Philosophy , Michael Dummett

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

Marxs Concept of Man , Erich Fromm

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Violence and the Sacred , Ren Girard

The Three Ecologies , Flix Guattari

The Essence of Truth , Martin Heidegger

The Odyssey , Homer

The Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

Language of the Third Reich , Victor Klemperer

Rhythmanalysis , Henri Lefebvre

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

On Late Style , Edward Said

Course in General Linguistics , Ferdinand de Saussure

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building A Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating A Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Interrogating the Real , Slavoj iek

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Pedagogy of Hope

Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Freire

With Notes by Ana Maria Arajo Freire

Translated by Robert R. Barr

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

English translation first published in 1994 by the Continuum

International Publishing Group Ltd

Copyright 1992 by Paulo Freire

English translation Copyright 1994 by The Continuum Publishing Company

Copyright renewed 1998 by Ana Maria Arajo Freire

This Bloomsbury Revelations edition first published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Academic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ePub ISBN : 978-1-4725-3352-4

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Ana Maria, Nita,

who gave me back a taste for life:

when life seemed so long to me,

so nearly hopeless...

I looked at her!

Paulo

In memory of Armando Neves Freire,

excellent brother, fine friend

Paulo

For Stela Bruno, Silvia Temistocles

and Reinilda

With a brotherly embrace

Paulo

For Genove Arajo,

hopeful as a teenager, at ninety

whom I can never pay what I owe,

lovingly,

Paulo

For Z de Melo and Dora

for reasons beyond counting

with an embrace from their friend

Paulo

Contents

We are surrounded by a pragmatic discourse that would have us adapt to the facts of reality. Dreams , and utopia , are called not only useless, but positively impeding. (After all, they are an intrinsic part of any educational practice with the power to unmask the dominant lies.) It may seem strange, then, that I should write a book called Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed .

But for me, on the contrary, the educational practice of a progressive option will never be anything but an adventure in unveiling. It will always be an experiment in bringing out the truth. Because this is the way I have always thought, there are those who dispute whether or not I am an educator. It happened recently in a meeting at UNESCO in ParisI have been told by someone who was there. Latin American representatives refused to ascribe me the standing of educator. At least I was not an educator as far as they were concerned. And they criticized me for what seemed to them to be my exaggerated politicization.

They failed to perceive that, in denying me the status of educator for being too political, they were being as political as I. Of course, on opposite sides of the fence. Neutral they were not, nor could ever be.

On the other hand, there must be countless individuals who think the way a friend of mine, a university professor, thinks. He came looking for me. In astonishment, he asked, But Paul... a Pedagogy of Hope in the shameless hellhole of corruption like the one strangling us in Brazil today?

The fact is that the democratization of the shamelessness and corruption that is gaining the upper hand in our country, contempt for the common good, and crimes that go unpunished, have only broadened and deepened as the nation has begun to rise up in protest. Even young adults and teenagers crowd into the streets, criticizing, calling for honesty and candor. The people cry out against all the crass evidence of public corruption. The public squares are filled once more. There is a hope, however timid, on the street corners, a hope in each and every one of us. It is as if most of the nation had been taken by an uncontainable need to vomit at the sight of all this shamefulness.

On the other handwhile I certainly cannot ignore hopelessness as a concrete entity, nor turn a blind eye to the historical, economic, and social reasons that explain that hopelessnessI do not understand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve it, apart from hope and dream. Hope is an ontological need. Hopelessness is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of that ontological need.

When it becomes a program, hopelessness paralyzes us, immobilizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world.

I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative.

I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute to this hope of mine the power to transform reality all by itself, so that I set out for the fray without taking account of concrete, material data, declaring, My hope is enough! No, my hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water.