Critique of Paulo Freire’s Major Works

Abstract

To understand Paulo Freire and to posit him properly in the historical context it is necessary to understand Brazil, the enormous land mass that occupies half of the territory of Latin America. Ever since the Europeans set foot on frontiers beyond seas, they unleashed a regime of exploitation, subjugation and plunder which swept through the whole continents, mauling, maiming and exterminating hundreds of thousands of people. The theatres of operation were vast and of unimaginable dimension. This saga of human degradation and suffering ȓ in its manifold forms – could constitute thousands of pages of shocking literature like the Mahabharatas if those events were recorded in black and white. Eduardo Galeano showed the outside world the open veins of Latin America, Brazil included. Some like Darcy Ribeiro brought to light the open wounds of Brazil. Paulo Freire said in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed that though humanization was the watchword of modern civilization, yet it had been observed more in violation than in observance. Hunger, that eats the body and benumbs the soul, which Freire experienced in his childhood and adolescence, devastated the whole of Brazil’s poor folks in the Northeast, as studied in the Geopolitics of Hunger by Josué de Castro. A critique of Paulo Freire’s major works is only possible in the backdrop of the Brazilian history of exploitation and extermination, hunger and malnutrition, and, of course, the people’s desire for democracy, human rights and peace.