92 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
about a truly humanising and liberating educational programme.
Paulo Freire was born in Recife in 1921. The harrowing experiences of his family during the depression period in the early thirties profoundly affected his outlook. Impoverishment, malnutrition, late schooling and the wretched conditions of his compatriots made him seek a way out of the rut in which the Brazilian masses found themselves. He found the way in a total revolution by the oppressed. One of the effective means of awakening revolutionary consciousness among them was through radical adult literacy campaigns. While he was Professor of History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Recife, Freire evolved his method of teaching during the course of extensive experiments among illitrates. His participation in the Movement of Popular Culture in Recife convinced him that it was possible to make the masses critically aware of their social situation through literacy campaigns. The successful example of of Cuba after the Revolution, in wiping out illiteracy through literacy campaigns influenced the thinking of the educationists of the then liberal populist Brazilian Government. In 1963 the Brazilian Government sought the co-operation of Freire in organising a nation-wide literacy campaign enlisting the services of thousands of volunteers. The radical orientation of Freire's method naturally provoked opposition in conservative circles. In Brazil the illiterates could not vote and a campaign aimed at making them literate as well as radical was obviously a threat to the reactionary forces. And when the coup leaders took over in 1964 the campaign was wound up and Freire was arrested and jailed along with thousands of progressives. When released Freire was exiled. He went to Chile where he got encouraging response from militant educational workers and worked in UNESCO sponsored schemes. He was also associated with the Harvard School of Education. Currently he is a Special Consultant to the Office of Education of the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
The most noteworthy aspect ofFreire's method is that it is not just another way of enabling illiterates to read and write but a radical way of changing people's perception of reality. Freire employs many of the basic insights of Marxism, but he has also drawn upon the writing of Husscrl, Hegel, Buber, Niebuhr, Sartre and Fromm. His general philos-phical position seems to be an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism. This has made his critics call him an eclectic and accuse him of wanting in philosophical rigour.
They key word in Freire's thought is conscientwtion. It is an atrocious word and though Freire disclaims the responsibility of coining it, it is through his writings that the word has gained its present wide currency in educational circles. Conscientization is a political-educational process which enables the masses to overcome "false consciousness", to realise their real situation in society and to take part in changing society in the capacity of subjects. In other words it is a process of gaining awareness of reality in order to transform it consciously. Obviously this has radical political implications. It is all again Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.