Paulo Freire

Freire ran adult literacy work in north-eastern Brazil in the early sixties, teaching labourers to read in about forty hours using words drawn from their own lives, which mattered because literacy was then a condition of the vote. The 1964 coup jailed him for seventy days and then exiled him for sixteen years, through Chile, Harvard and the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Pedagogy of the Oppressed came out of that exile and is now among the most cited books in the social sciences. Its argument is against what he called the banking model, in which a teacher deposits facts into a student, and for a classroom where both parties are learning. He came home in 1980 and ran education for the city of São Paulo. Arizona pulled the book from its schools in 2010 under a law banning ethnic studies.