A Review of The Making of Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire’s Approach to Literacy, Training and Adult Education

The Making of Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire’s Approach to Literacy, Training and Adult Education, Vol. 2 in the series Comparative and International Education: The Hispanic Americas, edited by L. Marcela Gajardo Jiménez (Brill, 2025, 117 pages)

Although Freire is often thought of in relation to his early years in his native Brazil, the exile years he spent in Chile proved to be more than a short interlude in what was a long and productive life—much of it spent outside of Brazil. The authors argue convincingly that this was the period and place where some of the most consequential work in Freire’s trajectory from a local pedagogical practitioner to a world-renowned oracular figure took place. They collectively claim it is when and where his philosophical base was deepened, his political focus sharpened, and his most important manuscripts were written.

In the interests of candor, I was one of those whose primary connection to Freire was in relation to his early work in the Brazilian Northeast before his exile. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Freire’s native Pernambuco from 1968-70—in retrospect, the height of military rule and repression in Brazil. We volunteers were very aware of Freire’s work in the Northeast, since literacy levels among the rural population we were working with were still abysmally low and we were working in the field of rural cooperative education. In fact, the volunteers created a literacy primer, Nosso Dever [Our Duty], that was produced in literatura de cordel style (popular inexpensively printed chapbooks sold in street markets in Northeast Brazil). The content focused on voting rights and responsibilities, which in this period depended on literacy as a pre-condition to vote. Ironically, the U.S. Consulate in Recife in what may have been an excess of caution, impounded the primer before it could be distributed, in spite of the fact that it had been approved by local military and civilian authorities.  

Turning to the book itself, there are four chapters and an unattributed preface, each treating a separate topic in Freire’s experience in Chile. The chapters focus on the context in which Freire conceptualized and drafted many of the manuscripts that later became incorporated in his best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in Spanish in 1970 in Montevideo by Tierra Nueva (TN) Press and in English in New York by Herder & Herder the same year. The Making of Pedagogy of the Oppressed takes great care to distinguish among the many steps between conceptualizing a work; drafting a manuscript; moving it through various steps in transcription, editing and translation; and then actually publishing and disseminating it. These last steps are the special province of Federico Brugaletta, an Argentine scholar, whose chapter on publishers and editors follows Harvard Professor Emeritus Robert Darnton’s work on communication circuits in which texts are produced, edited, published, marketed and read.

This last step is absolutely critical to the book’s project. Paulo Freire was both a prolific writer and a perplexing one in that he apparently wrote only by hand; and through translation moved freely among three principal languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English). He left a scattered corpus of unpublished manuscripts in Chile and often rewrote early work and incorporated it into later publications under the same or different titles. This set of circumstances—amply documented in the book—gave rise to a vast literature devoted to documenting the Freire legacy. Just to come up with a definitive bibliography is no mean feat; in fact, it may well prove to be impossible. The Harvard Library system (HOLLIS), for example, lists some 1,275 books on Paulo Freire, with 135 attributed to him as “Author/Creator.”

Marcela Gajardo’s opening chapter alone listed some 50 entries for “Freire, P.,” several in mimeo form or marked for internal use only. Many of these were training materials prepared for fellow workers and trainers at the National Institute for Agricultural Development (INDAP) and later at the National Institute for Training and Research in Agrarian Reform (ICIRA), which was supported by FAO and UNESCO. Freire remained at ICIRA from 1967-1969 until political pressures motivated him to take up Harvard’s offer of a position in 1969. It was at ICIRA that he experienced an extremely productive phase of writing. Rodrigo Aravena Alvarado and José Diaz-Diego (Chapter 2) call 1968 an annus mirabilis for the volume of his work during this intense period. Many of these papers, memoranda and training documents directly led to his later publications, including Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), drafted in Portuguese in 1967-1969, and Cultural Action for Freedom published in the May 1970 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. Both appear on the front cover of the Brill book.

One of the great accomplishments of The Making of Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the light it sheds on this complex process, led by Marcela Gajardo, the editor and lead author. She was personally present at the creation—so to speak—an engaged participant during Freire’s exile and indeed close to Freire and his family for years after he had left Chile for Harvard and then Geneva, before returning late in life to his beloved Brazil. Her chapter is a thoughtful overview of Freire’s years in Chile drawing on her own personal experience and substantial body of work published on this topic in Spanish. She carefully alludes to the controversies surrounding Freire’s odyssey in Chile and notes that many authors have addressed the subject. But she brings an even hand to the debates and sets the tone and context for the other chapters.

Sin Barba: The Quest for the Historical Paulo Freire

It is worth noting for a Harvard audience that Gajardo was a Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2015-16) and drafted a number of manuscripts in English. She alludes to “Paulo Freire Sin Barba,” which she borrowed from George Stoney’s documentary on Freire. This refers to Freire’s clean-shaven visage during the years in Chile before he became the white-bearded prophet the world came to know and revere.

One of the mysteries surrounding Freire’s passage through Chile was his transformation from a local Pernambuco pedagogue working in literacy training to a national-scale political reformer in Chile to an international philosopher/policy oracle based in Geneva. People debate whether he was primarily a Christian humanist, a Marxist demagogue, a neo-liberal apologist, or my favorite—a pragmatic utopian. Ample evidence in the vast Freire corpus exists for all these positions.

On a more prosaic note, one of the truly positive developments in this book is the authors’ unearthing of various archives of Freire’s unpublished, informal works created during his tenure at several Chilean action-oriented agencies focused on agrarian reform and education reform. There has been a consolidation of various smaller, dispersed collections into larger, more centralized ones as, for example, the movement of collection from the former Rural World Library José María Argueda to the National Library reported by Rodrigo Aravena Alvarado and José Díaz-Diego in Chapter 2.

The Aravena and Díaz-Diego chapter is an abridged version of a research report they prepared for DIBAM (Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos). In it, they explore the reaction of local Chileans who were exposed to Freire’s training methods, which morphed during this period from the “Paulo Freire Method” to the “Psycho-Social Method.” This is a welcome corrective to much of the speculation about what Freire did or did not do and what his efforts actually accomplished, since his time was brought to a premature end by conservative attacks leading up to the military coup against Allende’s government in 1973. They were very creative in analyzing this historical period, interviewing former peasant and labor leaders, along with national figures working in agrarian reform, and working with archival material.

Daniela Zubicueta Luco’s chapter, based on her graduate thesis, is perhaps the most exciting for me. She lays out in great detail the various sources of her work and focuses on the actual materials, including works of art and graphic material, employed by the literacy trainers Freire worked with in the field. The publishers included many color plates illustrating with specific examples how INDAP training in the extension programs was structured and presented. These illustrations alone are worth the price of the book. As an anthropologist by training and conviction, I was particularly impressed by the section on the Anthropological Concept of Culture, which I always sensed was latent in Freire’s work. But, seeing it presented in such bold and explicit terms was impressive.      

Federico’s chapter is based on his 2020 doctoral thesis at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. One of the most interesting themes in the chapter is the role played by various religious publishing houses and transnational organizations in disseminating Freire’s work in the Spanish-speaking world. I had primarily thought of Freire in relation to the progressive Catholic movement in Brazil, particularly the work of Dom Helder Camara in Pernambuco. Indeed, Freire saw himself in that vein. However, much of the dissemination of his work was done by Protestant publishing houses such as Tierra Nueva, associated with the Methodist church in Uruguay, which published the first edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Spanish. And when Freire left Harvard in 1970 it was to accept an offer to work with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, an ecumenical organization with strong ties to Protestant networks. Yet to be explored is the relation of Freire’s work to that of Protestant evangelical organizations such as the Summer Institute of Linguistics founded by the anthropologist, Kenneth Pike.

Brill is to be commended for bringing this material to light in English. One concern I do have involves the translation process, since it is likely that all chapters were originally written in Spanish and translated into English for this publication. The front matter states, “Javiera Gómez has also been responsible for pre-editorial work and translations from Spanish to English.” Since translation figures so prominently in the analyses of the authors (Portuguese to Spanish, for example), more information on this point would have been helpful (i.e. Gajardo does write in English, as was the case during her year at Harvard).

Some of the articles would have benefitted from copy editing by a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese. If a future edition is published, some of the English could use some editorial polishing as well, although in most instances the translation is more than up to the task of conveying the basic meaning. Finally, a substantive preface is usually attributed. But, overall, this is an invaluable contribution to the English-language Freire library. Perhaps, one day a companion piece would explore Freire’s 10-month sojourn at Harvard and the many lives he touched.

James P. Ito-Adler, Ph.D. (Anthropology) Harvard University, is president and co-founder of the Cambridge Institute for Brazilian Studies (CIBS, Inc.) a non-profit NGO dedicated to mutual understanding of Brazil and the United States.

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