2

PAULO FREIRE
His modernity and new ways of thinking about
early childhood education

Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

With a special thanks to Tatiana Reschke for the translation

Fahrenheit 451
In this chapter, we aim to point out not only what Paulo Freire intends to say in
his books, and to show the contributions of his writings to the adult and young
adult popular education, but also and particularly, we want to highlight what his
work triggers, what kind of political imagination is unleashed when we start to
read and consider his educational proposals – whose latent modernity made Brazil’s
newly elected extreme right president announce his intention of burning Freire’s
work, as in the 1966 film Fahrenheit 451.1
In his very words, the president-elect announced that he “will enter the Ministry
of Education and Culture with a flamethrower and cast Paulo Freire out”. On
several occasions, the right-wing groups that the elected president represents have
ferociously attacked Paulo Freire, holding him responsible for the education
problems in Brazil, where school performance indicators have shown, year after
year, a decrease in children’s and adolescents’ school achievement. What risk does
Paulo Freire represent 50 years after the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2
in the late 1960s? Paulo Freire is certainly the most notorious Brazilian educator
and one of the world’s most influential thinkers in education in the twentieth
century, which is evident by the 41 honorary doctorate degrees awarded to him by
universities in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Brazil. He was also
named Patron of Brazilian Education by law 12,612 of 2012. Nonetheless, the far-
right government intends to take back the educator’s honor.
Instead of just asking what Paulo Freire meant in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
we could ask ourselves: what does he trigger? Since it is what he unleashes as
imagination, political and pedagogical praxis that the fascists intend to fight against
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 31

and burn. Writing about Paulo Freire and discussing his ideas is today an act of
resistance to the obscurantist forces. Moreover, we will show that the subjects he
wrote about, his epistemology, and the other theorists he worked with make him a
contemporary author, considering Giorgio Agamben’s idea of contemporaneity
(2007). Agamben defines as contemporary the one who sees the shadows of their
time, the one who identifies what is to come, whose visibility time does not allow
seeing. What makes Paulo Freire contemporary is his fight against colonialism
(Would the “oppressed” issue be today those in precarious situations?); the fights
with those who are “oppressed”, and not about/for them; the debate about
freedom; and so many other issues. In this chapter, we will emphasize the topic of
colonialism because Frantz Fanon was part of Freire’s framework and, yet, many of
Freire’s reviewers did not approach this point.
This chapter is made of two parts and six items. The first part intends to show
the theoretical influences on Paulo Freire, with an emphasis on Frantz Fanon, in
order to show the contemporary relevance of Freire’s work in Brazil, America and
Europe, which gives rise to several controversies and makes him the target of
ultraconservative hatred. Based on Michel Vandenbroeck’s article, the second part
aims to examine the possibility of re-politicizing early childhood education using
Freire as a “theoretical tool” to enable releasing the political imagination, by
establishing some connections between Freire’s work and the pedagogical proposals
for early childhood education renewal that have been discussed since the 1990s.
It is possible to say that early childhood education (ECE) has been under assault by
neuroscience in an attempt to give it scientific status. ECE has also been directed
towards schooling practices that seek to teach children to read and write too early, for
example, by having preschools buy workbooks whose epistemic logic considers the
literate culture an autonomous instance from social structure. ECE has been under-
stood in terms of economic return on investment, and the child is seen as human
capital investment. This schooling and mercantile process takes place aseptically, as if it
were possible to sell and buy such literate or scientific “culture” as independent of a
social structure, which is deeply unequal and racist in Brazil. This means that literacy
implies introducing and subjecting children to the unequal and racist Brazilian social
structure, with its white curriculum, its normative religious, sexual and gender hege-
mony, and its adult-centered idea of the child, in which development is seen as a
passage, the focus is on what the child should be as an adult, and language (written and
oral) is presented as one. The pre-school being “colonized” by school creates a kind of
gravitational force around the school and moves the childhood experience away from
the pre-school. Childhood is a social construction produced and engendered within a
series of norms, laws, measures and assumptions, which range from philosophical to
theological, from legal to pedagogical and psychological. Consequently, we here join
the discussion about some naturalization of childhood, which is understood either as a
stage of child development or as a biological stage of human development, which
entails equally all children. Our perspective is to think about how the child can ques-
tion their own childhood, how they can inflect, question, subtract, and resist the idea
of childhood when it presents itself as a fabricated device that keeps society
32 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

functioning. In other words, this single and biological concept of childhood has the
purpose of ensuring that society’s normative functions continue being carried out.
Our challenge is to undertake an effort inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, who
conceive “the idea of an adult modulated by the child, the idea that the man needs to
become a child in order to undo the consensual models prior to his own thinking”
(Scherer, 2012, p. 66). This is a fabulous idea since it shows the child questioning their
childhood as a possibility of resistance, as a power of life opposing the power over life.
Namely, if there were a childhood that shaped all children, it would mean that there
were children without childhood. In other words, there would only be childhoodless
children if we considered a single model of childhood, because, in reality, every child
lives their unique childhood.
It is the adult who conceives the idea of childhood as in the past, and thus, removes
the childhood power and transformation possibility that exists in itself. The child is
impoverished in the student, in the small consumer, impoverished in preconceived
childhood ideas that see the child as a brain that needs stimuli of all kinds.

The oppressed, the colonized: Freire and Fanon

What is it that makes us think about Paulo Freire at this very moment in history?
This question was diagnosed by Suely Rolnik (1996), when she stated that we
think when we are

out of focus, and regaining focus demands that we make the effort to create a
new image. This is where the work of thought comes in: with the thought, we
cross from these sensible states – which although real, are invisible and unsaid –
to the visible and said ones. The thought, in this sense, is at the service of life in
its creative power.
(Rolnik, 1996, p. 247)

Thus, that is what ECE needs: to regain focus, refocus, reconfigure, seek and return to
childhood. In addition, it will only be able to do so using a new thought, or as Van-
denbroeck says, it is necessary that ECE “contributes to the urgent re-politicization of
early childhood education and early years’ pedagogies”. To think of the creative
power present in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed means to struggle to evoke one’s own
freedom, their creative power, individually and collectively, because life demands
expansion. Decolonize. However, life is constrained; biopolitical determinations
impose on lives and distinguish those worth living from those doomed to die.

Foucault showed [it] decades ago, using the extreme example of Nazis, who
conferred themselves the right to decide which peoples were worth living on
Earth, and which were not. We are still tracking this discovery, or under the
shadow of this paradigm. Yet, the fact that thanatopolitics (politics that terminate
lives) has been called necropolitics recently by Achille Mbembe just confirms,
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 33

from the most pillaged or forgotten continent in the world, that such logic was
not episodic, it is rather systemic and expands itself in our present.
(Pelbart, 2019, p. 15)

In other words, remodernizing Freire makes us wonder what decolonizing

would mean today, with neoliberalism and generalized precarity.
The pedagogy of the oppressed is the struggle of men for their liberation, conse-
quently the anticolonial matter and struggle – the decolonization – are at the heart of
Freire’s works. Decolonizing the curriculum, the social structures, the subjectivities,
the consciousnesses, and the schools was, and still is, in Freire’s proposal.
Tomaz Thadeu states that:

If Paulo Freire anticipated, in some way, the cultural definition of the curriculum,
which would later characterize the influence of Cultural Studies on curricular stu-
dies, it can also be said that he introduces what could be called, in the present
context, a post-colonialist pedagogy, or perhaps, a post-colonialist perspective on
curriculum. […] By focusing on the perspective of dominated groups in Latin
American countries and, later, on that perspective in countries that became inde-
pendent of Portuguese rule, Paulo Freire anticipates, in pedagogy and curriculum,
some of the themes that would later become central to postcolonial theory. Freire’s
perspective was already clearly postcolonial in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially
when he insisted on the epistemologically privileged position of dominated
groups – because they were in a dominated position in a structure that divides
society between dominant and dominated, these groups had a knowledge of
domination that dominant groups could not have.
(Silva, 2014, p. 62)

Machado added:

Taking a broader view in literature, it is possible to find authors that have rela-
ted Paulo Freire to two concepts: Hegelianism and post-colonialism. Regarding
the latter, it is well known that Paulo Freire attributes several of his fundamental
insights to Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. As for the former, we found no
wide debate, although in his work, Freire flirts with Hegel’s ideas.
(Machado, 2017, p. 59)

In the Brazilian edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when diagnosing colonialism,

Paulo Freire makes reference to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in footnote
number 35. Freire examines the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed,
and discusses a certain adherence to or admiration for the oppressor by the oppressed.
The oppressed, therefore, needs a decolonization process since, according to Freire:

Only as they discover themselves to be hosts of the oppressor can they con-
tribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in
34 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the

oppressor, this contribution is impossible.
(Freire, 2005, p. 48)

The theme of the oppression, the complexity in which it is produced, as well as how
the oppressed subjectify themselves to incorporate the oppressor, is a concern in
Freire’s writings. In this regard, decolonizing is a de-subjectifying process that will
constantly be considered in postcolonial and poststructuralist thoughts. The issue
concerning the oppressor–oppressed dialectic in Freire is also present in Frantz
Fanon’s proposal for a new humanism, as well as in his persistent criticism of
colonialism. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon states that the colonized is the
colonizer’s host. Those dialectical relationships are explored by Freire’s
commentators. According to Martinis (2012):

This theme arises in connection with the dehumanization inherent to the

oppression. Freire makes reference to the situation through the concept of
‘existential duality of the oppressed’: the oppressed hosts the oppressor within
themselves. To paraphrase Fanon, it is about what the oppressor has done and
continues doing to the oppressed, not allowing the oppressed to recognize the
oppressor clearly, or to recognize themselves.

Freire refers explicitly to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “During the period of
colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening
until six in the morning. The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness
which has been deposited in his bones against his own people” (Fanon, 1965 in
Freire, 2005, p. 62). This is the only time Freire quotes Fanon directly in Pedagogy of
the Oppressed (Martinis, 2012, p. 248).
In his book, Freire refers to the oppressed in different ways: “the wretched of
the earth”, “the rejects of life”, “the oppressed” (Freire, 2014, p. 42). It is their
fight for freedom and, in this respect, the oppressor will never fight for the
oppressed or the pedagogy of the oppressed, because the fight for freedom is forged
in oppression:

what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which
must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or people) in
the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression
and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will
come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the
struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade.
(Freire, 2005, p. 48)

His work is praxis and, in this sense, Freire’s trajectory was forged in his social activities
with the SESI (Brazilian Social Service of Industry) workers and their children, with
the peasants in Chile, the fishermen in Recife, Brazil, and Guinea-Bissau, and in other
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 35

journeys in Africa. Although the concept of “oppressed” was considered vague (Freire
responds to this criticism of his concept in the book Pedagogy of Hope, 1997a, p. 46),
we can say that the Freirean proposal contains the idea that in each educational
encounter he had, in each of his “wanderings”, there is a unique way of educating.
Each moment of his praxis brings a new inflection to what and who the oppressed is,
almost as if for each life, a new pedagogy. “The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is
the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation, (…) And those
who recognize, or begin to recognize, themselves as oppressed must be among the
developers of this pedagogy” (2005, p. 52–54). Thus, it is not enough to talk about the
oppressed, to offer them “humanitarian” treatment. Oppressors cannot make the
pedagogy of the oppressed. The pedagogy of the oppressed is the struggle for deco-
lonization, as Fanon and Memmi have diagnosed. It is not a simple fight, since the
oppressed can either adhere or admire the oppressors (Freire, 2005, p. 63; 1997a, p.
64). The Wretched of the Earth and The Colonizer and the Colonized are frequently
referenced.

The reference framework of our political-pedagogical action was the attempt

to live and build, in each concrete situation, a pedagogy of the oppressed, that
is, to experience an educational practice in which, from the reality and inter-
ests of those with whom we worked, we explored a knowledge and tool
acquisition process that would increase their power of intervention in reality.
This option for education as awareness explains IDAC (Institute of Cultural
Action) diverse insertions and direct involvement and, at the same time, the
coherence of our work methodology in the most diversified contexts.
(Freire, 1980, pp. 9–10)

We can summarize in one sentence what Freire proposes – for each life, we
must have one pedagogy: one for the precarious life, one for the oppressed, the
wrecked, and many other lives.

Colonialism, postcolonialism, difference, and Freire

In the quote mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Freire sketches those with
whom he wishes to share his thoughts, his praxis, and his pedagogy, those with
whom he wants us to march across the country: the unruly, wretched of the earth,
exploited, landless, dispossessed, loveless, disapproved, and oppressed. That propo-
sition joins Freire with postcolonial thinkers of difference, such as Fanon, Foucault,
Deleuze, and Derrida, among others.
Evidently, the connection with the poststructuralists is our own proposal, after
all Paulo Freire was a Christian humanist, unlike atheist anti-humanist thinkers, as
Foucault. Freire already decentered the narratives and the subjects, and elected
those on “the third bank of the river”3 to talk, which showed his concern with the
differences and the thinkers of difference. The distinction between colonial and
postcolonial thinking is that “the debate over culture and experience is now
36 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

analyzed in view of the racialization caused by the colonial situation, also present in
the large capitalist centers, full of immigrants from all over ‘the rest of world’”
(Faustino, 2015, p. 99). Freire will not debate on racial issues, but by reading Frantz
Fanon, we can observe the relation, given that “Fanon is cosmopolitan, proponent of
a ‘transnational solidarity’ or a ‘post-colonial’ humanist, who opposes the oppression
wherever it is” (Faustino, 2015, p. 102). According to researchers on Fanon’s work,
“Freire was possibly the first Brazilian to incorporate Fanon’s ideas” (Guimarães,
2008). “In addition, the familiarity with which [Freire] approaches some concepts
used by Fanon, as well as his journey to some African countries in an anti-colonial
struggle context, allows a close analysis between the two authors to become a very
fertile exercise” (Faustino, 2015, p. 139). Accordingly, both Fanon and Freire are
truly transnational.
We can associate Freire with contemporary writers – especially those concerned
with differences (race, gender and sexuality, social class, illegalisms of all sorts), with
the oppressed (the outcasts, the precarious, the wretched of the earth) – to propose
education as a practice of freedom, as practice of difference, as practice of the
oppressed. A pedagogy that enables to make a difference. A decolonizing pedagogy
towards social transformation, in a world where students and educators meet.
What is happening with contemporary Education and Pedagogy? Pedagogy
(starting with capital ‘P’) is understood as a relationship established only after the
educator has reduced the student to a model, the model of a body with which he,
the educator, can deal. We can say that Freire makes a pedagogy with no universal
model of student. He proposes a unique and different pedagogy for each life. In
their subjective exercise, each student must try to decolonize their life, and direct
personal and collective efforts towards freedom and equality, in order to become
aware of social injustice and fight against it. This is an intrinsic principle of the
political nature of education. Freire’s education was erratic: he went to places
where “capitalism dehumanized human beings, and in doing so, he resembled a
wanderer” (Kohan, 2019b, p. 144). It is worth mentioning that Freire was called
the “Wanderer of Utopia”.
As educators, we try to find in our research, philosophical intakes that can not
only provide theoretical frameworks and answer our questions, but also offer
alternatives and possibilities to determine, in our educational practices, the differ-
ences that every person brings, without labeling, judging, or excluding, no matter
how small they may seem. In Pedagogy of Freedom (1998, p. 88), Freire states that
“nobody is superior to anyone else”. Being equal within the pedagogical relation is
the Freirean principle – a shared listening. We can use this when working with
children in early childhood education.

Childhood and education

Even though there is no direct intention of approaching it, childhood is present in
Freire’s work. Like children, it is sometimes almost invisible; however, in appar-
ently disconnected situations, it presents itself strongly in affective places. One of
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 37

the most well-known, and particularly delicate, passages in Paulo Freire’s books is
that in which he refers to his first experiences of reading the world. In a report
presented at the opening conference of the 1989 Brazilian Congress on Reading,
and published in A importância do ato de ler (Freire, 1989a), and in its English version
Literacy: Reading the Word & the World (Freire and Macedo, 2005), we learn that:

Recapturing distant childhood as far back as I can trust my memory, trying to

understand my act of reading the particular world in which I moved, […] I see
myself then in the average house in Recife, Brazil, where I was born, encircled
by trees. Some of the trees were like persons to me, such was the intimacy
between us. In their shadow I played, and in those branches low enough for
me to reach I experienced the small risks that prepared me for greater risks and
adventures.
(Freire and Macedo, 2005, p. 20)

Further in this account, Freire brings a description of his experiences as a child in

his early years of life, his relationship with the world, and how he appropriated that
world, which expresses a concept of the child as a powerful subject, not restricted
to the condition of student, of a small consumer, or a brain to be filled.

The old house – its bedrooms, hall, attic, terrace (the setting for my mother’s
ferns), backyard – all this was my first world. In this world I crawled, gurgled,
first stood up, took my first steps, said my first words. Truly, that special world
presented itself to me as the arena of my perceptual activity and therefore as the
world of my first reading. The texts, the words, the letters of that context were
incarnated in a series of things, objects, and sighs. In perceiving these experi-
ences myself, and the more I experienced myself, the more my perceptual
capacity increased. I learned to understand things, objects, and signs through
using them in relationship to my older brothers and sisters and my parents.
(Ibid., p. 20)

A baby’s motor skills and perceptive activities, such as crawling, babbling,

standing, and walking, as well as their relationship with objects and family mem-
bers, are understood by Paulo Freire as knowledge and interpretation actions. They
are not at all considered less important in human development process – a child is
able to interpret the world from an early age. Regarding “the texts, the words, the
letters of that context [in which he lived] [which] incarnated” in the phenomena
and things of nature, such as the wind, the rain, the animals, the plants. Freire
describes the mango ripening process, its colors, scents, and consistency. He also
recognizes it as a piece of knowledge that he kept all his life. “It was possibly at this
time, by doing it myself and seeing others do it, that I learned the meaning of the
verb to squash” (ibid., p. 21).
Paulo Freire uses his experience as a boy to ponder his own human develop-
ment process, as well as how this experience becomes a reference in his
38 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

understanding of educating others and oneself, which led to his many times repe-
ated principle that “no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach
each other, mediated by the world” (Freire, 2005, p. 80). In a conversation with
Sérgio Guimarães (Freire and Guimarães, 2014, p. 24), Freire comments that his
education, and in particular, his literacy, undergone with his parents, marked him
and influenced his way of analyzing and conceiving pedagogy.

it is interesting: first of all, they [his parents] taught me to read and write using
my own words, words from my childhood, words from my practice as a child,
from my experience, not from their words. You see how it featured me years
later. As a grown up man, I propose it! In the adult literacy level, for example.
(Freire and Guimarães, 2014, p. 24)

As far as his parents’ contributions are concerned, Freire declares that they are his
first reference of dialogue experience. For this reason, his first work, Education, The
Practice of Freedom, was dedicated to them, and there, he acknowledges that it was
with his parents that he “learned the dialogue that ‘I will hold with the world, with
men, with God, and with my wife and children’” (Barreto,1998, p. 17). In another
moment, Freire and Guimarães talk about Freire’s relationship with his parents and
the way literacy was promoted in their backyard, in the shadow of two mango
trees, which can be associated with non-colonizing childhood education. At that
point, Freire and Guimarães mention preschool as a non-school experience, free,
but committed to schooling. However, that experience did not have the purpose
of anticipating school practices. When asked by Sérgio Guimarães how he became
literate, Freire answers “that they [his parents] made my school of that space. And
this is what I find wonderful: the information and education they provided me was
in an informal space, which was not a school, though they prepared me for it,
later” (Freire and Guimarães, 2014, p. 25). Similarly, in this context of informality
and taking his own childhood experience, Freire mentions:

It is important to add that reading my world, always basic to me, did not make
me grow up prematurely, a rationalist in boy’s clothing. Exercising my boy’s
curiosity did not distort it, nor did understanding my world cause me to scorn
the enchanting mystery of that world. In this I was aided rather than dis-
couraged by my parents.
(Freire and Macedo, 2005, p. 21)

It seems that the boy Paulo lived his childhood without the pressure of being a
miniature adult, since he was recognized in his full potentiality, his preferences,
his curiosity, and his expressions; he was allowed to be a child among adults. His
childhood was notably based on dialogue and goodwill, on experience, and on
the recognition of his age and knowledge differences. Freire sees childhood as a
possibility to resist the shaping and imprisoning forces, a power of life, as men-
tioned before.
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 39

Early childhood education: policies and Freirean contributions

Being colonized is a predominant characteristic in the relationship between chil-
dren and adults, as well as in Brazilian society, which was created from slavery and
colonial domination, and where inequality is a fundamental and permanent trait.
As the last country to end the slavery regime, Brazil never implemented a land
distribution policy, nor did it promote a social welfare state. Despite innumerous
human rights and anti-inequality movements, Brazil’s concentration of income is
among the world’s4 highest levels. In this scenario, children are the most affected
group, especially when class issues intersect age, gender, and race. Although the
national laws on children’s rights are considered one of the most advanced in the
world,5 basic living conditions are not guaranteed, because their families lack
decent work, housing and basic sanitation.6 Education is one of the rights that are
claimed, but not obtained: childcare enrollment (0 to 3 years) was 32.7 percent in
2017 – this percentage varies between regions in the country: in the South and
Southeast, the figures are 40.0 percent and 39.2 percent respectively; in the
Northeast, 28.7 percent; in the Central-west region, 25.4 percent; and in the
North, 16.9 percent. In other words, the poorest region has a significantly lower
percentage of enrollments than the wealthier regions. Preschool (4- to 5-year-old
children) is almost universalized: enrollment rate reaching 91.7 percent. Yet, again,
there is significant regional inequality: the Northeast and the Southeast rates are
above the national average (94.8 percent and 93.0 percent), while the other regions
have much lower rates: 88.9 percent in the South, 86.9 percent in the Central-
west (86.9 percent), and 85 percent in the North (UNICEF, 2019).
Philanthropic and educational actions have historically attempted to address the
extreme class inequalities, reinforced by race and ethnicity (black and indigenous), as
well as by gender (women and LGBTT+). Early childhood education in Brazil dates
back to the late nineteenth century, and is associated with charity and philanthropy,
subject to welfare actions with a moralistic and regulatory bias towards lower classes
(Kuhlmann Jr., 1998). Later, in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship (1964–
1985), international organizations, such as Unicef, helped local governments to carry
out compensatory education programmes, by opening nursery schools and preschools
in extremely poor areas. Those programmes were funded by the population under
assistance, at a low cost. However, the primary goal of those actions was not to
guarantee the right to education, but rather, they aimed at achieving the objectives
set by international agencies, i.e., the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. Moreover, they were intended for controlling poor families, and avoiding
possible protests against the economic and political order (Rosemberg, 1992). The
presence of those international organizations and their colonizing policies had a
strong influence in the field of early childhood pedagogy, by incorporating the dis-
course of (economic, cultural, and socio-affective) deficiency into practices and
documents aimed at early childhood education. However, we can also observe in the
same period the production of critical discourses and practices committed to the
40 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

oppressed and the dispossessed, in the sense of affirming the education for freedom,
humanization, and anti-domination, as proposed by Freire, and recorded by Vera
Barreto (1998):

I exhorted a pedagogy that unveiled injustice, revealed the ideological lie. I

said that the worker, as a learner, had the duty to fight for their right to par-
ticipate in choosing the contents they would be taught. I defended a demo-
cratic pedagogy whose starting point was the working classes’ anxieties, desires,
dreams, and needs.
(p. 29)

In this unveiling process, the students, children, families and communities’ right to
participate is an essential factor, as well as the educators’ role, constantly improving
themselves in order to understand the historical, political and cultural conditions of
their time, and perform the mediation task engaged in dialogue with their group.

None of this is easy to do, and I do not want to give readers the impression
that to change the world all it takes is to want. Wanting is essential, but not
enough. We must also know what to want – learn to know what to want –,
which means learning to know how to fight politically using appropriate tac-
tics, consistent with our strategic dreams. What does not seem possible to me
is doing nothing or very little in the face of the terrible disruptions that mark
us. In terms of contributing to make the world, our world, better, we have no
reason why to distinguish between moderate or drastic actions. Everything
someone can do competently, loyally, clearly, and persistently in order to
summon the strength to weaken the forces of lack of love, selfishness, and
wickedness, is important. In this sense, a union leader’s active presence in a
factory to explain, at the break of dawn, in front of the company gates, the
reasons for the ongoing strike, is as valid and necessary as it is the practice of a
teacher who, in a school on the outskirts of the city, tells their students about
their right to defend their cultural identity. The factory worker leader at the
gate and the teacher at school have both a lot to do.
(Freire, 1997b, p. 47)

Since the 1980s, some key concepts of Freire’s pedagogy, such as dialogue,
freedom practice, criticality, utopia/hope, reading the word and the world, fond-
ness, popular education, and democracy, have been part of early childhood peda-
gogy in public and private schools in Brazil. One of the pedagogical practice
appropriations that was observed is the idea of a generative theme. The issue is
identified or devised considering the children’s reality, on a regular or episodic
basis, expressed by the children themselves or identified by the teachers, and
engaging family members. The generative theme proposal seeks to break with the
banking model of education, which dismantles and roots out knowledge. In 1989,
Kramer et al. published the book Preschool in Hands – An Alternative Curriculum for
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 41

Early Childhood Education, in which the authors present a work methodology

organized through generative themes. According to them, when we favor “cultural
and social aspects, the core idea of the curriculum is given by the Generating
Themes of Pedagogic Activities” (Kramer, 1989, p. 50). The book was widely
distributed until the early 2000s, with over ten editions. In terms of national poli-
cies, the 2009 National Curriculum Guidelines for Early Childhood Education,
produced by the National Council of Education, highlights in its seventh article
that the socio-political and pedagogical function of early childhood education shall:

iv) provide equal educational opportunities to children from different social classes
regarding the access to cultural goods and the possibilities of childhood
experience;
v) build new forms of sociability and subjectivity committed to playfulness, democ-
racy, planet sustainability, and to disrupting the school’s existing relations of age,
socioeconomic, ethnic-racial, gender, regional, linguistic and religious power.
(Brasil, 2009; emphasis added).

In the above extract, it is possible to recognize similarities with Paulo Freire’s work:
the sociopolitical function of education together with the pedagogical one, the
concern to describe the educational inequalities related to social class differences,
and the importance of building new forms of sociability. Therefore, it represents a
proposition for change in the prescribed sociability, and implies a rupture in the
different forms of dominance in Brazilian society. This guideline points to the
responsibility of education as a way of social transformation, a task that begins in
early childhood education.

No nation asserts itself if people are not crazy for knowledge, do not dare, are
not full of emotion, constantly reinventing themselves, creatively risking
themselves. No society asserts itself without enhancing its culture, science,
research, technology, and education. It all starts at preschool.
(Freire, 1997b, p. 36)

Adventure, reinvention, risk, and passion for knowledge – Freire’s propositions

resemble childhood as it expresses possibility, inauguration, and inversion, or sub-
version, of the established order. A place where imagination is a necessary tool to
be shared between teachers and children.

The teacher needs to let students’ imagination fly creatively, obviously, in an

orderly manner. This should happen from the first day of class, to show the
students how important imagination is to our lives. Imagination helps curiosity
and inventiveness, just as it drives to adventure, without which we do not
create. Naturally free imagination that flies, walks, or runs free; that uses body
movements: dance, rhythm; that draws, writes (from the very moment that
writing is still prewriting, scribble); or orally, when repeating tales that are
42 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

reproduced in their culture. Imagination that leads us to possible or impossible

dreams is always necessary. It is important to stimulate the students’ imagina-
tion, to use it to ‘draw’ the school they dream of. Why not put into practice,
in their own classroom, part of the school they dream of? Why, when
discussing about imagination, projects, not show the real obstacles to the
students, some still insurmountable challenges to conjure up what is in their
mind? Why not introduce scientific knowledge which sew on together,
directly or indirectly, patches of imagination? Why not emphasize the right to
imagine, dream, and fight for the dream? Because the imagination that
surrenders to the possible and necessary dream of freedom has to face the
reactionary forces for whom freedom belongs to them as an exclusive right.
After all, it is relevant to make clear that imagination is not the exercise of
those people who are disconnected from what is real, heads in the clouds. On
the contrary, when we imagine something, we do it precisely because we lack
our concrete. When a child imagines a happy and free school, it is because
their school denies them freedom and joy.
(Freire, 1997b, 47–48)

Final considerations
Even though Freire has been intensely attacked in this contemporaneous pro-fascist
moment in the world and in Brazil, he offers powerful analytical tools for those that
support the education of the oppressed. The history of capitalism and the present
neoliberalism reveal the capital willingness in shamelessly sacrificing this “life” (of the
oppressed) and its reproduction. In other words, scarifying the proletarian life, as it
has always done, still does, and will continue doing, by reducing social services and
welfare state to a minimum. Similarly, capitalism is absolutely not concerned with
the widespread destruction of life on the planet, for the reason that this is precisely
what grants its accumulation. Protesting that this means putting itself at risk because
it needs resources and workforce means not understanding its “rationality” (Pelbart,
2019, p. 47). Capitalism moves forward while it puts in danger everyone, combining
biopolitics and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018); its target is Freire’s “oppressed”. This
endangerment is also present in children’s education. There are approximately 7
million Brazilian children from 0 to 5 years old that are poor, black, and out of
school. Only 0.6 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product is spent on early
child education. Moreover, the Brazilian state has gradually ducked responsibility
from 0 to 3-year-old children, leaving their education under the responsibility of
philanthropic and religious entities. Freire proposes us to (re)read the world from the
point of view of the illiterate, the outcast, the wretched of the earth. We propose to
reread the world from the children’s standpoint.
What is childhood? Foucault wonders if it is not the freedom of not being an
adult, not depending on the law and the power to establish polymorphous relations
with things, people and bodies (Foucault, 1977, p. 235). That is what childhood
cannot do: produce the adult, and not be produced by them.
 Paulo Freire’s modernity 43

We have to stand up against the unified curriculum prescriptions. However, it

has not been easy, because of those who claim to be entitled to answer those
questions, and therefore, saturate the theoretical and practical fields with manuals of
Science, Mathematics, Portuguese, English, Judo, in early childhood education:
what to teach babies, who is afraid of teaching, how to teach, when, etc. We need
to protest against pleading and prescriptive pedagogies. The child’s highest strength
is the eon, i.e., the time of childhood itself. Childhood as experience. In excerpt
number 52, Heraclitus says that “time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power
is a child’s.” If there is a new possibility of Early Childhood Education, we must
look for it in our own childhood.
Freire proposes a pedagogy that gives voice to those who cannot speak: Iranian
and African women, Pernambuco rural workers, young children, the disabled, the
mentally ill, etc. How can they speak? Judith Butler (2005) writes about precarious
lives and asks which lives can cry and which ones can be lamented.7 There are lives
that cannot be cried, as if they did not have the dignity to be cried for or to be
lived. A child talking is no small matter. Spivak (2010) asks “can the subaltern
speak?” This is essential: who can talk? How can they talk? How can we break
with the ostensive and powerful grid of those who speak and whose speeches are
considered, while all the others are not? How to echo the voices that do not
resonate, or as Benjamin says “lives that leave no traces”? That is the reason we can
create a network of thinkers and connect them to Freire.

Critical thinking that is not, in any aspect, a meditation on childhood does not
make any sense.
(Virno, 2012, p. 34)

Notes
1 A 1966 film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s book about a society of the future that banned
all reading materials and the fire brigade’s job of keeping the fires at 451 degrees: the
temperature at which paper burns.
2 The book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was written in 1968 when the author was in exile in
Chile. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published first in 1970 in English (New York:
Herder and Herder) without the preface by Ernani María Fiori, but with a presentation
by Richard Schaull and a preface by Paulo Freire himself. That same year, it was pub-
lished in Spanish (Montevideo: Tierra Nueva) also without the preface by Ernani, and
only later, it was published in Portuguese (São Paulo: Paz e Terra)” (Kohan, 2019a).
3 Freire refers here to the book The Third Bank of the River, and Other Stories by Brazilian
writer João Guimarães (Rosa, 1968).
4 According to Oxfam Brasil, in Brazil, “six Brazilians – all white men – concentrate the
same wealth as the poorest half of the population, more than 100 million people. And the
richest 5% of the country receive the same as the other 95% together”. Available at
https://www.oxfam.org.br/tags/desigualdades-no-brasil. Accessed 29 July, 2019.
5 Law 8069/1990. Child and Adolescent Statute. Available at http://www.planalto.gov.br/
ccivil_03/leis/l8069.htm. Accessed 29 July 2019.
6 Poverty in the country affected about 15 million people in 2017, according to the World
Bank’s base criterion, which draws the line at an income of US $ 1.90 per person/day –
44 Anete Abramowicz and Ligia Leão de Aquino

around R$210 per capita household per month. (OXFAM Brazil, Us and Inequalities.
Oxfam Brazil Survey / Datafolha Perceptions of Inequalities in Brazil, 2019) available at
https://www.oxfam.org.br/sites/default/files/arquivos/relatorio_nos_e_as_desigualidades_
datafolha_2019.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2019.
7 “Some lives deserve to be cried, others not; the differential attribution of the right to
mourning (grievability), who decides which subjects should be mourned and who are
effectively, and which subjects should not be, produces and maintains exclusive concep-
tions who is human”.

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“Not infrequently, training course participants [using critical pedagogy] call attention to
‘the danger of conscientização’ in a way which reveals their own fear of freedom. The
‘conscientização’ (they say…) is anarchic.”
Calligraphy by Brody Neuenschwander
Quote from Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogia de opprimido. Montevideo: Tierra Nueva.