The Paulo Freire System

This article discusses the origins and structure of what for the lack of a better term I will call the ‘Paulo Freire System’. Focusing on the historical experience of Angicos which catapulted Freire to world fame as an adult educator, a major claim of this article is that Freire’s work was a much more ambitious and revolutionary project than transforming adult education and literacy training becoming another landmark in the history of popular education in the region. The Angicos experience connecting public education with popular culture, the system that Freire and associates imagined in the sixties aimed for a profound and revolutionary transformation of public education in Brazil. With his exile in 1964, popular education becomes a model that could deeply affect public education worldwide. Represented theoretically in the pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a pedagogical classic of the twenty first century, education is for Freire critical hermeneutics, addressing the dilemmas of citizenship building with a postcolonial ethics.