Paulo Freire; Brazilian Author, Literacy Educator

Paulo Freire, 75, Brazilian educator and author who linked adult literacy to social consciousness in the poor. In classrooms from Brazil’s northeast to Consolidated Edison Co. of New York, Freire won international acclaim for his method of teaching literacy based on the day-to-day experiences of his students. That meant first training teachers in their students’ vocabulary. Instead of the English word “food,” for example, they taught the word “hunger,” which was more familiar to the students. In his first experiment, Freire taught 300 adults to read and write in 45 days. But a year later a right-wing military coup overthrew Brazil’s democratic government. Freire was arrested for preaching communism and his method was banned. After 70 days in jail, Freire went into exile in Bolivia, Chile and Switzerland. He returned to Brazil under a political amnesty in 1979. Freire wrote 25 books, which were translated into 35 languages. He maintained that he never would have been arrested or criticized had he stuck to teaching ABCs. He fell into disfavor, he said, because of his theory that illiteracy, not any religious reason, made people poor. On Friday in Rio de Janeiro of a heart attack.