Reprint: The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom

In this article, Part I of Cultural Action for Freedom, Paulo Freire rejects mechanistic conceptions of the adult literacy process, advocating instead a theory and practice based upon authentic dialogue between teachers and learners. Such dialogue, in Freire's approach, centers upon the learners’ existential situations and leads not only to their acquisition of literacy skills, but also, and more importantly, to their awareness of their right as human beings to transform reality. Becoming literate, then, means far more than learning to decode the written representation of a sound system. It is truly an act of knowing, through which a person is able to look critically at the world he/she lives in, and to reflect and act upon it.