Paulo Freire: The Greatest Pedagogical Thinker of this Era

Abstract: Paulo Freire was a humanist educator and philosopher. Being a child of a middle-class family in Brazil, Freire took his lessons from life and the harsh and real. It was this experience that determined his course of action later in life. His philosophy on society and education has become inviolable in the present age of capitalist crisis. Based on the relationship between society, state and education, Freire’s ideology cannot be reconciled with education in the conventional sense in many cases. Freire believed that education is a field through which people are able to create a new world without discrimination through their own awareness. But because knowledge is always confined to a special class, the application of knowledge, the access of people to knowledge and the expansion of the realm of knowledge are deprived of the real enjoyment of these by the relatively oppressed people. He emphasized on building a new society through fearless freedom of people, creation of educational process through dialogue and interaction of leaders with people and building awareness and cultural consciousness. Freire’s ideology has been discussed in various ways in this article.