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PEDAGOGY OF HOPE
PAULO FREIRE




CHAPTER
1

In 1947 I was teaching Portuguese at Colegio Oswaldo Cruz, the same school where I had completed my 
secondary education and, also, as a special favor of the school's director Dr.
Muizio Pessoa de Araujo, my preparatory course for law school It was at that time that I received the 
invitation to become part of the recently created Industrial Social Service, SESI, the Regional Department 
of Pernambuco, set up by the National Industrial Confederation and given legal status by presidential 
decree.
The invitation was transmitted through a great friend of mine and fellow alumnus of Colegio Oswaldo 
Cruz, a person to whom I am bound by close ties of friendship, which our political disagreements have 
never disturbed, to this very day. Our disagreements had to be. They expressed our diverging views of 
the world, and our under-standing of life itself. We have got through some of the most difficult moments of 
our lives tempering our disagreements, thereby defending our right and our duty to preserve mutual love 
by ensuring that it will rise above our political options and ideological positions. Without our knowing it, at 
the time, we were already-each in his or her own way-postmodern! In fact, in our mutual respect, we were 
actually experiencing the rock-bottom foundation of politics.
His name is Paulo Rangel Moreira. Today he is an attorney of renown, and professor of law at the 
Federal University of Pernambuco. One bright afternoon in Recife, he came to our house in the Casa 
Forte district, 224 Rita de Souza Street, and told us-Elza, my first wife, and me of SESI's existence and 
what it could mean for us. He had already accepted the invitation extended to him by the young president 
of the organization, engineer and industrialist Cid Sampaio, to coordinate its social service projects. Every 
indication was that he would soon move to the legal department of the organization-his dream-to work in 
the field of his own expertise.
I listened, we listened-silent, curious, reticent, challenged-to Paulo Rangel's optimistic discourse. We 
were a little afraid, too, Elza and L Afraid of the new; perhaps. But there was also within us a willingness 
and a taste for risk, for adventure.
Night was "falling." Night had "fallen." In Recife, night arrives suddenly. The sun is "surprised" to find itself 
still shining, and makes a run for it, as if there were no time to lose.
Elza flicked on the light. "And what will Paul do in this organization?" she asked "What will it be able to 
offer Paul besides the salary he needs? How will he be able to exercise his curiosity, what creative work 
will he be able to devote himself to so that he won't die of sadness and longing for the teaching job he 
likes so much?"
We were in our last year of law school, in the middle of the school year Something had already 
happened, right about the time of the invitation, that was to become very important in my life. I have 
already referred to it in interviews, and it has been mentioned in biographical notes in books and 
periodicals. It had made Elza laugh with satisfaction at seeing something happen that she had almost 
guessed would happen-something she had counted on happening since the beginning of our life together. 
At the same time, her laugh was a pleasant one, without anything like "I told you so" about it, but just full-
to-the-brim of gladness.
I had come home at the end of the day with the tasty sensation of someone correcting a mistake he or 
she has been making. Opening the door, Elza asked me a question that, on so many people's lips, is not 
much more than a kind of bureaucratic formality, but which when asked by Elza was always a genuine 
question, never a rote formula. It expressed lively curiosity and betokened true investigation. She asked, 
"Everything all right at the office today?"
And I told her about the experience that had put an end to my brand-new career as a lawyer. I really 
needed to talk. I needed to recite, word for word, what I had just told the young dentist I had sitting in front 
of me in my very new office. Shy frightened, nervous, his hands moving as if suddenly unhooked from his 
mind, detached from his conscious body and become autonomous, and yet unable to do anything "on 
their own," do anything with themselves, or connect with the words that tumbled out of his mouth (God 
knows how the young dentist had said something to me that I needed to speak with Elza about at once. I 
needed to talk with Elza at that special moment, just as in other equally special moments in the course of 
our life. I needed to speak of the spoken, of the said and the not said, of the heard, of the listened to. To 
speak of the said is not only to resay the said, but to relive the living experience that has generated the 
saying that now, at the time of the resaying, is said once more. Thus, to resay to speak of the said, 
implies hearing once again what has been said by someone else about or because of the saying that we 
ourselves have done.
"Something very exciting happened to me this afternoon-just a few minutes ago," I said to Elza. "You 
know what? I'm not going to be a lawyer. It's not that I see nothing special, nothing captivating, about law. 
Law is a a basic need. Ifs a job that has to be done, and just as much as anything else, it has to be based 
on ethics, and competence, and seriousness, and respect for people. But law isn't what I want." Then I 
spoke of what had been, of things experienced, of words, of meaningful silences, of the said, of the 
heard. Of the young dentist before me whom I had invited to come talk with me as his creditor's attorney 
The young man had set up his dental office, at least partially and had not paid his debts.
"I made a mistake," he said. "I guess I was overoptimistic. I took out a loan I can't pay back. But I'm 
legally required to have certain instruments in order to practice dentistry. So, well, sir; . . . you can take 
our furniture, in the dining room, the living room . . ." And then, laughing a shy laugh, without the trace of 
a sneer-with as much humor as irony-he finished up: " . . . Only you can't have my eighteen-month-old 
baby girl"
I had listened in silence. I was thinking. Then I said to him,  think you and your wife and your little girl and 
your dining room and your living room are going to sit in a kind of suspended animation for a while, as far 
as your debt-troubles are concerned. I'm going to have to wait till next week to see my client and tell him 
I'm dropping the case. It'll take him another week or so to get another down-and-outer like me to be his 
attorney. This will give you a little breathing space, even if it is just suspended animation. I'd also like to 
tell you that, like you, I'm closing down my career before ifs even gotten started. Thanks."
The young man, of my own generation, may for all I know have left my office without much of a grasp of 
what had been said and heard. I squeezed his cold hand warmly with mine. Once he was home again 
and had thought over what had been said, who knows, he might have begun to understand some of the 
reasons that had led me to say what I had said
That evening, relaying to Elza what had been said, I could never have imagined that, one day so many 
years later, I would write Pedagogy of the Oppressed, whose discourse, whose proposal, has something 
to do with the experience of that afternoon, in terms of what it, too, meant, and especially in terms of the 
decision to accept Cid Sampaio's invitation, conveyed to me by Paulo Rangel I abandoned the practice of 
law for good that afternoon, once I had heard Elza say "I was hoping for that. You're an educator. Not 
many months after, as the night that had arrived in such haste began, I said yes to SESI's summons to its 
Division of Education and Culture, whose field of experience, study reflection, and practice was to be-
come an indispensable moment in the gestation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Never does an event, a fact, a deed, a gesture of rage or love, a poem, a painting, a song, a book, have 
only one reason behind it. In fact, a deed, a gesture, a poem, a painting, a song, a book are always 
wrapped in thick wrappers. They have been touched by manifold whys. Only some of these are close 
enough to the event or the creation to be visible as whys. And so I have always been more interested in 
understanding the process in and by which things come about than in the product in itself.
Pedagogy' of the Oppressed could not have gestated within me solely by reason of my stint with SESI. 
But my stint with SESI was fundamental to its development. Even before Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my 
time with SESI wove a tapestry of which Pedagogy was a kind of inevitable extension. I refer to the 
dissertation I defended in what was then the University of Recife, and later the Federal University of 
Pernambuco: "Educacao e atualidade brasileira." I later reworked my dissertation and published it as 
Educacao como pratica da liberdade, and that book basically became the forerunner of Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed.
Again, in interviews, in dialogues with intellectuals, including non-Brazilians, I have made references to 
more remote tapestries that enveloped me, by bits and pieces, from my childhood and adolescence 
onward, antedating my time with SESI, which was without any doubt a "founding time," a foundational 
time.
These bits and pieces of time actually lived in me-for I had lived them-awaiting another time, which might 
not even have come as it came, but into which, if it did come, earlier bits and pieces of time were destined 
to extend, in the composition of the larger fabric.
At times, it happens to us not to perceive the "kinship" among the times we have experienced, and thus to 
let slip the opportunity to "solder together" disconnected cognitions, and in so doing to allow the second to 
shed light on the doubtful brilliance of the first.
There was my experience of infancy and adolescence with youngsters who were the children of rural and 
urban workers, my life as a child with children whose opportunities for life were so utterly minimal, the way 
in which most of their parents treated us-Temistocles, my immediately elder brother; and me-their "fear of 
freedom," which I never understood, nor called it this at the time, their subservient attitude toward their 
employers, the boss, the owner; which later; much later; I read in Sartre was one of the expressions of 
the "connivance" of the oppressed with the oppressors. * There were their oppressed bodies, the 
unconsulted hosts of the oppressors' parasitism.
It is interesting, in a context of childhood and adolescence, in the connivance maintained with the 
wickedness of the powerful-with the weakness that needed to turn into the strength of the dominated-that 
the time of SESI's foundation, that time of "solderings" and "splicings" of old, pure guesses,' to which my 
new knowledge with its critical emergence gave meaning, was the moment at which I read the why or 
some of the whys-the tapestries and fabrics that were books already written and not yet read by me, and 
of books yet to be written that would come to enlighten the vivid memory that was forming me: Marx, 
Lukacs, Fromm, Gramsci, Fanon, Memmi, Sartre, Kosik, Agnes Heller; M. Ponty Simon Weil, Arendt, 
Marcuse, and so many others.
Years later; the putting into practice of some of the "solderings" and "splicings" of the inaugural years of 
SESI sent me into exile7-a kind of "golden spike" that enabled me to connect recollections, recognize 
facts, deeds, and gestures, fuse pieces of knowledge, solder moments, re-cognize in order to cognize, to 
know, better.
In this effort to recall moments of my experience-which necessarily regardless of when they were, 
became sources of my theoretical reflections for the writing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as they would 
continue to be today as I rethink pedagogy feel that it will be appropriate to refer to an excellent example 
of such a moment, which I experienced in the 1950s. The experience resulted in a learning process of 
real importance for me-for my theoretical understanding of the practice of political education, which, if it is 
to be progressive, must, as I have always asserted, take careful account of the reading of the world being 
made by popular groups and expressed in their discourse, their syntax, their semantics, their dreams and 
desires.
I was now working in SE SI, and specifically on relations between schools and families. I had begun to 
experiment with various avenues to an improvement of the meeting of minds: to an understanding of the 
educational practice being carried out in the schools, on the part of families; to an understanding of the 
difficulties that families from popular areas would have in confronting problems in the implementation of 
their own educational activity. At bottom, I was looking for a dialogue between them from which might 
result the necessary mutual assistance that, at the same time-as it would imply more involvement of the 
families in the school-might enhance the political connotation of that involvement in the sense of opening 
channels of democratic participation to fathers and mothers in the actual educational policy being 
implemented in the schools.
I had carried out, by that time, a research project covering some one thousand families of students, 
throughout the urban area of Recife, the Zona da Mata, the countryside, and what might be called the 
"doorway" to the desert hinterland of Pernambuco,8 where SESI had nuclei or social centers in which it 
offered its members and their families medical and dental assistance, scholastic help, sports and 
recreation projects, cultural projects, and so on.
My research, which had nothing of the sophisticated about it, asked the parents questions about their 
relationship with their daughters and sons. I asked about punishments, rewards, the most frequent 
punishments, the most frequent reasons for it, their children's reaction to the punishment, any change in 
their behavior; or want thereof, in the direction desired by the person doing the punishing, and so on.
I recall that, when I had sifted through the results, I was astonished, even more than I had expected to be, 
at the emphasis on corporal punishment, really violent punishment, in the Recife inner city, the Zona da 
Mata, in the rural areas, and hinterland, by contrast with the almost complete absence, not only of violent 
corporal punishment, but of any punishment of children, along the fishing coast. It seemed that, along the 
coast, under the maritime sky the legends of individual freedom with which the culture is drenched, the 
fishers' confrontation, in their precarious jangadas or rafts, with the forces of the sea, the independent 
jobber's work done by persons free and proud, the imagination that lends such color to the fishers' 
fantastic stories-it seemed that all of this had some connection with the taste for a liberty diametrically 
opposed to the use of violent punishment.
I do not know myself to what extent we might consider the fishers' lifestyle too permissive, wanting 
boundaries, or whether; on the contrary with their emphasis on freedom, and conditioned by their own 
cultural context, the fishers are simply relying on nature itself on the world, on the sea, in and with which 
their children they win an experience of themselves, to be the source of freedom's necessary limits. It was 
as if, softening or trimming down their duty as their children's educators, fathers and mothers shared them 
with the sea, with the world itself, to which it would fall, through their children's practice, to delineate their 
responsibilities. In this fashion, the children would be expected to learn naturally what they might and 
might not do.
Indeed, the fishers lived a life of enormous contradiction. On one side, they felt free and bold, confronting 
the sea, in fellowship with its mysteries, doing what they called "scientific fishing, "10 of which they had 
spoken to me in the sunsets when, relaxing with them in their primitive shelters, their cai~ras,11 I learned 
to understand them better by listening to them. On the other hand, they were viciously plundered, 
exploited, now by the middlemen who bought for nothing the product of their hard labor; now by the 
moneylenders who financed their work tools.
Sometimes, as I listened to them-in my conversations with them in which I learned something of their 
syntax and semantics, without which I could not have worked with them, or at any rate not effectively-I 
wondered whether they didn't perhaps notice how unfree they really were.
I recall that, in the fishing season, we delved into the reason why various students were missing school so 
frequently. Students and parents, separately replied The students, "Because we're free." The parents, 
"Because they're free. They'll go back some day."
Punishments in the other areas of the state that I researched ranged from tying a child to a tree, locking 
them in a room for hours on end, giving them "cakes" with thick, heavy switches,12 forcing them to kneel 
on stones used to grind corn, thrashing them with leather straps. This last was the principal punishment in 
a town of the Zona da Mata that was famous for its shoemaking.
These punishments were applied for trivial reasons, and people watching the fishing were told, "Hard 
punishment makes hard people, who are up to the cruelty of life." Or; "Getting hit makes a real man out of 
you."
One of my concerns, at the time, as valid then as it is now, was with the political consequences of that 
kind of relationship between parents and children, which later becomes that between teachers and pupils, 
when it came to the learning process of our infant democracy. It was as if family and school were so 
completely subjected to the greater context of global society that they could do nothing but reproduce the 
authoritarian ideology
I acknowledge the risks to which we expose ourselves in confronting such problems. On the one hand, 
there is the danger of voluntarism, ultimately a kind of "idealism of the strife" that ascribes to the will of the 
individual with the power to do all things. On the other hand, there is the peril of a mechanistic objectivism 
that refuses to ascribe any role to subjectivity in the historical process.
Both of these conceptions of history and of human beings in that history end by definitively canceling the 
role of education. The first, because it attributes to education a power that it does not have; the second, 
because it denies that it has any power at all
As for the relationship between authority and freedom-the subject of the research project that I have 
mentioned-we also run the risk either of denying freedom the right to assert itself, thus exacerbating the 
role of authority; or else of atrophying the latter and thus hypertrophying the former. In other words, we 
run the risk of succumbing to the seduction or tyranny of liberty or to the tyranny of authority thus acting at 
cross-purposes, in either hypothesis, with our incipient democracy.
This was not my position then and it is not my position now. And today as yesterday while on perhaps 
better foundations than yesterday I am completely persuaded of the importance, the urgency of the 
democratization of the public school, and of the ongoing training of its educators, among whom I include 
security people, cafeteria personnel, and custodians, and so on. Their formation must be ongoing and 
scientific. Nor should it fail to instill a taste for democratic practices, among which should be an ever more 
active intervention on the part of educands and their families as to which direction the school is going. 
This has been one of the tasks to which I have devoted myself recently so many years after having first 
observed this need, and spoken of it in my 1959 academic treatise, "Educacaco e atualidade brasileira," 
to address it again as secretary of education for the City of Sao Paulo from January 1989 to May 1991. 
Here is the challenge of the democratization of the public school, so neglected by the military 
governments that, in the name of the salvation of the country from the curse of communism and from 
corruption, all but destroyed that country.
Finally with the results of my study in hand, I scheduled a kind of systematic visitation of all of the SESI 
nuclei or social centers in the state of Pernambuco where we maintain primary schools, as
they were called at the time, to go there and speak to the parents about the findings of the inquiry. And to 
do something more: to join to communication of the findings of the investigation a discussion about the 
problem of the relationship between authority and freedom, which would necessarily involve the question 
of punishment and reward in education.
The tour for discussion with the families was preceded by another; which I made in order to debate, in 
seminars as rigorous as it was possible to have, the same question with teachers.
I had put together-in collaboration with a colleague, Jorge Monteiro de Melo, recently deceased, whose 
seriousness, honesty and devotion I now reverence-an essay on scholastic discipline, which, alongside 
the results of the study became the object of our preparatory seminar in our meetings with the families. In 
this fashion, we prepared ourselves, as a school, to welcome the students' families-the natural educators 
of those of whom we were the professional educators.
Back then, I was accustomed to give long talks on the subjects that had been selected. I was repeating 
the traditional route of discourse about something that you would give an audience. Then I would shift the 
format to a debate, discussion, dialogue about the subject with the participants. And, while I was 
concerned about the order and development of ideas, I proceeded almost as if I were speaking to 
university students. I say "almost," because actually my sensitivity had already made me aware of the 
differences in language, the syntactical and semantic differences, between the working persons with 
whom I was working and my own language. Hence my talks were always punctuated with, "In other 
words," or; "That is to say. . ." On the other hand, despite some years of experience as an educator; with 
urban and rural workers, I still nearly always started out with my world, without further explanation, as if it 
ought to be the "south" to which their compass ought to point in giving them their bearings. It was as if my 
word, my theme, my reading of the world, in themselves, were to be their compass. 
It was a long learning process, which implied a journey and not always an easy one, nearly always 
painful, to the point that I persuaded myself that, even when my thesis and proposal were sure, and I had 
no doubt in their respect, it was nevertheless imperative, first, to know whether this thesis and proposition 
coincided with the reading of the world of the groups or social class to whom I was speaking; second, it 
was incumbent upon me to be more or less abreast of, familiar with, their reading of the world, since only 
on the basis of the knowledge in its content, or implicit in it, would it be possible for me to discuss my 
reading of the world, which in turn, maintains, and is based on, another type of knowledge.
This learning process, this apprenticeship, whose story is a long one, is rehearsed in my university 
dissertation, cited above, continues being sketched in Educacao como practica da liberdade, and 
becomes explicit once and for all in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One moment-I could even say a solemn 
one, among others, of this apprenticeship-occurred during the one-day seminar to which I have referred, 
which consisted of talks in which I discussed authority freedom, and punishment and reward in education. 
It happened precisely in the SESI nucleus or social center named for President Dutra, at Vasco da Gama-
Amarela House-in Recife.
Basing my presentation on an excellent study by Piaget on the child's moral code, his and her mental 
representation of punishment, the proportion between the probable cause of punishment and the 
punishment itself, I spoke at length. I quoted Piaget himself on the subject, and argued for a dialogical, 
loving relationship between parents and children in place of violent punishments.
My mistake was not in citing Piaget. In fact, how much richer my presentation could have been if I had 
talked about him very concretely using a map, and showing where Recife is, then the Brazilian Northeast, 
then to move out to the whole of Brazil, show where Brazil is in South America, relate that to the rest of 
the world, and finally point to Switzerland, in Europe, the land of the author I was quoting. It would have 
been not only richer; but more challenging and instructive, to do that. But my actual mistake was, first, in 
my use of my language, my syntax, without more effort to get close to the language and syntax of my 
audience; and second, in my all but oblivion of the hard reality of the huge audience seated before me.
When I had concluded, a man of about forty still rather young but already worn out and exhausted, raised 
his hand and gave me the clearest and most bruising lesson I have ever received in my life as an 
educator.
I do not know his name. I do not know whether he is still alive. Possibly not. The wickedness of the 
country's socioeconomic structures, which take on stronger colors in the Brazilian Northeast-suffering, 
hunger; the indifference of the mighty-all this must have swallowed him up long since.
He raised his hand and gave a talk that I have never been able to forget. It seared my soul for good and 
all It has exerted an enormous influence on me. Nearly always, in academic ceremonies in which I have 
had an honorary doctorate conferred on me by some university I acknowledge how much I owe, as well, 
to persons like the one of whom I am now speaking, and not only to scholar other thinkers who have 
taught me, too, and who continue to teach me, teachers without whom it would have been impossible for 
me to learn, like the laborer who spoke that night. Actually were it not for the scientific rigor that offers me 
greater opportunities for precision in my findings, I should not be able critically to perceive the importance 
of common sense and the good sense therein residing. In almost every academic ceremony in which I am 
honored, I see him standing in one of the aisles of that big auditorium of so long ago, head erect, eyes 
blazing, speaking in a loud, clear voice, sure of himself, speaking his lucid speech.
"We have just heard," he began, "some nice words from Dr. Paulo Freire. Fine words, in fact. Well 
spoken. Some of them were even simple enough for people to understand easily. Others were more 
complicated. But I think I understood the most important things that all the words together say.
"Now I'd like to ask the doctor a couple of things that I find my fellow workers agree with."
He fixed me with a mild, but penetrating gaze, and asked: "Dr. Paulo, sir do you know where people live? 
Have you ever been in any of our houses, sir?" And he began to describe their pitiful houses. He told me 
of the lack of facilities, of the extremely minimal space in which all their bodies were jammed. He spoke of 
the lack of resources for the most basic necessities. He spoke of physical
exhaustion, and of the impossibility of dreams for a better tomorrow. He told me of the prohibition 
imposed on them from being happy-or even of having hope.
As I followed his discourse, I began to see where he was going to go with it. I was slouching in my chair; 
slouching because I was trying to sink down into it. And the chair was swiveling, in the need of my 
imagination and the desire of my body which were both in flight, to find some hole to hide in. He paused a 
few seconds, ranging his eyes over the entire audience, fixed on me once more, and said, "Doctor; I have 
never been over to your house. But I'd like to describe it for you, sir. How many children do you have? 
Boys or girls?"
"Five," I said-scrunching further down into my chair. "Three girls and two boys."
"Well, Doctor; your house must be the only house on the lot, what they call an oitao livre house," a house 
with a yard There must be a room just for you and your wife, sir. Another big room, that's for the three 
girls. There's another kind of doctor; who has a room for every son or daughter. But you're not that kind-
no, sir. You have another room for the two boys. A bathroom with running water. A kitchen with Arno 
appliances. 19 A maid's room-much smaller than your kids' rooms-on the outside of the house. A little 
garden, with an 'ingress' (the English word) lawn," a front lawn. "You must also have a room where you 
toss your books, sir-a 'study' a library. I can tell by the way you talk that you've done a lot of reading, sir; 
and you've got a good memory.
There was nothing to add or subtract. That was my house. Another world, spacious and comfortable.
"Now Doctor; look at the difference. You come home tired, sir, I know that. You may even have a 
headache from the work you do. Thinking, writing, reading, giving these kind of talks that you're giving 
now. That tires a person out too. But, sir;" he continued, "it's one thing to come home, even tired, and find 
the kids all bathed, dressed up, clean, well fed, not hungry-and another thing to come home and find your 
kids dirty hungry crying, and making noise. And people have to get up at four in the morning the next day 
and start all over again-hurting, sad, hopeless. If people hit their kids, and even go beyond bounds,' as 
you say it's not because people don't love their kids. No, it's because life is so hard thay don't have much 
choice."
This is class knowledge, I say now.
This talk was given about thirty-two years ago. I have never forgotten it. It said to me, despite the fact that 
I didn't understand this at the time, much more than it immediately communicated
In his intonations, his laborer's syntax and rhythm, the movements of his body his hands of an orator; in 
the metaphors so common to popular discourse, he called the attention of the educator there in front of 
him, seated, silent, sinking down into his chair; to the need, when speaking to the people, for the educator 
to be up to an understanding of the world the people have. An understanding of the world which, 
conditioned by the concrete reality that in part explains that understanding, can begin to change through a 
change in that concrete reality. In fact, that understanding of the world can begin to change the moment 
the unmasking of concrete reality begins to lay bare the "whys" of what the actual understanding had 
been up until then.
A change in understanding, which is of basic importance, does not of itself, however; mean a change in 
the concrete.
The fact that I have never forgotten the fabric in which that discourse was delivered is significant. The 
discourse of that faraway night is still before me, as if it had been a written text, an essay that I constantly 
had to review. Indeed, it was the culmination of the learning process I had undertaken long ago-that of the 
progressive educator: even when one must speak to the people, one must convert the "to" to a "with" the 
people. And this implies respect for the "knowledge of living experience" of which I always speak, on the 
basis of which it is possible to go beyond it.
That night, in the car on the way back home, I complained to Elza rather bitterly. Though she rarely 
accompanied me to meetings, when she did she made excellent observations that always helped me.
"I thought I'd been so clear;" I said. "I don't think they understood me.
"Could it have been you, Paulo, who didn't understand them?" Elza asked, and she went on: "I think they 
got the main point of your talk. The worker made that clear in what he said They under-
stood you, but they needed to have you understand them. That's the question."
Years later; Pedagogy of the Oppressed spoke of the theory that became steeped in practice that night, a 
night whose memory went with me into exile along with the rememberance of so many other fabrics lived.
The moments we live either are instants in a process previously inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a 
new process referring in some way to something in the past. This is why I have spoken of the "kinship" 
among times lived-something we do not always perceive, thereby failing to unveil the fundamental why of 
the way in which we experience ourselves at each moment.
I should like to refer; now, to another of these times, another fabric that powerfully scored my existential 
experience and had a noticeable influence on the development of my pedagogical thought and 
educational practice.
Stepping back, now, from the moment to which I am about to refer; which I experienced between the 
ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine-part of it, then, while I was working in SESI-I see it as not just a 
moment but a process, whose point of departure occurred toward the end of my childhood and the 
beginning of my teen years, in Jaboatao.
During the period I am talking about, from the ages of twenty-two to twenty-nine, I used to be overcome 
by a sense of despair and sadness from time to time. I was a terrible sad sack at these moments, and I 
suffered terribly from it. Nearly always, I would spend two or three days, or even longer; like this. 
Sometimes this state of mind would attack me without warning-in the street, in my office, at home. 
Sometimes it would come gradually and get the best of me piecemeal. Regardless of which way it came, I 
felt wounded, and bored with the world, as if I were submerged in myself, in the pain whose reason I did 
not know, and everything around me seemed strange and foreign. Who wouldn't despair?
One time, a schoolmate from high school managed to hurt and offend me by telling me about something 
in my behavior of the previous two or three days that he couldn't understand "You wouldn't talk to me! On 
Empress Street! I was heading for Hospice Street, and you were walking on the other side of the street 
going the other way. I crossed over; and waved a big hello. I thought you'd stop and say hi! And you just 
kept on walking! Why did you pretend you didn't see me?"
There were other; less striking, cases than this one. My explanation was always the same. "I didn't see 
you. Look, I'm your friend! I wouldn't do something like that!"
Elza always had deep understanding for me when this happened, and she helped me in every way she 
could And the finest help she could give me, and she gave it, was not to so much as suggest to me that 
my attitude toward her was changing.
After I had had these experiences for some time, especially as they were beginning to happen more and 
more often, I began to try to see it in the framework, in which it occurred, see it as a part of the bigger 
picture. What were the elements, or surrounding elements, of the actual moment at which I felt that way?
When I could see the depression coming, I tried to see what it was that was there around me. I tried to 
see again, tried to remember; what had happened the day before, tried to hear once more what had been 
said and to whom it had been said, what I had heard and from whom I had heard it. When you come right 
down to it, I began to take my depression as an object of curiosity and investigation. I "stepped back" from 
it, to learn its "why." Basically I needed to shed some light on the framework in which it was being 
generated.
I began to perceive that it was repeated, almost identically-my depression, this lack of interest in the 
world, this pessimism: that it occurred more often in the rainy season, and mostly at or around the time of 
the trips I would make to the Zona da Mata to speak in SESI schools to teachers and pupils' families on 
educational problems. This observation called my attention to the trips I made with the same objective to 
the farming zone of the state. But it didn't happen in connection with these trips. So it wasn't trips that 
were the cause of my depression.
I find it interesting that I can condense into just a few pages the three or four years of search out of the 
seven during which that moment was repeated.
My first visit to the city of Sao Paulo occurred when my search happened to be in full swing.
The day after I arrived, I was in my hotel, that afternoon, and the rain began to pour. I went over to the 
window to peer out at the world outside. The sky was black, and it was really coming down. But one thing 
was lacking, in the world that I was observing, by comparison with the pouring rain that would be 
accompanied with such deep depression. What was missing was green, and mud-the black earth soaking 
up the water; or the yellow clay turning into the slippery or else slurpy-sticky mass that "grabs you like a 
great, big constrictor;" as Gilberto Freyre said of massape, the black clay of the Northeast.
The dark sky of Sao Paulo that day and the falling rain, had no effect on me whatsoever.
On my return to Recife, I brought with me a mental portrait that the visit to Sao Paulo had helped me to 
put together. My depressions were doubtless connected to rain, and mud-massape clay-and the green of 
the cane brakes and the dark sky. Not connected to any of these elements in isolation, but to the 
relationship among them. What I needed now, in order to gain a clear understanding of the experience of 
my suffering, was to discover the remote framework in which these elements had won or had been 
winning the power to spark my depression. At bottom, in seeking for the deepest "why" of my pain, I was 
educating my hope. I never expected things just to "be that way" I worked on things, on facts, on my will I 
invented the concrete hope in which, one day I would see myself delivered from my depression.
And so it was that, one rainy afternoon in Recife, under a leaden sky I went to Jaboatao in quest of my 
childhood. If it was raining in Recife, in Jaboatao, which was known as the "spout of heaven," there was 
no describing it. And it was under a heavy rain that I paid my visit to Morro da San de, where I had lived 
as a child I stopped in front of the house in which I had lived-the house in which my father died in the late 
afternoon of October 21, 1934. I saw again the long lawn that stretched before the house at the time, the 
lawn we played soccer on. I saw again the mango trees, their green fronds. I saw my feet again, my 
muddy feet going up the hill, and me soaked to the skin. I had before me, as on a canvas, my father 
dying, my mother in stupefaction, my family lost in sorrow.
Then I walked down the hill and went to see once more certain areas where, more out of need than for 
sport, I had hunted innocent little birds, with the slingshot I had made myself and with which I became an 
excellent shot.
That rainy afternoon, with the sky dark as lead over the bright green land, the ground soaked, I 
discovered the fabric of my depression. I became conscious of various relationships between the signs 
and the central core, the deeper core, hidden within me. I unveiled the problem by clearly and lucidly 
grasping its "why." I dug up the archeology of my pain.
Since then, never again has the relationship between rain, green, and mud or sticky clay sparked in me 
the depression that had afflicted me for years. I buried it, that rainy afternoon I revisited Jaboatao. At the 
same time as I was struggling with my personal problem, I devoted myself to SESI groups of rural and 
urban workers, worked on the problem of moving from my discourse about my reading of the world to 
them, and moving them, challenging them, to speak of their own reading.
Many of them had possibly experienced the same process I had lived through-that of unraveling the fabric 
in which the facts are given, discovering their "why."
Many perhaps, had suffered, and not just a little, in redoing their reading of the world under the impulse of 
a new perception-in which it was not actually destiny or fate or an inescapable lot that explained their 
helplessness as workers, their impotence in the face of the defeated, squalid body of their companion, 
and their death for want of resources.
Let me make it clear; then, that, in the domain of socioeconomic structures, the most critical knowledge of 
reality, which we acquire through the unveiling of that reality does not of itself alone effect a change in 
reality.
In my case, as I have just recounted, the unmasking of the "why" of my experience of suffering was all 
that was needed to overcome it. True, I was freed from a limitation that actually threatened both my 
professional activity and my life in the community of my fellow human beings. It had come to the point that 
I was politically limited, as well
A more critical understanding of the situation of oppression does not yet liberate the oppressed But the 
revelation is a step in the right direction. Now the person who has this new understanding can engage in 
a political struggle for the transformation of the concrete conditions in which the oppression prevails. Here 
is what I mean. In my case, it was enough to know the fabric in which my suffering had been born in order 
to bury it. In the area of socioeconomic structures, a critical perception of the fabric, while indispensable, 
is not sufficient to change the data of the problem, any more than it is enough for the worker to have in 
mind the idea of the object to be produced: that object has to be made.
But the hope of producing the object is as basic to the worker as the hope of remaking the world is 
indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women. The revelatory gnosiological practice of 
education does not of itself effect the transformation of the world:
but it implies it.
No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile-not even those who arrive physically alone, 
unaccompanied by family spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without 
having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul We carry with us the memory of many 
fabrics, a self soaked in our history our culture; a memory sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and 
clear; of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that 
suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of 
misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word 
for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected-
which, as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal of risk.
We experience, of course, in the voyage we make, a tumult in our soul, a synthesis of contrasting 
feelings-the hope of immediate deliverance from the perils that surround us, relief at the absence of the 
inquisitor (either the brutal, offensive interrogator; or the tactically polite prosecutor to whose lips this "evil, 
dangerous subversive" will yield, it is thought, more easily), along with, for the extension of the tumult of 
and in the soul, a guilt-feeling at leaving one's world, one's soil, the scent of one's soil, one's folks. To the 
tumult in the soul belongs also the pain of the broken dream, utopia lost. The danger of losing hope. I 
have known exiles who began to buy a piece of furniture or two for their homes only after four or five 
years in exile. Their half empty homes seemed to speak, eloquently of their loyalty to a distant land. In 
fact, their half-empty rooms not only seemed to wish to speak to them of their longing to return, but 
looked as if the movers had just paid a visit and they were actually moving back. The half-empty house 
lessened the sentiment of blame at having left the "old sod." In this, perhaps, lies a certain need that I 
have so often perceived in persons exiled: the need to feel persecuted, to be constantly trailed by some 
secret agent who dogged their step and whom they alone ever saw. To know they were so dangerous 
gave them, on the one hand, the sensation of still being politically alive; and on the other; the sensation of 
a right to survive, through cautious measures. It diminished their guilt feelings.
Indeed, one of the serious problems of the man or woman in exile is how to wrestle, tooth and nail, with 
feelings, desire, reason, recall, accumulated knowledge, worldviews, with the tension between a today 
being lived in a reality on loan and a yesterday in their context of origin, whose fundamental marks they 
come here charged with. At bottom, the problem is how to preserve one's identity in the relationship 
between an indispensable occupation in the new context, and a preoccupation in which the original 
context has to be reconstituted How to wrestle with the yearning without allowing it to turn into nostalgia. 
How to invent new ways of living, and living with others, thereby overcoming or redirecting an 
understandable tendency on the part of the exiled woman or man always to regard the context of origin 
(as it cannot be got rid of as a reference, at least not over the long haul) as better than the one on loan. 
Sometimes it is actually better; not always, however.
Basically it is very difficult to experience exile, to live with all the different longings-for one's town or city 
one's country family relatives, a certain corner; certain meals-to live with longing, and educate it too. The 
education of longing has to do with the transcendence of a naively excessive optimism, of the kind, for 
example, with which certain companions received me in October 1964 in La Paz:
"You're just in time to turn around. We'll be home for Christmas." I had arrived there after a month or a 
little more than a month in the Bolivian embassy in Brazil, waiting for the Brazilian government to deign to 
send me the safe-conduct pass without which I should not be allowed to leave. Shortly before, I had been 
arrested, and subjected to long interrogations by military personnel who seemed to think that, in asking 
these questions of theirs, they were saving not only Brazil but the whole world.
"We'll be home for Christmas."
"Which Christmas?" I asked, with curiosity and even more surprise.
"This Christmas!" they answered, with unshakable certitude.
My first night in La Paz, not yet under the onslaughts of  the altitude sickness that were to fall upon me 
the next day I reflected a bit on the education of longing, which figures in Pedagogy of Hope. It would be 
terrible, I thought, to let the desire to return kill in us the critical view, and make us look at everything that 
happens back home in a favorable way create in our head a reality that isn't real.
Exile is a difficult experience. Waiting for the letter that never comes because it has been lost, waiting for 
notice of a final decision that never arrives. Expecting sometimes that certain people will come, even 
going to the airport simply to "expect," as if the verb were intransitive.
It is far more difficult to experience exile when we make no effort to adopt its space-time critically-accept it 
as an opportunity with which we have been presented It is this critical ability to plunge into a new daily 
reality without preconceptions, that brings the man or woman in exile to a more historical understanding 
of his or her own situation. It is one thing, then, to experience the everyday in the context of one's origin, 
immersed in the habitual fabrics from which we can easily emerge to make our investigations, and some-
thing else again to experience the everyday in the loan context that calls on us not only to become able to 
grow attached to this new context, but also to take it as an object of our critical reflection, much more than 
we do our own from a point of departure in our own.
I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 1964, and another coup d'etat took me by surprise. In November of 
the same year I landed in Arica, in Chile, where I startled my fellow passengers, as we were making our 
descent toward the airport, by calling out, loud and strong, "Long live oxygen!" I had left an altitude of four 
thousand meters and was returning to sea level My body once more became as viable as it had been 
before. I moved with facility rapidly without exhaustion. In La Paz, carrying a package, even a little one, 
meant an extraordinary effort for me. At forty-three I felt old and decrepit. In Arica, and on the next day in 
Santiago, I got my strength back, and everything happened almost instantly as if by sleight of hand Long 
live oxygen!
I arrived in Chile with my whole self: passion, longing, sadness, hope, desire, dreams in smithereens but 
not abandoned, offenses, knowledge stored in the countless fabrics of living experience, avail-ability for 
life, fears and terrors, doubts, a will to live and love. Hope, especially.
I arrived in Chile, and a few days later started to work as a consultant for renowned economist Jacques 
Chonchol, president of the Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuano (Institute for the Development of Animal 
Husbandry the INDAP-subsequently to be minister of agriculture in the Allende government.
Only in mid-January of 1965 were we all back together. Elza, the three girls, and the two boys, with all 
their terrors, their doubts, their hopes, their fears, their knowledge gotten and being gotten, started a new 
life with me again in a strange land-a foreign land to which we were giving ourselves in such wise that it 
was receiving us in a way that the foreignness was turning into comradeship, friendship, siblingship. 
Homesick as we were for Brazil, we had a sudden special place in our hearts for Chile, which taught us 
Latin America in a way we had never imagined it.
I reached Chile a few days after the inauguration of Eduardo Frey's Christian Democratic government. 
There was a climate of euphoria in the streets of Santiago. It was as if a profound, radical, substantial 
transformation of society had occurred. Only the forces of the Right, at one extreme, and those of the 
Marxist-Leninist Left at the other, for different reasons, obviously did not share the euphoria. How vast it 
was! What a certitude there was, rooted in the minds of Christian Democracy activists, that their 
revolution was fixed on solid ground, that no threat could even get near it! One of their favorite 
arguments, more metaphysical than historical, was what they called the democratic and constitutionalist 
tradition of the Chilean armed forces."
"Never will there be an uprising against the established order" they said, sure as sure can be, in 
conversations with us.
I remember a meeting that did not go very well at the home of one of these militants, with some thirty of 
them, in which Pll'nio Sampaio, Faulo de Tarso Santos, Mmino Affonso, and I, participated.
We argued that the so-called tradition of loyalty on the part of the armed forces to the established, 
democratic order was not an immutable quality an intrinsic property of the military but a mere "historical 
given," and therefore that this "tradition" might become historically shattered and a new process take its 
place. They answered that Brazilians in exile gave them "the impression of being crybabies who've had 
their toys taken away" or "frustrated, helpless children." There was no conversing with them.
A few years later the Chilean armed forces decided to change positions. I hope it was without the 
contribution of any of those with whom we were conversing that night, as I hope as well that none of them 
had to pay as dearly as thousands of other Chileans did-along with other Latin Americans-under the 
weight of the perversity and cruelty that came crashing down on Chile in September 1973. It was not by 
chance, then, that the most backward of the elite, in whom even timid liberal positions stirred threat and 
fear, frightened at the reformist policy of Christian Democracy which was then regarded as a kind of 
middle road, dreamed of the need to put an end to all this bold, too-risky business. Just imagine what 
Allende's victory meant, then, not only for the Chilean elite, but for the outsiders of the North!
I visited Chile twice during the time of the Popular Unity government, and used to say in Europe and in 
the United States, that anyone who wanted to get a concrete idea of the class struggle, as expressed in 
the most divergent ways, really ought to pay a visit to Chile. Especially if you wanted to see-practically 
touch with your hands-the tactics the dominant classes employed in the struggle, and the richness of their 
imagination when it came to waging a more effective struggle for the resolution of the contradiction 
between power and government, I would tell my audiences, you really must go to Chile. What had 
happened is that power; as a fabric of relations, decisions, and force, continued to be the main thing with 
them, while the government, which was in charge of policy found itself being propelled by progressive 
forces, forces in discord with the others. This opposition, this contradiction, had to be overcome, so that 
both power and government would be in their hands again. The coup was the solution. And so, even 
within the Christian Democratic party the Right tended to place obstacles in the way of the democratic 
policy of the more advanced echelons, especially of the youth. As the process developed, a clearer and 
clearer tendency to radicalization, and breach between the discordant options, appeared, precluding a 
peaceful coexistence between them, either in the party or in society itself.
On the outside, the Marxist-Leninist Left, the Communist party and the Socialist party, had their 
ideological, political, historical, and cultural reasons for not joining in the euphoria. They regarded it as 
naive at best.
In step with the waxing and deepening of the class struggle or conflicts, the rift between the forces of 
Right and Left, among Christian Democrats as in civil society, likewise deepened. Thus arose various 
tendencies on the Left calculated to regiment militants who, in direct contact with the popular bases, or 
seeking to understand these grassroots elements through a reading of the classic Marxists, began to call 
on the carpet the reformism that had finally gained the upper hand in the strategic plans of Christian 
Democratic policy.
The Movimiento Independente Revolucionario, the MIR, was born in Concepci6n, and was constituted of 
revolutionary youth who disagreed with what seemed to them to be a deviation on the part of the 
Communist party-that of a "coexistence" with elements of 'bourgeois democracy."
It is interesting, however, that the MIR, which was constantly to the Left of the Communist party and 
afterwards, of the Popular Unity government itself always manifested a sympathy for popular education, 
something the parties of the traditional Left generally lacked
When the Communist party and the Socialist party rehised, dogmatically to work with certain poblaci6nes 
who, they said, were without a "class consciousness," so that they mobilized only for ad hoc protests and 
automatically demobilized whenever their demands were met, the MIR thought it necessary first, to prove 
the correctness of this attitude toward the Lumpenproletariat, the "great unwashed," and second, to 
observe whether, admitting the hypothesis that their proposition had been verified in certain situations, it 
would be verified again in a different historical moment. In other words, while there was some truth in the 
proposition, it could not be taken as a metaphysical postulate.
And so it came about that, now under the Popular Unity government, the MIR launched an intensive 
campaign of mobilization and organization-itself a piece of political pedagogy-in which it included a series 
of educational projects in the popular areas. In 1973, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with the 
leaders of the poblaci6n-settlement or "new city" of Nueba Habana, which, contrary to the dour forecast, 
after obtaining what it had been demanding, its own villa, continued active and creative, maintaining 
countless projects in the area of education, health, justice, social security and sports. I paid a visit to a 
lineup of old buses, donated by the government, whose bodies, converted and adapted, had become 
neat, nicely set up little schoolrooms, which the children of the poblacion attended In the evenings, the 
bus-schoolrooms would fill with literacy-program clients, who were learning to read the word through a 
reading of the world. Nueba Habana had a future, then, if an uncertain one, and the climate surrounding it 
and the experimental pedagogy being plied within it was one of hope.
Mongside the MIR arose the Movimiento de Acci6n Popular Uni-taria, and the Christian Left, further 
splintering the Christian Democrats. A sizable contingent of more advanced youth among the Christian 
Democrats joined the MAPU, or else the Christian Left, and even migrated to the MIR as well, or the 
Communist and Socialist parties.
Today nearly thirty years later, one readily perceives what, at the time, only a few grasped, and already 
urged. They were sometimes regarded as dreamers, utopians, idealists, or even as "selling out to the 
gringos." At this distance, it is easy to see that only a radical politic not a sectarian one, however; but one 
that seeks a unity in diversity among progressive forces could ever have won the battle for a democracy 
that could stand up to the power and virulence of the Right. Instead, there was only sectarianism and 
intolerance-the rejection of differences. Tolerance was not what it ought to be:
the revolutionary virtue that consists in a peaceful coexistence with those who are different, in order to 
wage a better fight against the adversaries.
The correct road for the progressive forces standing to the Left of the Christian Democrats would have 
been to move-within ethical limits of concession on policy loser and closer to them, not in order to take 
over the party nor again in such a manner as to drive it to the Right, nor, indeed, so as to be absorbed 
into it. And for its own part, Christian Democracy in all intolerance, rejected dialogue. There was no 
credibility on either side.
It was precisely by virtue of the inability of all forces to tolerate one another that Popular Unity came to 
power. . . without power.
From November 1964 to April 1969, I followed the ideological struggle closely. I witnessed, sometimes 
with surprise, retreats in the area of political ideology by persons who had proclaimed their option for the 
transformation of society, then became frightened and repentant, and made a fearful about-face in 
midcourse and turned into hidebound reactionaries. But I also saw the advances made by those who 
confirmed their progressive discourse by walking consistently refusing to run from history. I likewise 
witnessed the progress of persons whose initial position had been timid, to say the least, but who became 
stronger, ultimately to assert themselves in a radicalness that never extended to sectarianism.
It would really have been impossible to experience a process this rich, this problem-fraught, to have been 
touched so profoundly by the climate of accelerated change, to have shared in such animated, lively 
discussion in the "culture circles" in which educators often had to beg the peasants to stop, since they 
had already gone on practically the whole night, without all of this later winning explication in this or that 
theoretical position of mine in the book that, at the time, was not even a project.
I was impressed, when I heard about it in evaluation meetings, or when I was actually present, by the 
intensity of the peasants' involvement when they were analyzing their local and national reality. It took 
them what seemed like forever to spill everything that was on their minds. It was as if the "culture of 
silence" was suddenly shattered, and they had discovered not only that they could speak, but that their 
critical discourse upon the world, their world, was a way of remaking that world It was if they had begun to 
perceive that the development of their language, which occurred in the course of their analysis of their 
reality, finally showed them that the lovelier world to which they aspired was being announced, somehow 
anticipated, in their imagination. It was not a matter of idealism. Imagination and conjecture about a 
different world than the one of oppression, are as necessary to the praxis of historical "subjects" (agents) 
in the process of transforming reality as it necessarily belongs to human toil that the worker or artisan first 
have in his or her head a design, a "conjecture," of what he or she is about to make. Here is one of the 
tasks of democratic popular education, of a pedagogy of hope: that of enabling the popular classes to 
develop their language: not the authoritarian, sectarian gobbledygook of "educators," but their own 
language-which, emerging from and returning upon their reality sketches out the conjectures, the designs, 
the anticipations of their new world. Here is one of the central questions of popular education-that of 
language as a route to the invention of citizenship.
As Jacques Chonchol's consultant in the Institute for the Development of Animal Husbandry in the area of 
what was then called in Chile human promotion, I was able to extend my collaboration to the Ministry of 
Education, in cooperation with people working in adult literacy as well as to the Corporation for Agrarian 
Reform.
Quite a bit later, almost two years before we left Chile, I began to work as a consultant for these same 
organizations on the basis of my position in another; the Instituto de Capacitaci6n e Investigaci6n en 
Reforma Agraria (Institute for Ways and Means and Research in Agrarian Reform, or IC IRA), a joint 
organization of the United Nations and the Chilean government. I worked there for UNESCO, against the 
will and under the consistent niggardly protest of the Brazilian military government of the period.
And it was as consultant for the Institute for the Development of Animal Husbandry for the Ministry of 
Education, and for the Corporation for Agrarian Reform, that, as I traveled practically all over the country 
always in the company of young Chileans, who were mostly progressives, I listened to peasants and 
discussed with them various aspects of their concrete reality. I urged upon agronomists and agricultural 
technologists a political, pedagogical, democratic understanding of their practice. I debated general 
problems of educational policy with the educators of the cities and towns I visited.
I still have in my memory today as fresh as ever; snatches of discourses by peasants and expressions of 
their legitimate desires for the betterment of their world, for a finer; less-ugly world, a world whose "edges" 
would be less "rough," in which it would be possible to love-Guevara's dream, too.
I shall never forget what a UN sociologist, an excellent intellectual and no less excellent a person, a 
Dutchman who wore a red beard, told me after we had assisted, all enthusiastic and full of confidence in 
the working class, at a two hour discussion on their eagerness for the establishment of agrarian reform by 
the government (still the Christian Democrats) in a remote corner of Chile. The peasants had been 
discussing their right to the land, their right to the freedom to produce, to raise crops and livestock, to live 
decently to be. They had defended their right to be respected as persons and as workers who were 
creators of wealth, and they had demanded their right of access to culture and knowledge. It is in this 
direction that those historico-social conditions intersected in which the pedagogy of the oppressed could 
take root-and this time I am not referring to the book I wrote-which, in turn, is here being matched by or 
prolonged into, a needed pedagogy of hope.
With the meeting over; as we were leaving the wagon shed where it had been held, my Dutch friend with 
the red beard put his hand on my shoulder and said choosing his phrases carefully and speaking with 
conviction: "It's been worth four days of wandering through these corners of Chile, to hear what we heard 
tonight." And he added, good-humoredly "These peasants know more than we do."
I think it is important, at this point, to call attention to something I have emphasized in Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed: the relationship prevailing between political lucidity in a reading of the world, and the various 
levels of engagement in the process of mobilization and organization for the struggle-for the defense of 
rights, for laying claim to justice.
Progressive educators have to be on the alert where this datum is concerned, in their work of popular 
education, since not only the content, but the various manners in which one approaches the
content, stand in direct relation with the levels of struggle referred to above.
It is one thing to work with popular groups, and experience the way in which those peasants operated that 
night, and something else again to work with popular groups who have not yet managed to see the 
oppressor "outside."
This datum continues valid today. The neoliberal discourses, chock-full of "modernity" do not have 
sufficient force to do away with social classes and decree the nonexistence of differing interests among 
them, any more than they have the strength to make away with the conflicts and struggle between them.
It happens that struggle is a historical and social category Therefore it has historicity. It changes from one 
space-time to another space-time. The fact of the struggle does not militate against the possibility of 
pacts, agreements between the antagonistic parties. In other words, agreements and accords are part of 
the struggle, as a historical, and not metaphysical, category.
There are historical moments in which the survival of the social whole, which is in the interest of all the 
social classes, imposes upon those classes the necessity of understanding one another-which does not 
mean that we are experiencing a new age devoid of social classes and of conflicts.
The four-and-one-half years that I lived in Chile, then, were years of a profound learning process. It was 
the first time, with the exception of a brief visit to Bolivia, that I had had the experience of distancing 
myself geographically with its epistemological consequences, from Brazil. Hence the importance of those 
four-and-one-half years.
Sometimes, on long automobile trips, with stops in cities along the way-Santiago to Puerto Mont, 
Santiago to Arica-I gave myself over to the quest for myself, refreshing my memory when it came to 
Brazil, about what I had done here, with other persons, mistakes made, the verbal incontinence that few 
intellectuals of the Left had escaped and to which many today still devote themselves, and through which 
they reveal a terrible ignorance of the role of language in history.
"Agrarian reform, like it or lump it!" "Either this congress votes laws in the people's interests or we'll close 
it."
Actually all of this verbal incontinence, this explosion of verbiage has no connection, none whatever; with 
a correct, authentic progressive position. It has no connection with a correct understanding of struggle as 
political, historical practice. It is quite true, as well, that all of this volubility, precisely because it is not 
done in a vacuum, ends by generating consequences that retard needed changes even more. At times, 
however; the irresponsible chatter also generates a discovery of the fact that verbal restraint is an 
indispensable virtue for those who devote themselves to the dream of a better world-a world in which 
women and men meet in a process of ongoing liberation.
Basically I sought to reunderstand the fabrics, the facts, the deeds in which I had been wrapped and 
enveloped. Chilean reality, in its difference from our own, helped me to a better understanding of my 
experiences, and the latter; reseen, helped me to understand what was happening and could be 
happening in Chile.
I traversed a great part of that country on trips on which I really learned a great deal Side by side with 
Chilean educators, I learned by helping administer training courses for persons proposing to work at the 
grass roots in agrarian reform projects, those who would work with the peasants on the fundamental 
problem of the reading of the word, always preceded by a reading of the world. The reading and writing of 
the word would always imply a more critical rereading of the world as a "route" to the "rewriting"-the 
transformation-of that world. Hence the hope that necessarily steeps Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Hence 
also the need, in literacy projects conducted in a progressive perspective, for a comprehension of 
language, and of its role, to which we have referred, in the achievement of citizenship.
It was by attempting to inculcate a maximal respect for the cultural differences with which I had to 
struggle, one of them being language-in which I made an effort to express myself, as best I could, with 
clarity-that I learned so much of reality and learned it with Chileans.
Respect for cultural differences, respect for the context to which one has come, a criticism of "cultural 
invasion," of sectarianism, and a defense of radicalness, of which I speak in Pedagogy of the Oppressed-
all of this was something that, having begun to be part of my experience years before in Brazil, whose 
knowledge I had brought with me into exile, in the memory contained within my own self, was intensely 
rigorously experienced by me in my years in Chile.
These elements of knowledge, which had been critically constituted in me since the inauguration of SESI, 
were consolidated in Chilean practice, and in the theoretical reflection I made upon that practice-in 
enlightening readings that made me laugh for joy almost like a teenager; at finding in them a theoretical 
explanation of my practice, or the confirmation of the theoretical understanding that I had had of my 
practice. Santiago, to mention just the team of Brazilians living there, sometimes de jure-in exile-
sometimes just de facto, unquestionably provided us with a rich opportunity. Christian Democracy which 
spoke of itself as a "revolution in freedom," attracted countless intellectuals, student and union leaders, 
and groups of leftist political leaders from all over Latin America. Santiago, especially had become a 
place, or grand context of theory-of-practice, in which those who arrived from other corners of Latin 
America would discuss, with Chileans and foreigners living there, both what was going on in Chile and 
what was going on in their own countries.
Latin America was effervescent in Santiago. Cubans were there, threatened as much as ever by the 
reactionary forces that, all filled with themselves, spoke of the death of socialism. The Cubans showed 
that changes could be made. There were the guerrilla theories, the "focus theory" the extraordinary 
charismatic personality of Camilo Torres-in whom no dichotomy existed between transcendentality and 
worldliness, history and metahistory-liberation theology was there (so soon to provoke fear, trembling, 
and rage), Guevara's capacity for love was there, as in the line he wrote to Carlos Guijano, as sincere as 
it was arresting: "Let me tell you, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the genuine revolutionary is 
animated by feelings of love. It is impossible to imagine an authentic revolutionary without this quality. "
In May 1968 came the student movements in the outside world, rebellious, libertarian. There was 
Marcuse, with his influence on youth. In China, Mao Tse-tung and the cultural revolution.
Santiago had become almost a kind of "bedroom community"~ for intellectuals, for politicians of the most 
varied persuasions. In this sense, perhaps Santiago was, in itself, at that time, the best center of 
"learning" and knowledge in Latin America. We learned of analyses, reactions, and criticisms by 
Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Mexicans, Bolivians, Argentinians, Paraguayans, Brazilians, 
Chileans, and Europeans-analyses ranging from an almost unrestricted acceptance of Christian 
Democracy to its total rejection. There were sectarian, intolerant criticisms, but also open, radical 
criticisms in the sense that I advocate.
Some of my companions in exile and I learned not only from encounters with many of the Latin 
Americans I have mentioned who passed through Santiago, but from the excitement of a "knowledge of 
living experience," from the dreams, from the clarity, from the doubts, from the ingenuousness, from the 
"cunning" of the Chilean worker more rural than urban, in my case.
I remember now a visit I made, with a Chilean companion, to an agrarian reform project some hours' 
distance from Santiago. A number of evening "culture circles" were in operation there, and we had come 
to follow the process of the reading of the word and rereading of the world In the second or third circle we 
visited, I felt a strong desire to try a dialogue with a group of peasants. Generally I avoided this because 
of the language difficulty. I was afraid my language gaffes might prejudice the smooth functioning of the 
work. That evening I decided to lay this concern aside, and, asking permission from the educator 
coordinating the discussion, I asked the group whether they were willing to have a conversation with me.
They accepted, and we began a lively dialogue, with questions and replies on both sides-promptly 
followed, however; by a disconcerting silence.
I too remained silent. In the silence, I remembered earlier experiences, in the Brazilian Northeast, and I 
guessed what was going to happen. I knew and expected that, suddenly one of them, breaking the 
silence, would speak in his or her name and that of his or her companions. I even knew the tenor of that 
discourse. And so my own waiting, in the silence, must have been less painful than it was ~r them to 
listen to the silence.
"Excuse us, sir;" said one of them, " . . . excuse us for talking. You're the one who should have been 
talking, sir. You know things, sir. We don't."
How many times I have heard this statement in Pernambuco, and not only in the rural zones, but even in 
Recife. And it was at the price of having to hear statements like that that I learned that, for the progressive 
educator; there is no other route than to seize the educands' "moment" and begin with their "here" and 
"now"-but as a stepping-stone to getting beyond, critically their naivete. It will do no harm to repeat that a 
respect for the peasants' ingenuousness, without ironical smiles or malicious questions, does not mean 
that the educator must accommodate to their level of reading of the world.
What would have been meaningless would have been for me to "fill' the silence of the group of peasants 
with my words, thus reinforcing the ideology that they had just enunciated. What I had to do was to begin 
with the acceptance of something said in the discourse of the peasant and make a problem of it for them, 
and thereby bring them once more to dialogue.
On the other hand, it would have been likewise meaningless after having heard what the peasant said, 
begging pardon on behalf of the group for having spoken, when I was the one who knew how to do that, 
because I "knew"-if I had given them a lecture, with doctoral airs, on the "ideology of power and the power 
of ideology."
Purely parenthetically I cannot resist-at a moment like this, as I relive Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and 
speak of cases like this one that I have experienced, the experience of which has given me theoretical 
foundations for not only advocating, but experiencing respect for the popular groups in my work as an 
educator-I cannot resist expressing my regret over a certain type of criticism in which I am pointed to as 
an "elitist." Or; at the opposite pole, where I am sketched as a "populist.
The far-off years of my experiences in SESI, the years of my intense learning process with fishers, with 
peasants and urban laborers, among the hillocks and ravines of Recife, had vaccinated me, as it were, 
against an elitist arrogance. My experience has taught me that educands need to be addressed as such; 
but to address them as educands implies a recognition of oneself, the educator; as one of two agents 
here, each capable of knowing and each wishing to know, and each working with the other for an 
understanding of the object of cognition. Thus, teaching and learning are moments in a larger process-
that of knowing, of cognizing, which implies recognizing. At bottom, what I mean is that the educand really 
becomes an educand when and to the extent that he or she knows, or comes to know, content, 
cognoscible objects, and not in the measure that the educator is depositing in the educand a description 
of the objects or content.
Educands recognize themselves as such by cognizing objects-discovering that they are capable of 
knowing, as they assist at the immersion of significates, in which process they also become critical 
"significators." Rather than being educands because of some reason or other; educands need to become 
educands by assuming themselves, taking themselves as cognizing subjects, and not as an object upon 
which the discourse of the educator impinges. Herein lies, in the last analysis, the great political 
importance of the teaching act. It is this, among other elements, that distinguishes a progressive educator 
from his or her reactionary colleague.
"Ml right," I said, in response to the peasant's intervention. "Let's say I know and you don't. Still, I'd like to 
try a game with you that, to work right, will require our full effort and attention. I'm going to draw a line 
down the middle of this chalkboard, and I'm going to write down on this side the goals I score against you, 
and on this other side the ones you score against me. The game will consist in asking each other 
questions. If the person asked doesn't know the answer; the person who asked the question scores a 
goal I'll start the game by asking you a question."
At this point, precisely because I had seized the group's "moment," the climate was more lively than when 
we had begun, before the silence.
First question:
"What is the Socratic maieutic?"
General guffawing. Score one for me.
"Now it's your turn to ask me a question," I said.
There was some whispering, and one of them tossed out the question:
"What's a contour curve?"
I couldn't answer. I marked down one to one.
"What importance does Hegel have in Marx's thought?" Two to one.
"What's soil liming?" Two to two.
"What's an intransitive verb?" Three to two.
"What's a contour curve got to do with erosion?" Three to three.
"What's epistemology?" Four to three.
"What's green fertilizer?" Four to four.
And so on, until we got to ten to ten.
As I said good-bye, I made a suggestion. "Let's think about this evening. You had begun to have a fine 
discussion with me. Then you were silent, and said that only I could talk because I was the only one who 
knew anything. Then we played a knowledge game and we tied ten to ten. I knew ten things you didn't, 
and you knew ten things I didn't. Let's think about this."
On the way back home I recalled the first experience I had had, long before, in the Zona da Mata of 
Pernambuco, like the one I had just had here.
After a few moments of good discussion with a group of peasants, silence fell on us and enveloped us all 
What one of them had said then, in Portuguese, was the same thing as I had heard tonight in Spanish-a 
literal translation of what the Chilean peasant had said this evening.
"Fine," I had told them. "I know. You don't. But why do I know and you don't?"
Accepting his statement, I prepared the ground for my intervention. A vivacious sparkle in them all. 
Suddenly curiosity was kindled. The answer was not long in coming.
"You know because you're a doctor; sir; and we're not."
"Right, I'm a doctor and you're not. But why am I a doctor and you're not?"
"Because you've gone to school, you've read things, studied things, and we haven't."
"And why have I been to school?"
"Because your dad could send you to school Ours couldn't."
"And why couldn't your parents send you to school?"
"Because they were peasants like us."
"And what is 'being a peasant'?"
"It's not having an education. . . not owning anything. . .working from sun to sun. . . having no rights. . . 
having no hope."
"And why doesn't a peasant have any of this?"
"The will of God."
"And who is God?"
"The Father of us all"
"And who is a father here this evening?"
almost all raised their hands, and said they were.
I looked around the group without saying anything. Then I picked out one of them and asked him, "How 
many children do you have?"
"Three."
"Would you be willing to sacrifice two of them, and make them suffer so that the other one could go to 
school, and have a good life, in Recife? Could you love your children that way?"
"No!"
"Well, if you," I said, "a person of flesh and bones, could not commit an injustice like that-how could God 
commit it? Could God really be the cause of these things?"
A different kind of silence. Completely different from the first. A silence in which something began to be 
shared. Then:
"No. God isn't the cause of all this. It's the boss!" Perhaps for the first time, those peasants were making 
an effort to get beyond the relationship that I called, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that of the 
"adherence" of the oppressed to the oppressor; in order to "step back' from the oppressor; and localize 
the oppressor "outside" themselves, as Fanon would say.
From that point of departure, we could have gotten to an understanding of the role of the "boss," in the 
context of a certain socioeconomic, political system-gotten to an understanding of the social relations of 
production, gotten to an understanding of class interests, and so on and so on.
What would have been completely senseless would have been if, after the silence that had so brusquely 
interrupted our dialogue, I had given a traditional speech, crammed with empty intolerant slogans.


CHAPTER
2

Today at more than twenty-five years' distance from those mornings, those evenings, those nights of 
seeing, hearing,
all but touching with my hands sectarian certitudes that precluded other certitudes, that denied doubts, 
that asserted a truth possessed by certain groups calling themselves revolutionary I reassert, as is 
incumbent upon a pedagogy of hope, the position taken up and argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed 
against sectarianisms, which always eviscerate, as well as the position I maintain there in defense of a 
critical radicalism.
The preponderant climate with the factions of the Left was actually one of sectarianism, which, along with 
rejecting history as opportunity generates and proclaims a kind of "liberation fatalism." Socialism is on its 
way. . . necessarily. Carried to its ultimate consequences, then, an understanding of history as "liberation 
fatalism" prescinds from the struggle, from an engagement in the creation of democratic socialism as a 
job to do in history. Thus, it conjures away the ethic of struggle and the fineness of the striving. I believe, 
or rather I am convinced, that we have never needed radical positions, in the sense of the radicalness I 
advocate in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as we need them today. We need them if we are to get beyond, 
on the one hand, sectarianisms founding themselves on universal, exclusive truths; and on the other, 
"pragmatic" accommodations to the facts, as if the facts had turned immutable. Each faction would have 
its immutability to work with-the former; or modern positions, just as the latter, or modernistic ones. 
Instead, let us be postmodern: radical and utopian. Progressive.
The last period of my time in Chile-to be precise, the period during which I worked in the Institute for 
Ways and Means and Research in Agrarian Reform (ICIRA), from the beginning of my third year in the 
country onward-was one of the most productive moments of my experience in exile. In the first place, I 
came to this organization only after having already acquired a certain visceral familiarity with the culture 
of the country the habits of its peoples, and with the rifts in political ideology within Christian Democracy 
already clear. Then too, my activity in ICIRA was contemporaneous with the first denunciations lodged 
against me in and by the more radically rightist sectors of that party. These elements accused me of 
things I had never done nor ever would do. I always find that one of the ethical and political duties of 
someone in exile resides in respect for the host country.
Although the condition of exile surely did not transform me into a neutral intellectual, neither did it ever 
afford me the right to interfere in the party politics of the country. I am not even inclined to go into the 
facts surrounding the accusations against me, as the latter could easily be demolished by their utter 
inconsistency How-ever upon being informed of the existence of the first rumor; I took the decision to 
write out in advance the texts of the talks I would give on the subjects on which I was to speak in the 
training groups. Along with becoming accustomed to writing them out, I got into the habit of discussing 
them, every time I could, with two great friends I worked with in the ICIRA, Marcela Gajardo, a Chilean, 
today researcher and professor at the Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciencias Sociais, and sociologist 
Jose' Luiz Fiori, a Brazilian, today a professor at Rio de Janeiro University.
The hours we spent together; discussing discoveries, and not just my talks, talking over our doubts, 
wondering together; challenging ourselves, recommending readings, being surprised, being fearful, 
exerted such a spell on us that, nearly always, the time of day came when our conversation was the only 
one to be heard in the building. Everyone else had left the office, and there we were, trying to get a better 
understanding of what was behind a peasant's reply to a challenge with which he had been presented in 
a culture circle.
With them I discussed various things I wanted to say in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I was still 
composing. There is no denying the good that both of their friendships did me, and the contributions that 
their shrewd intellects added to my mind and my work.
At bottom, in the last analysis, my time at the Instituto de Desarrollo Agropecuaria, the Ministry of 
Education, and the Corporation for Agrarian Reform; my serious work with their technological teams, 
through which I found it possible to have a rich experience almost throughout the country, with countless 
peasant communities, interviewing their leaders; even simply the opportunity to have experienced a life in 
the historical atmosphere of the time-all of this explained to me the doubts I had had that had led to my 
exile, deepened my hypotheses, assured me of my positions.
It was in the intense experience I was having in Chilean society-my own experience of their experience, 
which always sent me back in my mind to my Brazilian experience, whose vivid memory I had brought 
with me into exile-that I wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in 1967 and 1968. Now that that composition 
has "come of age," I take it once more in hand. To look at it again, rethink it, restate it. And to do some 
new saying, as well: the text in which it is now being said again has its own word to say as well, and one 
that, in the same manner; speaks for itself, by speaking of hope.
In more or less a conversational tone-in "conversation" not only with the reader now seeking a living 
contact with Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the first time, but with those who have read it fifteen, twenty 
years ago, and who, at this moment, as they read this reflection on it, are preparing to read it again-I 
should like to focus in on a few points through which I might be able to make a better restatement of what 
I have already said.
I think that an interesting point to begin with might be the actual creation, or procreation, of the book. 
Pedagogy of the Oppressed enwraps the procreation of ideas of course, but thereby it enfolds as well the 
moment or the moments of activity in which those ideas were generated, together with the moments at 
which they were put down on paper. Indeed, ideas that need to be argued to-which imply other ideas, 
ideas that have come to be restated in various "corners" of texts to which authors feel obliged to return 
from time to time-become generated throughout these authors' practice, within the greater social practice 
of which the ideas are a part. It is in this sense that I have spoken of the memories that I brought into 
exile, of which some had been formed in childhood long ago, but are still of genuine importance today for 
an understanding of my understanding or of my reading of the world. This is also the reason why I have 
spoken of the exercise to which I always devoted myself in exile-wherever the "loan context  was, the 
context in which, as I gained experience in it, I thought and rethought my relations with and in the original 
context. But as ideas, positions, to be made explicit and explained, to be argued in the text, have first 
seen the light of day in the action-reflection-action in which we are en-wrapped (as we are touched by 
memories of happenings in old fabrics), thus the moment of writing becomes as a time of creation and re-
creation, as well, of the ideas with which we come to our desk. The time of writing, let me say again, is 
always preceded by one of speaking of the ideas that will be set down on paper. At least this was the way 
it was with me. Speaking of ideas before writing about them, in conversations with friends, in seminars, in 
talks, was also a way not only of testing them, but of re-creating them, of giving them second birth. Their 
edges could be better honed down when the thinking managed to reach written form through another 
discipline, another set of systematics. In this sense, to write is also to redo what has been thought out in 
various moments of our practice, of our relations-with; to write is as much to re-create, as much to restate 
what has been said previously during the time of our activity just as much as serious reading requires of 
the one doing it a rethinking of the already-thought, a rewriting of the written, and a rereading, as well, of 
what before being turned into the writing of the author was some reading of his or her own.
I spent a year or more talking about aspects of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I spoke with friends that 
visited me, I discussed it in seminars and courses. One day my daughter Madalena came to me to 
delicately call my attention to something. She suggested greater restraint on my eagerness to talk about 
the as-yet-unwritten Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I did not have the strength to abide by her suggestion. I 
continued, passionately to speak of the book as if-and as a matter of fact this was true-I were learning to 
write it.
I shall never be able to forget something about this oral period of Pedagogy of the Oppressed-an entire 
address in New York, my first, in 1967.
It was my first visit to the United States, where I had been invited by Father Joseph Fitzpatrick and 
Monsignor Robert Fox, who is now deceased
It was an exceedingly important visit for me, especially because of what I was able to observe in places 
where blacks and Puerto Ricans were discriminated against. I visited these places by invitation of 
educators working with Fox. There was a great deal of similarity between what they were doing in New 
York and what I was doing in Brazil. The first one to notice the resemblances had been Ivan Illich, who 
then proposed to Fitzpatrick and Fox that they bring me to New York.
In my trips and visits to the various centers the two priests maintained in areas of New York, I was able to 
verify seeing them all over again, behaviors expressive of the "wiliness" or "cunning" demanded of the 
oppressed if they are to survive. I saw and heard things in New York that were "translations"-not just 
linguistic ones, of course, but emotional ones, as well of much of what I had heard in Brazil, and was 
hearing more recently in Chile. The "why" of the behavior was the same. Only the form-what I might call 
"trappings"-and the content, were different.
There is a case, among these, which I report in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that it will do no harm to 
take another look at here, somewhat more extensively
In one home, with blacks and Puerto Ricans participating in the group, the educator had a large blowup of 
a photograph carried in and placed on the arms of a chair. It was a picture of a street-as it happened, of 
the very street that ran in front of the building in which we sat. In the photo, a near mountain of garbage 
could be seen, piled on a corner of the street.
"What do you see in this picture?" asked the educator.
A silence ensued, as it always did, no matter where we were or to whom we addressed the question. 
Those present were somehow failing to recognize their own street. Then, emphatically with false 
assurance, one of them came out with: "A street in Latin America."
"But the street signs are in English," the educator now pointed out.
Another silence, broken by another attempt to hide the painful, wounding, sorrowful truth. "Maybe a street 
in Latin America and we're teaching' English down there. Or maybe a street in Africa."
"Why not New York?"
"Because were in the United States and we don't have nothing' like that here!" And the person speaking 
pointed to the photograph.
After another; longer silence, a third participant spoke up, and said, with difficulty, and painfully as if he 
were relieving himself of some terrible burden: "Might as well admit ifs our street. Where we live."
As I recall that session now, so much like so many others I shared in, as I remember how the educands 
defended themselves in the analysis or "reading" of the codification (the photo), trying to hide the truth, I 
hear again in my mind something I once heard from Erich Fromm, in Cuernavaca, Mexico: "This kind of 
educational practice," he told me, in our first meeting, arranged by Ivan Illich, at which I had told him how I 
thought of and practiced education, "This kind of educational practice is a kind of historico-cultural, 
political psychoanalysis."
He was dead right, and his words were confirmed by the statements of the educands, one by one, to the 
approving nods of the others: "Ifs a street in Latin America . . . we're there and we're teaching English," or 
"Ifs a street in Africa," or "We're the US, we can't have anything like that." Two nights before, I had 
assisted at another meeting, with another group, likewise of Puerto Ricans and blacks, where the 
discussion was about another fine photo. It was a montage, representing "slices" of New York-more than 
half-a-dozen shots, one atop the other; representing socioeconomic conditions in various areas of the city 
in ascending order of "decency" starting with the bottom "slice."
Once the group had understood what the photo was supposed to represent, the educator asked the 
group what part of New York in the montage was where they lived. Realistically the group might have 
actually lived in the conditions in the second shot from the bottom in the picture, at best.
There was silence, whispering, and opinion swapping. Finally came the group's decision. Their place third 
from the top!
On the way back to the hotel, sitting next to the educator; who was driving, I continued silently to think 
about the meetings, of the basic need individuals exposed to such situations have-until they accept 
themselves as individuals and as a class, until they commit themselves, until they struggle-their need to 
deny the humiliating truth, a truth that humiliates them precisely because they introject the dominant 
ideology that sketches them as incompetent and guilty the authors of their own failures. And yet the 
actual "why" of those figures is to be found in the perversity of the system.
I thought as well of the moment, several evenings before, when (with Carmen Hunter as simultaneotis 
translator one of the most competent North American educators, even in those early days) I spoke for the 
first time at length about Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I was to finalize only in the following year. 
And I compared the reactions of the educands on those two nights with those of some of the audience of 
my talk educators and community organizers.
"Fear of freedom" had marked the reactions in all three meetings. Flight from the real, an attempt to 
"tame" the real through concealment of the truth.
At this very moment, as I recall these happenings and reactions of times so long ago, something else, 
something very much like them, comes to mind: an event at which I likewise assisted It was another case 
of an expression of the assimilation and interiorization of the dominant ideology by the dominated 
themselves-I might even say as I put it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, an expression of the oppressor 
'inhabiting'' and dominating the half-defeated body and soul of the oppressed one.
We were in the midst of the campaign for the governorship of the State of Sao Paulo, in 1982. Luiz 
Innacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, was the Workers Party candidate, and, as a party activist, I attended some 
of the meetings in outlying districts of the city. I did not attend party assemblies, as I do not regard myself 
as sufficiently competent. These were meetings at recreational clubs or neighborhood associations. At 
one of these meetings, a workman, some forty years of age, stood up and criticized Lula and his 
candidacy. His main argument was that he could never vote for somebody just like himself. "Lula's the 
same as me," said the workman, with conviction. "He don't know how to talk. He don't talk the right kind 6 
Portuguese to be in government. Lula ain't had no education. He ain't, like they say 'well-read' Look," he 
went on "-if Lula won, what would we do? Think how embarrassed peopled be, if the queen 6 England 
was t' come here again. Lula's wife ain't got no rose garden to receive the queen! She can't be no First 
Lady!"
In New York, the concealing discourse, which looks for some other geography in which to deposit the 
garbage, which was making it too plain how discriminated against the audience was, was a discourse of 
self-rejection. In the same way it was a discourse of self-rejection, rejection of his class, that the workman 
had pronounced who refused to look at himself or to see in Lula, because he was a worker himself, a 
protest against the world that rejected him.
In the most recent presidential campaign, the Northeasterner who worked with us in our house voted, in 
the first two rounds, for Collor. She told us, with absolute assurance, that she "didn't have anybody to vote 
for" who would have been a candidate favorable to her own interests.
Basically she must have agreed with many of the elitists of this country: persons who refer to themselves 
as menas gente cannot imagine any of their own number being president. To say menas gente, lesser 
people," means, when all is said and done, that you are menos gente, "less people" in the adverbial 
sense of "less": less completely people.
I went back to Chile. Presently I found myself in a new phase of the gestation process of Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed.
I began to use index cards, titling and numbering each one according to what was written on it. I always 
carried some paper in my pockets, or even a little notepad. Whenever an idea occurred to me-regardless 
of where I was, in a bus, on the street, in a restaurant, alone, with someone-I jotted down the idea. 
Sometimes it was just a phrase.
Then in the evening, back home, after dinner; I worked on the idea or ideas I had jotted down, expanding 
them on two, three, or more file cards. Then I put a title on each card, and a number; in ascending order.
I started working on ideas I culled from reading I had done, as well. There were times when a statement 
by an author would make a light go on in my head. It would spark a series of reflections in
me that might never have been a concern of the author of the book I was reading.
Other times, what one or another author would say would lead me to reflections in the same area as that 
with which he or she was dealing, but reinforcing some position of mine and making it more clear to me.
In many cases, the sort of thing that challenged me, and about which I wrote on file cards, were 
statements, or questions, either of peasants whom I was interviewing and whom I had heard discussing 
codification's in culture circles, or of agricultural technologists, agronomists, or other educators, whom I 
made sure I kept meeting in training seminars. What kept me from ever looking down on or simply 
belittling "common sense" may have been the always-respectful contact I had with it, ever since the 
faraway days of my experience in the Brazilian Northeast, coupled with the never-failing certitude within 
me that, in order to get beyond "common sense, you had to use it. Just as it is unacceptable to advocate 
an educational practice that is satisfied with rotating on the axis of "common sense, so neither is an 
educational practice acceptable that sets at naught the "knowledge of living experience" and simply starts 
out with the educator's systematic cognition.
The educator needs to know that his or her "here" and "now" are nearly always the educands' "there" and 
"then." Even though the educator's dream is not only to render his or her "here-and-now" accessible to 
educands, but to get beyond their own "here-and-now" with them, or to understand and rejoice that 
educands have gotten beyond their "here" so that this dream is realized, she or he must begin with the 
educands' "here," and not with her or his own. At the very least, the educator must keep account of the 
existence of his or her educands' "here" and respect it. Let me put it this way: you never get there by 
starting from there, you get there by starting from some here. This means, ultimately that the educator 
must not be ignorant of, underestimate, or reject any of the "knowledge of living experience" with which 
educands come to school
I shall return to this subject again, as it appears to me to be central to a discussion of Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed, and not only of the book by that name, but of the actual pedagogy of the oppressed itself.
Then came the time when I began, occasionally to practically "play" with the file cards. I would calmly 
read a series of them, say ten of them, and I would try to discover; first, whether there were any holes to 
fill in their thematic sequence; and second, whether a careful reading of them called forth in me or gave 
rise to the emergence of new topics. Basically, my "idea cards" turned into seed cards for other ideas, 
other topics.
Sometimes-suppose, between card number eight and card number nine-I would sense a vacuum, and 
begin to work on it. Then I would renumber the cards accordingly so that they would still be in numerical 
sequence.
As I recall, now, all of this mechanical work-and it has its nostalgia for me-I admit that it would have saved 
time and effort, and been more efficient, if I had used a computer from time to time, even a little one like 
the one that my wife and I have today
But thanks to that mechanical effort, once I began to write the text-in July 1967, taking the opportunity of 
a vacation period-in two weeks of work, sometimes working all night long, I wrote the first three chapters 
of Pedagogy. When that much had been typed up-which I thought would be the whole book, just those 
first three chapters-I turned it over to my great friend, whom I shall never forget, and with whom I always 
learned so much-Ernani Maria Fiori, to write the preface. When Fiori gave me back his excellent essay in 
December 1967, I took a few hours at home that night to read through the entire manuscript, from his 
preface to the last word of chapter 3, which I then thought of as the last.
The year before, in 1966, Josue de Castro, owner of a vanity as lush as that of Gilberto Freyre, but, like 
the latter; a vanity that disturbed no one, had spent some days in Santiago. One evening when he had no 
official tasks to perform, we sat together; conversing freely in one of Santiago's lovely parks, Josue, 
Almino Affonso, and  Talking about what he was writing, Josue' suddenly told us: "I'll suggest a good 
habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book, or article, let it 'marinate' for three months, four months, 
in a drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always change 'something,"' concluded 
Josue, with his hand on the shoulder of one of us.
I took the risk of following his suggestion. The very night of the day Fiori gave me his text, after reading it 
and the three chapters of Pedagogy, I locked everything away in my "box" in my study and left it there for 
two months.
I cannot deny the curiosity and even more, a certain yearning, that the text provoked in me as it lay there, 
locked away "all, all alone." Sometimes I had a powerful urge to take it out and read it again; but I thought 
it would be interesting, too, to take a certain distance from it. So I restrained myself.
There in my study one night a little more than two months later; I sat down with it a few hours to get 
reacquainted. It was almost as if I had found an old friend again. In fact, I read it with great emotion-slowly 
without even wanting to finish it very soon-the whole text, page by page. (It would have been hard to 
imagine, just then, that twenty-four years later I would be doing much the same thing, several times, not 
with the manuscript, but with the book itself-to rethink it, to restate it.)
I did not make many important changes in it. But I did make the basic discovery that the text was 
unfinished It needed one more chapter. And so it came about that I wrote the fourth and last chapter; 
taking advantage, now of lunch period in training seminars in the vicinity of Santiago, now in hotels in 
cities or towns further away where I also went to give seminars. After dinner; I would fairly race to my 
room, and seclude myself there the whole night through, writing chapter 4, till early the next day when I 
would begin the work of my seminar once again. I remember now that the only text that could take me 
away from my writing work was Antonio Callad6s excellent Quarup.
In those days I was still able to read while the car was lapping up the miles. Thus it was that, on one of 
my trips to the South of Chile, after taking the opportunity of highway time to spend some hours with my 
book, I finished reading Quarup in the hotel, filled with emotion, as the first light dawned Then I wrote a 
letter to Callado, which I was too shy ever to mail I am sorry to say that the letter was lost, along with 
letters written to me, when we moved to the United States in 1969.
The gusto with which I gave myself to that exercise, the task of fairly spending myself in writing and 
thinking (mutually inseparable in the creation or the production of the text), compensated for the lack of 
sleep with which I returned from trips. I no longer remember the names of the hotels where I wrote parts 
of the fourth chapter of Pedagogy, but I still retain the sensation of pleasure with which I read, before 
going to sleep, the last pages I had written.
At home, in Santiago, not rare were the times when, so involved in my work, and gratified by it, I was 
surprised by the morning sun stealing into the little room which I had converted into a library at 500 
Alcides de Gasperi Street, Apoquindo, Santiago, and lighting it up-sun and birds, morning, new day. Then 
I would look out the window, at the little garden Elza had made, the rosebushes she had planted
I do not know whether the house would still be there, and still be painted blue, as it was at the time.
I should not be able to rethink Pedagogy of the Oppressed without thinking upon, without remembering, 
some of the places where I wrote it, but especially one of them, the house where I lived and was happy 
and from where I left Chile, carrying longings, suffering at having to leave but hopeful of being able to 
respond to the challenges that were waiting for me.
With the fourth chapter finally ready; I looked at the first three again and touched them up, then I handed 
over the whole text to a typist. Next I made several copies, which I distributed among Chilean friends, and 
some Brazilian companions in exile and other friends.
In the acknowledgments, when the first Brazilian edition appeared-which only became possible after the 
book had already been translated into English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German, due to the climate 
of repression in which we lived-I left out the names of some friends, as well as those of some of my 
companions in exile.
No one failed to come running, with his or her encouragement, plus concrete suggestions-for the 
clarification of a point here, for a stylistic improvement there, and so on.
Now, so many years later; and even more convinced how doggedly we must struggle lest ever again, in 
the name of freedom, democracy ethics, and respect for the common welfare, we should again have to 
experience the denial of freedom, outrage to democracy deception, and contempt for the common weal, 
such as the coup d'etat imposed on us on April 1, 1964 (which picturesquely dubbed itself a revolution), I 
should like to list the names of all who inspired me with their word, and express to them my sincere 
thanks: Marcela Gajardo, Jacques Chonchol, Jorge Mellado, Juan Carlos Poblete, Raul Velozo, and Pelli, 
Chileans. Paulo de Tarso and Plinio Sampaio, Almino Affonso, Maria Edy Flavio Toledo, Wilson Cantoni, 
Ernani Fiori, Joao Zacariotti, Jose' Luiz Fiori, and Antonio Romanelli, Brazilians.
There is another connection between Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the perverse, antidemocratic 
climate of the military regime that came crashing down on us with such remarkable, hateful fury that I 
should like to bring out.
Even though I knew that the book could not be published here-have its first edition in Portuguese, the 
language in which it was originally written-I did want to get the typescript into the hands of Fernando 
Gasparian, director of Paz e Terra, which was going to publish it. The question that arose was how to see 
to the safety not only of the material, but also, and above all, of the courier. At this point, in the early 
1970s, we were already staying in Geneva.
I had mentioned the problem to Swiss scholars, professors at the University of Geneva. One of them, 
who, besides being a professor; was a national councilor; Jean Ziegler; as he was about to leave for Rio 
de Janeiro on an academic assignment, offered to carry the typescript to Brazil personally. I accepted his 
offer; since, with his diplomatic passport plus his Swiss nationality; nothing untoward would befall him. He 
would get through the passport check and customs without questions or searches.
A few days later; Gasparian discreetly acknowledged receipt of the material, asking me to await more 
favorable times for its publication. I sent the text toward the end of 1970, when the book was already in its 
first edition in English, or early in 1971. Its publication in Brazil, its first printing, was possible only in 1975. 
Meanwhile a countless number of Brazilians had read it, in foreign4anguage editions arriving here by 
strokes of shrewdness and courage. I came to know, at this time, a young North American sister who 
worked in the Northeast, who said that, on her return trips from the United States, she had gotten into 
Brazil several times with a number of copies of Pedagogy, covered in book jackets with religious titles on 
them. In this fashion, her friends, who worked in the outlying districts of Northeastern cities, were able to 
read the book and discuss it even before its publication in Portuguese.
At about the same time, I received in Geneva, hand-delivered, an excellent letter from a group of workers 
in Sao Paulo, of whom I have unfortunately since lost track. They had studied, together; a copy of the 
original that someone had typed out. It is a pity that so little is left of my Geneva archives. Among many a 
good thing that was lost, was that letter. But I remember how they ended it. "Paul," they said, or words to 
this effect, "keep on writing-but next time lay it on a little thicker when you come to those scholarly types 
that come to visit as if they had revolutionary truth by the taiL You know, the ones that come looking for 
us to teach us that we're oppressed and exploited and to tell us what to do."
Some time after Ziegler; that excellent intellectual, had gotten the typescript into Gasparian's hands, he, 
Ziegler; published a book that immediately became a best-seller-La Suisse au-dessus de tout soupcon 
(Switzerland: above all suspicion), in which he disclosed Swiss secrets that were altogether too touchy 
especially in the area of the hidden bank accounts of a certain type of Third World folk. Ziegler wounded 
innumerable interests with his book, and has suffered reprisals that have been by no means easy to deal 
with. Recently Jean Ziegler is being put under pressure, and major restrictions, due to the publication of 
another best-seller of his, in which he discusses the "laundering" of drug-traffic money. As a national 
councilor; or deputy; from the canton of Geneva, Ziegler recently had his parliamentary immunity 
restricted by his colleagues, on the allegation that he writes as a professor; a scholar; an academician, 
while that his parliamentary immunity pertains only to his activity in the Parliament. And so he can be put 
on trial for what he has written as a scholar.
In view of all of this, and mindful of the unselfish favor he performed in serving as the courier of the 
forbidden book's typescript, I should like to make public here my solidarity with the great intellectual in 
whom I see no separation between the professor-the serious, competent scholar-and the watchful 
representative of the Swiss people, the national councilor.
Finally I owe one last word of acknowledgment, and posthumous gratitude: to Elza, for all she did in 
making Pedagogy a reality.
I find that one of the best things that any of us, man or woman, can experience in life, is a loving 
tenderness in our relationships, however bespattered, from time to time, those relationships may be with 
a lack of compassion, which simply prove that we are, after all, "ordinary people."
This is the experience I had with Elza, on account of which, when you get right down to it, I became 
predisposed for a re-creation of myself under the equally unselfish care of another woman who, speaking 
to me and of us, writes in her excellent book of having to come to me to "reinvent things lost-" hers, with 
the death of Ran , her first spouse, and mine, with that of Elza-"life, with love. "
All during the time I spoke about Pedagogy of the Oppressed with other persons and with Elza, Elza was 
always an attentive and critical listener; and became my first, likewise critical, reader when I began the 
phase of actual writing of the text.
Very early in the morning, she would read the pages I had been writing until daybreak, and had left 
arranged on the table.
Sometimes she was unable to contain herself. She would wake me up and say, with humor; "I hope this 
book won't send us into exile!"
I am happy to be able to record this sense of gratitude with the freedom with which I do so, without fear of 
being accused of being sentimental
My concern, in this hopeful work, as I have demonstrated to this point, is to stir my memory and challenge 
it, like an excavation in time, so that I can show you the actual process of my reflection, my pedagogical 
thought and its development, of which the book is a step-just as my pedagogical thinking is actually 
developing right in this Pedagogy of Hope, as I discuss the hope with which I wrote Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed.
Hence my attempt to discover-in old weaving 5, facts, and deeds of childhood, youth, and maturity; in my 
experience with others, within the events, within the instants in the general, dynamic process not only 
Pedagogy of the Oppressed as it was being gestated, but my life itself. Indeed, it is in the interplay of the 
fabrics of which life forms a part that life itself wins meaning. And Pedagogy of the Oppressed is an 
important moment of my life-my life of which the book expresses a certain "instant"-demanding of me at 
the same time that I demonstrate the necessary consistency with what I have said in it.
Among the responsibilities that, for me, writing sets before me, not to say imposes on me, there is one 
that I always take on. Already experiencing, as I write, the consistency obtaining between my written word 
and my speech and my deeds, past and present, I likewise come to experience the importance of 
intensifying this consistency all through the course of my existence. Consistency however; is not 
paralysis. In the process of acting-and-thinking, speaking-and-writing, I can change position. Thus my 
consistency still as necessary as ever; comes about within new parameters. What is impossible for me is 
inconsistency even recognizing the impossibility of an absolute consistency At bottom, this quality or this 
virtue, consistency requires of us an insertion into a permanent process of search, demands of us 
patience and humility; which are also virtues, in our dealings with others. And at times, for any number of 
reasons, we find ourselves lacking these latter virtues, which are fundamental for the exercise of another: 
consistency.
In this phase of the resumption of Pedagogy, I shall be seizing on certain particular aspects of the book, 
whether or not they have provoked criticism down through the years, with a view to explaining myself 
better; clarifying angles, asserting and reasserting positions.
Let me say a little something about language: about my taste for metaphor; and about the sexist mark I 
left on Pedagogy of the Oppressed-just as, before that, on Educa~o como pratica da liberdade. It seems 
to me not only important, but necessary that I now do this.
I shall begin precisely with the sexist language that marks the whole book, and of my debt to countless 
North American women, from various parts of the United States, who wrote to me, from late in 1970 into 
early 1971, a few months after the first edition of my book had come out in New York. It was if they had 
gotten together to send me their critical letters, which came into my hands in Geneva over the course of 
three months, almost uninterruptedly.
Invariably in their comments on the book, which seemed to them to contain a great deal of good, and to 
constitute a contribution to their struggle, they also spoke of what they regarded as a large contradiction. 
In discussing oppression and liberation, in criticizing, with just indignation, oppressive structures, they 
said, I used sexist, and therefore discriminatory language, in which women had no place. Almost all of 
those who wrote to me cited one or other passage in the book, like the one, for example, that I myself 
now excerpt from the Brazilian edition: "In this fashion, as their consciousness of the situation grows in 
acuity men 'appropriate' that situation to themselves as a historical reality that is thereby subject to 
transformation by them [masc.]." Why not by women too?
I remember reading the first two or three letters I received as if it were yesterday and how, under the 
impact of my conditioning by an authoritarian, sexist, ideology I reacted. And it is important to bring out 
that, here at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, I had already intensely experienced the political 
struggle, had spent five or six years of exile, had read a world of serious works, but in reading the first 
criticisms that I received, still said to myself, or repeated, what I had been taught in my boyhood: "Now, 
when I say men, that of course includes 'women."' And why are men not included when we say "Women 
are determined to change the world"? No man would feel included in any discourse by any speaker; or in 
the text of any author; who would write, "Women are determined to change the world." After all, men 
certainly dislike it when I say to a nearly all-female audience, but with two or three men in it, "Todas voces 
deveriam . .." You should all fem.] . . ."). For the men present, either I do not know Portuguese syntax, or 
else I am trying to "have some fun" at their expense. The one thing they cannot think is that they are 
included in my discourse. How can one explain, except on an ideological basis, the rule according to 
which, in a room filled with dozens of women and only one man, I have to say "Eles todos sao 
trabalhadores e dedicados" ("You are all workers,
and dedicated ones"), with all the variable terminations in the masculine gender? Indeed it is not a 
grammatical problem, but an ideological one.
It is in this sense that I have explicitly stated at the beginning of these comments my debt to those 
women, whose letters I have unfortunately lost as well, for having made me see how much ideology 
resides in language.
I then wrote to all of them, one by one, acknowledging their letters and thanking them for the fine help 
they had given me.
From that date forward, I have always referred to "woman and man, or "human beings." I had rather write 
an unattractive line sometimes than omit to express my rejection of sexist language.
Now, in writing this Pedagogy of Hope, in which I rethink the soul and body of Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed, I shall beg the publishing houses to get over their own sexist language. And let it not be said 
that this is a minor problem. It is a major problem. Let it not be said that, since the basic thing is to change 
a wicked world, recreating it in terms of making it less perverse, the debate over sexist language is 
therefore of minor importance, especially since women do not constitute a social class.
Discrimination against women, expressed and committed by sexist discourse, and enfleshed in concrete 
practices, is a colonial way of treating them, and therefore incompatible with any progressive position, 
regardless of whether the person taking the position be a woman or a man.
The rejection of a sexist ideology which necessarily involves the re-creation of language, is part of the 
possible dream of a change of the world. By that very fact, in writing or speaking a language no longer 
colonial, I do so not in order to please women or displease men, but in order to be consistent with my 
option for that less-wicked world of which I have spoken before-just as I did not write the book to which I 
now return in order to seem like a nice person to the oppressed as individuals and as a class, nor simply 
to beat over the head the oppressors as individuals or as a class. I wrote the book as a political task I 
understood I had to perform.
It is not pure idealism, let it be further observed, to refuse to await a radical change in the world in order to 
begin to insist on a change in language. Changing language is part of the process of
changing the world The relationship, language-thought-world, is a dialectical, processual, contradictory 
relationship. Obviously the defeat of a sexist discourse, like the defeat of any authoritarian discourse, 
requires of us, or imposes upon us the necessity; that, concomitantly with the new, democratic, 
antidiscriminatory discourse, we engage ourselves in democratic practices, as well
What would be intolerable would be simply pronouncing the democratic, antidiscriminatory discourse and 
maintaining a colonial practice.
An important aspect, under the heading of language, which I should like to emphasize is how much I have 
always been impressed, in my experiences with urban and rural workers, with their metaphorical 
language: the wealth of symbolism in their speech. Almost in parentheses, I should call attention to the 
abundant bibliography at the moment, of works by linguists and philosophers of language on metaphor 
and its use in literature and science. Here, however; my concern is to stress how much popular speech, 
and the absence of rough edges therein (there's a metaphor), has always gripped and excited me. From 
my adolescence, in Jaboatao, my ears began to open to the sonority of popular speech, to which would 
later accrue, when I was with SESI, a growing understanding of popular semantics and, necessarily 
syntax.
My long conversations with the fishers in their hemp shelters on the Pontas de Pedra coast, in 
Pernambuco, like my dialogues with peasants and urban laborers, in the gullies and hillocks of Recife, not 
only familiarized me with their language, but sharpened my sensitivity to the lovely way they spoke of 
themselves-no matter that it be of their sorrows-and the world. Lovely and sure.
One of the best examples of this loveliness and this sureness is to be found in the discourse of a peasant 
of Minas Gerais in dialogue with professor and anthropologist Carlos Brandao, in one of his many field-
research expeditions. Branda~o recorded a long conversation with Antonio Cicero de Soza, or Cico, part 
of which he used as the preface of the book he was editing 
Now this genlman comes up and asks me, "Cico, what is edjication?" Yup. Good. What do I think? I say 
Well, see, you say "edjication"; an' I say "edjication." Same word, right? Pronunciation, I mean. Its just 
one word: "edjication." But then I ask to the gen'l'man: Is it the same thing? Is it the same thing that folks 
talk about when they say that word? There I say: No. I say to the gen'l'man like this: Nope, it's not. I don't 
think so.
Edjication-when the gen'rman comes up and says "edjication," he's comm' from his world. The same. . . 
'nother. When ifs me talkin' I come from 'nother place, 'nother world. I come from down in the holler where 
poor folks lives, like people say. Whafre you comparin' it with, whafs this word comin' up with? With 
school, ain't it? With that fine perfesser, good clothes, smart, new book, spiff notebook, fountain pen, all 
real special, everything just like it should be-from his world, with schoolin', what changes folks into a 
doctor. Fact? I think so, but I think a ways off, since I never seen that roun' here.
I once proposed to a group of students of a graduate course at PUC-S~2 that they read Cico's text and 
analyze it. Make a critical analysis.
We spent four three-hour sessions reading Cico's four pages.
His thematics, which we gathered as we got into the text, as we unwrapped it, was rich and manifold, and 
the time just flew by. We never took breaks when we were discussing Cico-we found the work that 
exciting.
Something I should like very much to have been able to do, and that, though it was not done, I still have 
hope of doing some day is to have discussed or come to discuss this text of Cico with rural and! or urban 
workers. The experience would consist in starting with a reading of Cicos discourse, and joining my own 
to it. First, we would take Cico's text and talk about it. Then it would be my turn to teach any of a number 
of elements of content about which, like Cico, if possibly with lesser power of analysis than his, the 
workers would have a "knowledge of living experience." But the basic thing would be for me to challenge 
them to go more deeply into the meaning of the themes or content and thereby learn them.
I cannot resist repeating: teaching is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the 
teacher to passive, docile students. Nor can I resist repeating that starting out with the
educands' knowledge does not mean circling around this knowledge ad infinitum. Starting out means 
setting off down the road, getting going, shifting from one point to another; not sticking, or staying. I have 
never said, as it is sometimes suggested or said that I have said, that we ought to flutter spellbound 
around the knowledge of the educands like moths around a lamp bulb.
Starting with the "knowledge of experience had" in order to get beyond it is not staying in that knowledge.
Some years ago I visited a capital of the Northeast at the invitation of educators working in rural areas of 
the state. They wanted to have me with them for the three days they were going to devote to an appraisal 
of their work with various groups of peasants. At one moment in one of the sessions, the question of 
language came up-the matter of the sonorous lilt of the peasants' speech, the wealth of their symbolism, 
and so on. One of those present then recounted the following.
For almost two months, he said, he had wanted to be in on the Sunday meetings a group of peasants 
regularly held after the nine 6clock Sunday Mass. He had mentioned his wish to the leader; but the green 
light never seemed to come.
One day he was finally invited But as the meeting opened, and as he was being introduced to the group, 
he had to listen to the following speech by the leader.
"Today we have a new member; and he's not a peasant. He's a well-read person. I talked about this with 
you at our last meeting, whether he could come or not.
Then the leader gave the group a bit of personal data about the new member. Finally; he turned to the 
candidate himself, and, fixing him intently; said: "We have somet