Who is Paulo Freire from Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education: A Biographical Introduction and what is their importance?

Paulo Freire advocated liberation pedagogy in Brazil when the country had vast differences of wealth, poverty, abundance, malnutrition and underdevelopment made worse by modernization that benefited the rich. Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was born in 1921 in the port city of Recife to an officer in the military police. Paulo became Catholic following his mother's lead and attended private school at age 8. He liked his teachers but disliked his early schooling based on memory rather than understanding. He attended Recife's Faculty of Law and passed the bar in 1944 but devoted himself to education instead. He became a welfare official and was awarded a doctorate in 1959, when he launched a literacy mission for the poor. He was expelled from Brazil for subversive activities, after which he spent five years in Chile and became visiting professor at Harvard in 1969. He returned to Brazil in 1979 with a more liberal government in place. His literacy work to the impoverished was called liberation pedagogy that refers to power of education to liberate oppressed people from marginalized conditions. Goal is the creation of a new social order that opens self and society to leading a richer, fuller life. Freire took schooling from classrooms to open real possibilities to the actual world.