Paulo Freire

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire, was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of education. He was born on September 19, 1921. Freire enrolled at the University of Recife in 1943, the Faculty of Law, where he studied philosophy and psychology of language at the same time.
In 1961 he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 took the first opportunity to apply their theories in a meaningful way when they were taught to read and write to 300 workers in sugarcane plantations in such only 45 days.
In 1964 a military coup ended the project: Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile during five years for the Christian Democratic Movement for Agrarian Reform and the Organization for Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as practice of freedom. The book was well received, and was offered the post of visiting professor at Harvard University in 1969. The previous year, wrote his famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English and in Spanish in 1970. Due to the political conflict between the successive military dictatorships and authoritarian socialist Christian Freire, the book was not published in Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel of Brazil took control and began the process of cultural liberation.