In the fall of 1969, a Brazilian Marxist educator named Paulo Freire arrived on the Harvard University campus with a suitcase full of clothes and a Portuguese-language manuscript of a book he called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He arrived as an exile, forced out of Brazil following a right-wing military coup, and soon became enmeshed in radical political circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the weather turned cold, Freire grew a beard and adopted the appearance of a guru—the Third World theoretician with the keys to subversion.
During Freire’s short stay at Harvard, where he served as a research associate at the Center for Studies in Education and Development, Freire and his colleagues translated the manuscript of Pedagogy of the Oppressed into English, which, over the subsequent decades, helped transform American education. The book sold more than one million copies1 and is now the third-most-cited work in the social sciences.2 It has become a foundational text in nearly all graduate schools of education and teacher training programs. Although Freire only spent six months in Cambridge, he departed as a prophet of the intellectual Left and identified the education system as a vehicle for the revolution.
As a book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a Rorschach test. At one level, it presents a simple, even uncontroversial lesson: children must be invested in their own education and engage in creative problem-solving, rather than be subjected to rote learning and top-down control. This insight is packaged in American schools today as “critical pedagogy” and “culturally responsive teaching,” with Freire playing the role of the kindly, bearded teacher who wants to cultivate the spirit of social justice.
But underneath the surface, there is a deeper, troubling current that runs all the way through Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire bases his pedagogy on the political belief that capitalism has enslaved the population and “anesthetized” the world’s oppressed with a series of myths: “the myth that the oppressive order is a ‘free society’”; “the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish”; “the myth that this order respects human rights”; “the myth of private property as fundamental to personal human development”; “the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites.”3
Freire stands ready to offer the solution. Through his work, he reveals a vision of an ideal education system that deconstructs society’s myths, unmasks its oppressors, and inspires students to “revolutionary consciousness.”4 Freire’s language—liberation, revolution, struggle—is not merely symbolic. The most-cited political figures in the Pedagogy are Lenin, Mao, Guevara, and Castro, all of whom mobilized violence to advance their political cause.
The revolution might begin in the classroom, Freire told his students, but it would end in the streets. He worshipped the decisive action of the Third World militants and saw the education system as the ideal recruiting ground for a cultural revolution that would overturn the world. “‘Cultural revolution’ takes the total society to be reconstructed,” he thundered. “As the cultural revolution deepens [critical consciousness] in the creative praxis of the new society, people will begin to perceive why mythical remnants of the old society survive in the new. And they will then be able to free themselves more rapidly of these specters.”5
Paulo Freire imagined himself an oracle: a man who had demythologized the oppressions of his time. But he was, in truth, a man who would unleash unimaginable cruelties in the name of justice. “The ideal lies in punishing the perverse—the killers of popular leadership, of country folk, and forest people—here and now,” he thundered.6
The smiling, bearded teacher was not so much a guru as a fanatic. Even as the Marxist-Leninist regimes revealed themselves as purveyors of great barbarism, he refused to abandon the faith. He clung to his idols—Che, Lenin, Mao—even as their own societies repudiated them. But despite the failure of his ideology everywhere it was attempted, his influence took root in an unlikely place: the United States of America.
That is where he would become a prophet.
* * *
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was born in the fall of 1921 in the city of Recife, Brazil. The city, which was once the first slave port in the Americas, had remained poor, backward, and crowded onto the Atlantic shoreline. As other regions of Brazil began to industrialize, the Northeast remained stagnant: the economy persisted in the colonial mold, with sprawling farms and a primitive railroad system that supplied sugarcane to the world market.7 At the time of Freire’s youth, the region had the lowest per capita income in Latin America and some of the highest rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, and tropical disease.8
The Freire family was suspended precariously between the middle and lower classes. Paulo’s father, Joaquin, was an officer in the military police, but was forced into early retirement due to a heart condition and never managed to find steady work again. He eventually passed away when Paulo was a teenager, plunging the family into dire circumstances. Paulo’s mother maintained some of the trappings of the middle class—clothes, neckties, a piano in the living room—but the children often went without food.9
Freire traced the origins of his political thought to the deprivations of his childhood. “My lived experiences as a child and as a man took place socially within the history of a dependent society in whose terrible dramatic nature I participated early on,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I should highlight that it was this terrible nature of society that fostered my increasing radicality.”10 As an example of his political education, Freire recounts a story in which he and a group of friends, worn down and hungry, wandered into an orchard to steal papayas, only to be caught by the landowner. “I must have turned pale from surprise and shock. I did not know what to do with my shaking hands, from which the papaya fell to the ground,” Freire wrote. “At that time, stealing the fruit was necessary but the man gave me a moralistic sermon that had little to do with my hunger.”11
This symbolic world of Freire’s childhood—part recollection, part allegory—provided the human ground for the philosophy that emerged in Freire’s adulthood. In a real sense, Freire’s feelings of betrayal and outrage at the conditions in Recife were justified. The former colonial territory was structured into rigid hierarchies and countenanced immense suffering of the poor. The latifundia system, in which large landowners sent the mass of laborers into the sugar fields, still bore the stigma of feudalism. The peasants were bound to the land and worked to the bone; they were bound to the land and, as illiterates, barred from voting in democratic elections. They lived at the mercy of domestic plantation owners and foreign commodities markets, which had always been brutal masters.12
Politics provided a path out of this nightmare.
After finishing high school, Freire went to the University of Recife, earned a law degree, and joined the Social Service of Industry (SESI), where he started working as an educator for the region’s poorest citizens. He began his career as a modernist and a reformist, believing that “progressive education” could bring literacy to the masses and incorporate their interests into the governing system. As a young man, he traveled through the city’s slums and rural backwaters preaching the value of a “democratic education” and the “work of man with man.”13
At SESI, he conceptualized the practice of “culture circles,” in which participants engaged in an active dialogue with their instructors, seeking to understand their historical-political position as well as the mechanics of literacy. This was the period of Freire the humanist, driven by the conviction that “human beings, by making and remaking things and transforming the world, can transcend the situation in which their state of being is almost a state of non-being, and go on to a state of being, in search of becoming more fully human.”14
Over time, however, Freire became disillusioned with this model. He came to see his work at SESI as serving the “interests of the dominant class,” and criticized the institution for abandoning its utopian purpose and devolving into “a paternalistic, bureaucratic service.”15 The institute, he believed, presented the values of humanism, but was ultimately designed “to ease class conflict and stop the development of a political and militant consciousness among workers.” It was an attempt by the industrial powers to “domesticate” the men who populated the sugar fields and the factory floors.16
As a reaction, Freire sought out a new theory that would meet the radical nature of class conflict with an equally radical political philosophy. He immersed himself in the Marxist literature, which provided the utopian impulse and the vision of a classless society, as well the means for achieving it: revolution. Freire described this as a spiritual conversion that brought together Christian humanism with dialectical Marxism. “It was the woods in Recife, refuge of slaves, and the ravines where the oppressed of Brazil live coupled with my love for Christ and hope that He is the light, that led me to Marx,” he wrote. “The tragic reality of the ravines, woods, and marshes led me to Marx.”17
Freire’s conversion was fast and deep. By the mid-1960s, as Marxist revolutionaries had begun to seize power in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Freire began to think of education as a means for driving and supporting the “cultural revolution” that provided the intellectual basis for transforming the political, economic, and social order in the Third World. “Revolution is always cultural,” he wrote, “whether it be in the phase of denouncing an oppressive society and proclaiming the advent of a just society, or in the phase of the new society inaugurated by the revolution.”18
During this period, the reformist pedagogy of Freire’s early years turned into a Marxist pedagogy aimed at nothing less than the complete transformation of society. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he describes this new method: “The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.”19
How should one interpret this new pedagogical approach? First, it must be recognized that, throughout his life, Freire played a double game: he used abstractions such as “liberation” that could be interpreted through the lens of humanism or radicalism. “Liberation” meant a personal process of attaining conscientização, or “critical consciousness,” that frees the pupil from illiteracy, helplessness, and ignorance. But “liberation” also meant a revolutionary struggle to overthrow a given political regime and install Marxism-Leninism as the new state ideology.
In order to soften his image, Freire’s disciples have consistently emphasized his humanist mission, portraying the man as a wise, peaceful presence. In a typical portrayal, Freire translator Donaldo Macedo and Freire’s second wife, Ana Maria Araujo-Freire, declared that Freire “never spoke, nor was he even an advocate, of violence or of the taking of power through the force of arms. . . . He fought and had been fighting for a more just and less perverse society, a truly democratic one, one where there are no repressors against the oppressed, where all can have a voice and a chance.”20
But this softening, which attempts to make Freire’s work palatable to modern audiences, is preposterous.
Freire explicitly rationalized violence in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and defended violent revolutionaries such as Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Mao,21 who left behind them a trail of up to 90 million dead.22 “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized,” Freire wrote. “Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human.”23
Even after the atrocities of Freire’s heroes were revealed, he continued to idealize them. In 1974, he called China’s Cultural Revolution—which led to the death, starvation, and persecution of millions of innocent people—“the most genial solution of the century.”24 In 1985, he described Che Guevara as the incarnation of “the authentic revolutionary utopia” who “justified guerrilla warfare as an introduction to freedom.”25 Revolutionary violence, Freire maintained, was best understood as “an act of love.”26
The Brazilian military, however, took a different interpretation. In the 1960s, Freire had expanded his “culture circles” throughout Northeast Brazil and led a pilot program in Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte, with the support of left-wing president João Goulart, who had laid out an ambitious policy agenda called the Basic Reforms, including higher taxes on business, large-scale land redistribution, the extension of the franchise to illiterates, and investments in national education. Goulart attended a ceremony at one of Freire’s culture circles in Angicos, during which Freire proudly announced that the movement was creating “a people who decides, a people that is rising up, a people that has begun to become aware of its destiny and has begun to take part in the Brazilian historical process irreversibly.”27
That same year, Goulart hired Freire to build out the federal government’s national literacy campaign,28 which, together with the Basic Reforms, they hoped would finally usher in the “Brazilian Revolution.”29 The Brazilian Communist Party put its full weight behind the effort, convinced that Goulart’s “structural reforms of society” would provide “a link in the revolutionary process which will culminate with the advent and the construction of socialism.”30
With such rhetoric, Goulart, Freire, and the communists put themselves directly in the crosshairs of the Brazilian military and the American presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1963, American diplomats and Brazilian allies furiously exchanged messages warning of “an extremely grave process of institutional subversion” that “might require removal of threat through military action.” One message described Goulart and Freire’s literacy program as a “brainwashing” campaign that used the same techniques as the Chinese communists.31
In the spring of 1964, the Brazilian military pulled the trigger. The generals toppled Goulart, shut down the literacy programs, and jailed suspected communists and subversives. Military officials denounced the national literacy campaign as an attempt to “communize” Brazil and create “five million electoral robots for the populist parties, including the communists.”
Within months, the military had dismantled the structure of Freire’s campaign. Soldiers seized troves of documents, detained cultural circle leaders, and even set fire to some school buildings. The new regime accused Freire and his comrades of leading “the most subtle and efficient work of subversion yet realized in Brazil,” with the ultimate aim of transforming the “illiterate masses into an instrument of the peaceful conquest of power by the Communist Party.”32 By summer, the government had arrested Freire in his home and transferred him into a prison cell in Recife. “Another one for the cage,” said the security officer.33
For the next seventy days, interrogators questioned Freire about his techniques of subversion, support for communist revolution, relationship with Cuba and the USSR, and an alleged weapons cache discovered in the headquarters of Freire’s popular culture movement.34 Freire denied the charges, dismissing them as “hallucinations.”35
Finally, the military released him. Freire, fearing that he might be arrested again, sought asylum in the Bolivian embassy and, from there, went into exile.
For the next sixteen years, Freire would wander around the globe, from the United States to Latin America to postcolonial Africa, seeking to turn his theories of liberation into practice. The coup, Freire said, had radicalized him.36 The mild-mannered humanist from Recife had transformed into the pedagogist for the global revolution. He had abandoned hope in reformist politics and, by the time he went into exile, had become a committed Marxist, believing that only the total transformation of society would be sufficient to end the dehumanization of the laboring classes.
Although his project had failed in Brazil, he believed it could succeed in the Third World nations where the communists had secured power, such as Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and a small country on the west coast of Africa: Guinea-Bissau.
* * *
The coastline of Guinea-Bissau cuts into the Atlantic Ocean like a set of shark’s teeth. The series of islands, bays, and inlets once provided protected sailing for Portuguese colonial ships, which used Guinea-Bissau as a transit center for sending African slaves to their territories in Brazil. The Portuguese had dominated Guinea-Bissau for nearly five centuries, although they never ventured far into the territory, limiting their colonial enterprise to the coastline and small urban centers along the shores. Until late in the twentieth century, most of the nation’s interior was untouched by the modern world.
When Freire arrived in the capital city, Bissau, in 1975, the colonial backwater had just won its independence from Portugal and had established a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist regime under the leadership of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, or PAIGC. Freire arrived at the invitation of President Luís Cabral, half brother of and successor to revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral, who had been assassinated at the tail end of the war. Luís Cabral and his state education commissioner, Mario Cabral, had invited Freire into the country with the hope that the Brazilian could use his pedagogical techniques to help carry the government from the stage of military revolution, which Freire described as “the taking of power,” to cultural revolution, which he described as “inaugurating a society of women and men in the process of continuing liberation.”37
The task of educating the masses was a daunting one. The country had just emerged from a violent decade-long war and only 10 percent of Guinea-Bissauans were literate.38
In a series of letters to education minister Mario Cabral, Freire lavished praise on the guerrilla fighters and conceptualized the national education program as an extension of the revolution, combining his literacy campaign with central economic planning, collectivist agricultural policy, and political indoctrination. “If the society, in remaking itself, moves toward socialism,” Freire wrote, “it needs, on the one hand, to organize its methods of production with this objective in mind, and, on the other, to structure its education in close relation to production, both from the point of view of the understanding of the productive process and also the technical training of the learners.”39
The new regime, Freire argued, must “see literacy education of adults as a political act, coherent with the principles of PAIGC,”40 which, in accordance with Marxist doctrine, would lead to a society in which “economic productivity will increase to the degree that the political consciousness of the popular masses becomes clarified.”41
In practice, Freire and his colleagues designed a literacy campaign that can only be described as propaganda. The content of the program focused on eight “national themes,” including production, defense, education, culture, and labor, weaving in Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary slogans and lessons aimed at instilling “political clarity” among the masses. Freire imagined transforming teachers into a cadre of “militants” through “a permanent revision of [their] ideological class conditioning.”42
Following the revolutionary theory of Amílcar Cabral, Freire argued that the nation’s assimilados, urban residents, and tiny bourgeoisie should commit “class suicide” and go to the farms in order to transcend the boundaries of city and countryside, mind and body, rich and poor.43 Freire’s ambition was not only to build a Marxist-Leninist society, but to create “the new man and the new woman.” He argued that Guinea-Bissau’s native population might be “illiterate, in the literal sense of the term,” but was “politically highly literate” because of their experience with the war of liberation.44
But Freire and the regime made a series of fatal mistakes. First, they based their entire political and cultural project on a set of economic ideas that was bound to fail. At the first Popular National Assembly after the nation achieved independence, the PAIGC abolished private property, nationalized all land, mandated collectivized agriculture through Village Committees, and decreed a state monopoly on basic goods through government-run People’s Stores.
The Black Scholar, one of the preeminent journals of black radicalism in the United States, described Guinea-Bissau’s program in a 1980 dispatch: “The leaders have chosen to base the economy on agriculture in which 86 percent of the population is engaged. The government is gradually introducing mechanized and diversified production in the traditional farming areas. It sees the key to economic progress through a collectivist system of some type. The small land holding peasants are encouraged to adopt the cooperative mode. State farms are operational wherever possible. . . . Experimental farms have been established by the state; some in the interior where large farms abandoned by the Portuguese had existed.”45
Second, despite Amílcar Cabral’s vision of a distinctly African Marxism predicated on the “the re-Africanization of minds,” the education ministers chose Portuguese as the national language of instruction.46 The decision was bewildering: they were adopting the language of the colonial power, but, more importantly, they were adopting a language that almost nobody in the country could understand. At the time, only 5 percent of Guinea-Bissauans could speak Portuguese; the rest of the country, meanwhile, spoke a mix of tribal and indigenous languages.47
Amílcar Cabral had dreamed of the revolution as a campaign to “mentally decolonize” the native population, but by selecting Portuguese as the national language, the regime extended the colonial language deeper into the country than ever before.48 And by inviting Freire, the regime layered in another irony: the educator arrived in Africa as a self-described liberator, but carried with him the tongue and the mind of a European—after all, he was the descendant of Portuguese settlers in the metropole’s most important colony.
Finally, Freire’s vision for Guinea-Bissau was modeled on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which would prove to be an economic and human disaster. As Freire explained in the memoir of his work in Guinea-Bissau, Pedagogy in Process, his model was the Dazhai agriculture commune in Shanxi Province, China, which Chairman Mao heralded in the “Learn from Dazhai” campaign as having perfected communist economic development, crop production, and mass education.
Although the Chinese Cultural Revolution was on the verge of collapse when Freire arrived in Guinea-Bissau, he still believed it was the key to the country’s future. “The new climate created by liberation enables the people to become involved in a literacy campaign and in agrarian reform,” he wrote. “A program linked to production that seeks to build such social incentives as cooperative work and concern for the common good places its faith in human beings. It has a critical, not ingenuous, belief in the ability of people to be remade in the process of reconstructing their society.” For Freire, Mao’s collective work program in Dazhai was proof that revolutionary Marxism had made possible “the dynamic of transforming reality,” which could be applied directly to the situation in Guinea-Bissau.49
There was one problem: despite Freire’s insistence that he could see through the “myths” of capitalist societies, he was seduced by the even more dangerous myths of communist societies.
Dazhai, in reality, was a disaster. Chairman Mao had forced the peasants through brutal work routines, laboring day and night to the point of exhaustion, and the government had fabricated the harvest numbers: the commune was not self-reliant, but received enormous subsidies from the state. Meanwhile, Dazhai’s great construction projects, leveling mountains down to the bedrock and filling ravines with earth, were economic sinkholes; none led to greater prosperity or agricultural productivity.50 As one scholar of the Dazhai campaign concluded: “Rarely has there been a historical moment in which political repression, misguided ideals, and an absolutist vision of priorities and correct methods coincided to achieve such concentrated attacks on nature, environmental destruction, and human suffering.”51
Freire should have known better. In 1975, when he arrived in Guinea-Bissau, China’s Cultural Revolution was less than a year away from total collapse—and Dazhai’s collective agricultural system would be officially repudiated shortly thereafter.52
But Freire was still under the spell of the Cultural Revolution. He ignored the horrors, brutalities, famines, slaughter, and mass deaths that had accumulated over the course of the revolution. He betrayed no skepticism of Dazhai’s propaganda campaign and fantastical slogans, such as “move the mountains to make farm fields” and “change the sky and alter the land.”53 Even in 1985, when the violence and destruction of the Chinese revolution were known to the world, Freire refused to acknowledge his errors. He continued to tout the “great merits” of the Cultural Revolution54 and praised Chairman Mao as a model of “tolerance,” “humility,” and “patience.”55
This blindness—the denial of the old myths and the certainty in the new ones—doomed the efforts in Guinea-Bissau.
In 1977, the country’s Third Party Congress enacted a national agricultural policy that was nearly identical to the old Soviet policy of “primitive socialist accumulation.”56 As a result, food production plummeted. Guinea-Bissau went from being a net exporter of rice to being dependent on foreign aid. Food shortages, hunger, smuggling, graft, and corruption were rampant. Freire’s national education program devolved into pure illusion.
When the Brazilian lectured to young educators at Guinea-Bissau’s Maxim Gorki Center for the Formation of Teachers, he insisted that any failure in education was a failure in politics. “Militancy teaches us that pedagogical problems are, first of all, political and ideological,” he said. “Therefore we insist increasingly, in the qualifying seminars, on analysis of national reality, on the political clarity of the educator, on the understanding of ideological conditioning, and on the perception of cultural differences. All this must begin long before discussion of literacy techniques and methods.”57
The results of Cabral’s economic program and Freire’s education program were identical: abject failure.
For years, Guinea-Bissau’s official newspaper, Nô Pintcha, tried to prop up Freire’s literacy campaign with optimistic headlines.58 But in the most comprehensive study of Freire’s program in Guinea-Bissau, scholar Linda Harasim discovered that, for all the fanfare, Freire’s project was utterly fruitless.59 According to official records, Guinea-Bissau’s Department of Adult Education found that, of the 26,000 participants in Freire’s program over three years, almost none had achieved basic literacy.60
The pedagogy, the codifications, the pamphlets, the teachers college, the mass mobilization, the call for class suicide—none of it taught the Guinea-Bissauans how to read. “The activities envisioned and eventually implemented were inappropriate, unrealistic, and beyond the capacities of the country,” Harasim concluded. “[Freire’s] strategy was more concerned with orchestrating the ‘class suicide’ of the [literacy teachers] than with such concrete tasks as teaching the population to read and write.”61
Freire concluded his work in Guinea-Bissau in 1977, leaving it, by almost any measure, worse off than when he arrived.
Over the next three decades, Guinea-Bissau ricocheted through a series of elections, coups, assassinations, and a civil war; the country’s failed collectivist economic policies gave way to scattershot reforms, then to the rule of the black market and recurring bouts of inflation.62 In 1990, Pope John Paul II visited Guinea-Bissau and prayed for the nation to move beyond violence and corruption. The pope encouraged then-president João Bernardo Vieira to reform the national curriculum, which, according to Vatican officials, was still shot through with Marxist propaganda. “I pray that educative programs enjoy full success, beginning with genuine literacy,” he said, encouraging Guinea-Bissauans to resist “all that would seek to crush the individual or cancel him in an anonymous collectivity by institutions, structures, or a system.”63
Today, Guinea-Bissau is a failed state. South American drug cartels use the islands along the nation’s coastline as a drug transit point, smuggling up to one thousand kilograms of cocaine into the territory each night. Guinea-Bissau’s sprawling and corrupt military leases airstrips and naval facilities to the cartels, which paper their way through the bureaucracy with drug dollars.64
Meanwhile, the population suffers. Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest nations on earth: nearly 70 percent of residents live on less than two dollars per day and large swaths of the population depend on foreign aid for basic survival.65 The territory is plagued by slavery, child labor, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and the torture of political opposition.66 And, despite the regime’s ambitions, Guinea-Bissau remains an illiterate society: 54 percent of adults cannot read, including 69 percent of all women.67
In retrospect, Freire had made a tragic mistake. He had identified a constellation of monsters—colonialism, capitalism, ignorance, oppression—but put too much faith in the revolution. In Guinea-Bissau, Freire and Cabral had followed their theory to its limits, expelling the colonial power, dismantling the market economy, and establishing the one-party state that would, through conscientização alone, “transform reality.”68 But after they vanquished the old constellation of monsters, they unleashed another one: violence, barbarism, precarity, and disillusionment.
The Portuguese, who had never extended their influence beyond the coastline, provided a convenient foil. But after their departure, the revolutionaries had to grapple with the complex tribal, economic, linguistic, and cultural realities in the country’s tangled interior. For this task, Freire’s theories proved insufficient. Wherever he went—Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guinea-Bissau—the system of colonialism gave way to a system of poverty, repression, illiteracy, mass murder, and civil war.
Yet, despite this string of failures, Freire’s image as the wise, peripatetic guru persevered. His practical work might have been a supreme disappointment—he enabled tyranny more than he taught literacy—but his theoretical project would soon be resurrected in an unlikely place: the United States of America.