Paulo Freire, the Patron of Brazilian Educational Failure

In Brazil, children and teenagers know very little of what they should know: they have a poor command of the Portuguese language and lack basic math skills. Lack of learning is our biggest educational obstacle. Such precariousness is resistant and subsists despite fiscal and public investment issues. It's bad teaching when money is plentiful or scarce.

The roots of the precariousness of Brazilian education can be found in the training of our teachers. Long ago, university courses, public and private, were invaded by the most abject political demagoguery. In fact, higher-level pedagogical education has shied away from teaching young masters classroom techniques, methodologies based on scientific evidence and knowledge of how people learn. Furthermore, there are professors who also do not master the contents of their own subjects.

Pedagogy students graduate without knowing the fundamental elements of their future profession and many do not even enjoy serious and systematic professional internships. In Brazil, pedagogy was abandoned in favor of political discourse and training of militants. The greatest symbol of this type of education is the famous, much talked about and little read, Paulo Freire.

The theme is not new. Since his debut on the public and political scene, Paulo Freire has caused controversy and motivated countless Brazilian intellectuals to denounce his revolutionary tricks. In September 1963, for example, the newspaper Estado de São Paulo endorsed the devastating analysis of Dulce Salles Cunha Braga, at the time councilor in São Paulo, on the “literacy method” of the communist intellectual: “this method, in itself, presents serious gaps, being subject to fundamental criticism regarding its timeliness and efficiency. The most serious thing, however, is that according to the testimonies of people of unblemished integrity, the method in question has been a vehicle of Marxist indoctrination, under the pretext of literacy.” Professor Dulce was the first senator from São Paulo, councilor three times, and state deputy also three times.

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire's most famous book, is full of praise for Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Tse-Tung, Lenin and the communist revolutions. Freire ignores the blood of innocents shed by these tyrants and murderers, responsible for cowardly genocides and produces a socialist pamphlet with little or no pedagogy. Its objective, covered in a cloak of confused and disconnected words, is to lay the foundations of a socialist revolution in Brazil through the cultural subversion of students in favor of the old and refuted Marxist materialism.

He preaches in his winding book the students' revolt against the authority of the teacher and the family. The patron of Brazilian education made an effort, using crude and truncated language, to demonize the family and paternal authority: “parent-child relationships in homes reflect, in general, the objective-cultural conditions of the totality of which participate. And, if these are authoritarian, rigid, dominating conditions, they penetrate into homes that increase the climate of oppression”. Everything for him is oppression, exploitation, and domination.

From 1989 to 1991, Freire had the opportunity to put into practice his ideas copied from the Marxist theoretical tradition. He was São Paulo's secretary of education during Luiza Erundina's administration. The legacy of the idolized militant was the automatic promotion of students. Freire considered the teacher's authority to evaluate students as overwhelming. Liberation is to promote students even if they have not learned the programmed content satisfactorily. It is the perpetuation of the lack of quality in education.

We urgently need to promote a deep review in the training of our teachers. We will never be able to overcome our difficulties without introducing into higher education truly scientific pedagogies based on empirical evidence. We cannot just continue with left-handed politicization, which does so much harm to national education. We need more science and less cheap, mystifying ideology.

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