“[…] Paulo Freire supplied another variation on the theme of liberation. This Sociologist, trained at the University of Recife, completed a remarkable phd thesis in 1959 on literacy in the north-east of Brazil. He began immediately thereafter on campaigning work to improve the educational level of the rural poor. […] On the arrival in power of the military in 1964, Freire was arrested and jailed for allegedly subversive activities. […] Freire’s first book was Educação Como Prática de Liberdade (1967, ‘Education as the Practice of Liberty’), in which he argued that for the liberation to have any meaning at all it needed to be rooted in educational practice. Liberation was , he argued, a state of mind that could be taught. He developed the argument at greater length in the bestselling Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Here, education Is described as traditionally a tool of oppression […] Freire’s liberatory solution was a process of conscientização  (‘consciousness-raising’) to reveal the location and nature of oppression. Freire’s work on liberation through education closely relates to Augusto Boal’s theatre work, best known through his Teatro do Oprimido (‘Theatre of the Oppressed’), a collection of essays written in exile between 1962 and 1973. In many ways it is a Theatrical equivalent of Freire’s work. Just as Freire sought to interrogate and break down the power relations between teacher and student, Boal sought to rethink the relationship between actor and audience in the theatre, replacing it with a situation in which all parties are fully engaged, both in effect ‘writing’ an ‘performing’; like Freire, liberation is achived through  a process that never achives an end, but is an end itself.”  

 

Richard J. Williams , Brazil, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2009; pp. 165-166