AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We profile a remarkable new documentary about Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation.

In the early 1960s, Freire led an experiment in adult education in the northeastern Brazilian town of Angicos that helped hundreds of rural adults learn to read and write in just 40 hours.

Freire rejected rote memorisation, instead favouring culture circles, where students and educators drew on their own lives to learn vocabulary and develop critical consciousness.

But the experiment was abruptly halted in 1965, when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a US-backed coup. The literacy campaign was dismantled. Students burned their books out of fear of persecution. Paulo Freire himself was imprisoned and forced into exile for 16 years.

The new documentary, Reading the World, draws on rare archival footage of the 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students, educators who took part in the culture circles. This is the film’s trailer.

NEWSREEL: [translated] In Angicos, a small town of Rio Grande do Norte, next to an old railway station, a revolution has begun.

MARIA MIRANDA GOMES: [translated] Before the school came, I didn’t even know how to sign my name, because I had never gone to school.

LUZIA DE ANDRADE: [translated] No one cares about poor people who don’t know anything. They taught us that if we studied, we could be citizens.

PAULO ALVES DE SOUZA: [translated] Paulo Freire, for us, was a symbol of kindness in our lives. I had the seeds of education planted in my chest directly by him.

MARCOS GUERRA: [translated] At the time, Brazil was living through a period of great political fervoUr. There was a desire to change things, a desire to transform the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from Reading the World that features Paulo Freire himself, speaking in 1975.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] At that moment, the literacy students realise that transforming reality through their work, actions and reflections is a way to create and recreate the world.

And they take on the role of a transformer, not of an object.

AMY GOODMAN: The film Reading the World, or Lendo o Mundo, focuses on a time in Paulo Freire’s life before he wrote the famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It comes as Brazil prepares for its general election next month.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up for reelection. His challengers include Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now in prison for his role in the 2022 coup attempt. Lula and Paulo Freire were longtime allies.

For more, we’re joined by Catherine Murphy, co-director of Reading the World, which recently premiered here in New York and will air on PBS WORLD Channel on October 9. And we’re joined by Maria Luisa Mendonça, a consulting producer on the documentary, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! In fact, President Lula just met with the New York mayor, Mamdani, yesterday here in New York. Tell us about Lendo o Mundo. Tell us about this amazing documentary, Reading the World.

Reading The World                          Video: Democracy Now!

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, thank you so much for having us.

You know, Paulo Freire was one of the most influential educators of the past century and is still widely studied all around the world. But the studies often focus on his ideas, his philosophies, his books, and much less is known about his original praxis, the beginning, those early on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, grassroots-level experiences that Paulo Freire had in the years leading up to writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his other first books.

And that’s exactly what we ask in this film. We explore these years leading up to writing his first books. And we ask: Who were his closest collaborators? What was that collective that he was working with? And importantly, we ask: Who were the students?

How can we look at this experience through their eyes and through their words, their voices, and sort of see them as co-creators of this methodology that continues to make impacts around the world?

Brazil at the time was highly feudal and colonial. One percent of the population owned the vast majority of the arable land. In the northeast, 70 percent of people were illiterate, could not read and write. And if you couldn’t read and write, you could not vote. So, it was also prohibited to do any kind of rural union organising. So, these were these institutionalised, intersecting ways to keep the majority of people outside of any personal and political empowerment. And this was the Brazil that Freire and his collaborators were seeking to change.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria Luisa, could you talk — what was — what was revolutionary or unusual about Paulo Freire’s methods, his pedagogical methods?

MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: Yes, I think one of the most important points of his philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. So, when he started this group, teaching farmers, farm workers that sometimes didn’t even get paid with money — sometimes they just worked for food — in a very poor area, very remote area in the countryside in the northeast of Brazil, when they gathered together, they felt that they had knowledge.

So, the key point about Paulo Freire’s philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. And teaching is about exchanging knowledge, and it’s about seeing the world around you. So, teaching has — needs to have meaning, and learning needs to make sense for people from the concrete reality where they live.

And I think this is something that is very needed in all levels of education all over the world.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Catherine, as Brazil prepares for its elections this year, what does your film show so powerfully in the lessons of Paulo Freire that are necessary to keep alive today?

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, I think it’s important to understand that the demands of the grassroots movements in the early 1960s, when Paulo Freire was working, remain the demands of grassroots movements in Brazil today. For a more democratic and more just Brazil, with greater access to quality education, with expanded voting rights, with political representation through people and sectors of the society that have been historically excluded — women, Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous people — representing themselves and the country, the real Brazil, also advancing labor rights and labor relations, and, importantly, this land justice and land tenure issue, which is still such a huge problem in Brazil today.

So, these issues which were the core of the early 1960 movements are defining, at the core of the presidential debate now and what will be the future vision of the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: The 1964 coup, what happened to Paulo Freire?

CATHERINE MURPHY: So, Paulo Freire was arrested soon after the coup. He was taken to jail for 70 days and forced into exile, during which time he lived all over the world and started writing his books, and wrote his first books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and others.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this seminal work.

CATHERINE MURPHY: Yes. So, Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was really largely based on this Angicos experience and his first experiences in Brazil, looking at how to democratise education, to democratise the entire society.

And after he left Brazil, Pedagogy of the Oppressed circulated clandestinely in Brazil during the years of the dictatorship and circulated openly around the rest of the world.

But then, Paulo Freire also engaged with a number of adult education projects around the world during those two decades that he was out of Brazil, notably in Guinea-Bissau working with Mário Cabral, in Nicaragua working with Fernando Cardenal, and working with grassroots social justice educators all over the world, including in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with Paulo Freire in his own words from the film Reading the World.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] I said that we had to challenge the illiterate adults and the groups of illiterate adults, challenge them with certain representations of the concrete reality they experienced.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License and is republished under Creative Commons.