On our eighth wedding anniversary, Peggy and I had dinner in São Paulo with Paulo Freire and his wife, Elza. Afterward, one of the world’s great educators read aloud from Peggy’s unfinished doctoral dissertation on Freire himself. At one point, he encountered a lengthy quotation from his own work. He paused and exclaimed in English, “Right now, I am loving these words.”
I still remember that moment. There was something wonderfully unguarded about it: a thinker rediscovering his own thought through the work of a student who had become his friend. For me, it captures something essential about Paulo. Learning remained an encounter, even when the words being encountered were his own.
That memory returned recently when a friend, an editor at OpEdNews, asked about our relationship with Freire. He had just seen Reading the World, the new documentary directed by Catherine Murphy and Iris de Oliveira. Knowing that Peggy and I had a long history with its subject, he wanted to hear more.
Our story began before Peggy and I knew each other. Separately, we had read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It helped shape us as students and eventually as teachers. Looking back, I would say that Paulo entered our marriage before we ever met him.
His book’s brilliant title suggested two meanings to me. First, it concerned an education through which oppressed people could acquire literacy and participate more fully in public life. In Brazil, where literacy was a condition of voting, teaching people to read could change the electorate. At Angicos in 1963, approximately 300 people became literate through 40 hours of instruction spread over several weeks. Education was opening a political door previously closed to them.
The title’s second meaning was even more challenging: the oppressed themselves have something indispensable to teach the rest of us. People who endure hunger, exploitation, exclusion, and humiliation know things about society that comfortable people can spend their lives avoiding. Their experience raises questions that respectable institutions often discourage. Why are some hungry while others accumulate fortunes? Who benefits from the arrangements we are taught to consider natural?
Education begins to become revolutionary when those questions enter the classroom. For Peggy and me, that meant reconsidering our authority as teachers. Students arrived with knowledge acquired through their families, work, struggles, and communities. Our responsibility included helping them examine that knowledge—and allowing it to challenge our own.
When we married in 1976, we were both working at Berea College. Over the ensuing years, our reading and teaching included Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, and books recovering Black history and women’s history. Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins’s Food First further challenged our assumptions about hunger and poverty.
Freire supplied a thread connecting those works. Each invited us to examine the world from perspectives pushed to its margins. Each questioned the innocence of conventional education.
Then, in 1982, we attended a weeklong seminar led by Freire at Boston University. At the time, Peggy was pursuing her doctorate in philosophy of education at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation explored Paulo Freire and moral imagination: our capacity to envision human possibilities beyond the arrangements we have inherited. She approached Paulo and asked whether she might study with him at his center in São Paulo. He warmly encouraged her.
That invitation changed our lives. During my first sabbatical at Berea and still studying Portuguese, we went to Brazil in 1984. Peggy’s dissertation was already well underway. She studied at Freire’s center and worked directly with literacy teams in the city’s favelas. There, the questions raised by his books belonged to people’s daily lives. Words emerged from experience. Learning to read involved examining the conditions under which people worked, raised children, found shelter, and struggled to survive.
Meanwhile, I enrolled in a liberation theology seminar that placed Freire’s methods at the center of biblical reflection. I found myself sitting at the feet of theologians I had been studying for years. They helped me understand how “Base Christian Communities” used Freire’s methods in “biblical circles” to consider their efforts to follow Jesus. Their reading connected Scripture with high rents, inadequate water, starvation wages, and government repression.
Those connections transformed the questions brought to the Bible. What did Exodus mean to people seeking freedom? What did Jesus’ good news to the poor require in a neighborhood where families could barely eat? How might faith help people organize to change their circumstances? The poor were becoming interpreters of a tradition too often explained to them by others.
In 1984, Brazil was still under military rule. Freire had already experienced the consequences of awakening such questioning. After the 1964 coup, he had been imprisoned for 70 days. The authorities understood that people learning to name their circumstances might also begin to change them.
During our stay, Peggy and I came to know Paulo and Elza personally. That friendship gave a human face to ideas that had already transformed our work. Our anniversary evening remains its clearest expression. Paulo’s willingness to read Peggy’s developing dissertation aloud conveyed attention, encouragement, and intellectual generosity. The renowned educator took a student’s work seriously enough to enter into it with her. Her dissertation later received national recognition from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). But that evening offered a recognition of its own.
Our friendship continued after we returned to the United States. More than once, we attended workshops with Paulo and Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee. We also became friends with Freirean scholars Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, who helped us publish two books after Paulo’s death in 1997. The relationships continued the learning.
Today, when I think about Paulo Freire, I return to a question that has followed me through decades of teaching, writing, and theological reflection: whose experience helps us see what we have been missing? For Peggy and me, his answer led toward the poor and oppressed—and toward classrooms where teachers could also learn.
I remember the great thinker at his apartment, reading Peggy’s pages and delighting in words that still had the power to surprise him. That openness was part of his greatness. He helped us understand that a teacher’s work begins again whenever another person helps us see differently.
