Dialogues on Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire’s spoken books

ABSTRACT

The spoken books of Paulo Freire are works that can be considered part of Brazil's educational heritage, portraying critical dialogues between Freire and his interlocutors. This article primarily aims to examine the key generative themes that emerge from the dialogues presented in the first three books of the collection titled on education. These dialogues capture Freire’s thoughts during the final period of his exile and upon his return to Brazil. The analysis was conducted in light of other works by Freire himself and current literature. Ultimately, it was observed that spontaneous dialogue allowed for a clearer understanding of his pedagogical theses, such as the importance of class struggle in maintaining democracy in Brazil.

Keywords
Paulo Freire; Democracy; Spoken Books; Critical Education

RESUMO

Os livros falados de Paulo Freire são obras que podem ser consideradas patrimônio da educação brasileira e que retratam diálogos críticos entre Freire e interlocutores. Neste artigo, tem-se como objetivo principal problematizar os principais temas geradores procedentes do diálogo empreendido nas três primeiras obras da coleção, intituladas Sobre Educação. Trata-se de diálogos que registraram o pensamento freiriano no período final de seu exílio e no retorno ao Brasil. Quanto à análise, realizou-se à luz de outras obras do próprio Freire e da literatura atual. Ao fim, observou-se que o diálogo espontâneo permitiu o clareamento de teses da sua pedagogia, como a importância da luta de classes para o equilíbrio da democracia no Brasil.

Palavras-chave
Paulo Freire; Democracia; Livros Falados; Educação Crítica

Prologue: Freirean works

In March 1978, Geneva witnessed the first recording of a dialogue that initiated a landmark collection by Paulo Freire, the leading figure in Brazilian education, shaping a singular collection in the Brazilian educational history. Published in 1982, two years after Freire’s return from political exile, the first spoken book (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) led to twelve more volumes (thirteen in total), presenting Freire’s and his interlocutors’ perspectives on several educational themes, particularly from a critical and counter-hegemonic standpoint. These works center on the recorded dialogues (originally on cassette tapes) between Freire and both Brazilian and international educators. The dialogues were transcribed and became foundational texts within the Freirean literary collection. In them, Freire develops a central theme On Education (the title and subtitle of three books in the collection) which, broadly speaking, defends a conception of education as a collective, political, and historical process. Accordingly, this study examined the first three works in the collection and identified the generative themes arising from the reflexive dialogue (Freire; Guimarães, 1982; Freire; Guimarães, 2003; Freire; Guimarães, 2011).

The interlocutor and coauthor of the first three books was Sergio Guimarães. Guimarães taught in the early years of basic education in Brazil and was a professor of Brazilian Civilization at the University of Lyon II in France. During that period, Guimarães met Paulo Freire while Freire was living in exile in Geneva. It was precisely in 1978 that Guimarães recorded his first dialogue with Freire, which was published only years later under the title Lições de casa: últimos diálogos sobre educação (free translation, “Homework: Last dialogues on education”) (Freire; Guimarães, 2011).

Araújo Freire (2021) recalls that the spoken books were inspired by Freire’s pedagogical practice and, on the philosophical plane, by Plato’s celebrated dialogues with Socrates. The author argues that these works (re)inaugurate a new style in the recent history of pedagogy. It all began when Guimarães made a proposal to Freire: “Paulo, why don’t we put our discussions down on paper? [...] Besides being a more dynamic form of communication, perhaps it will be easier to read because it is orally based and, therefore, may be regarded by readers entering the pedagogical field as less pretentious” (Araújo Freire, 2021, p. 18). Paulo Freire himself also referred to the spoken books as “dialogical books that emerged in the 1980s” (Freire, 2024, p. 75). In the first book of the series, Freire described the spoken books as an “open project”:

Look at the idea, as I told you, I don’t know if I was saying it fascinates me, or if it’s an exaggeration, I don’t think so. I think it’s a project worth trying, especially if we approach the project so open to it that we admit that the project will be constituted precisely through dialogue

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 13).

Freire clearly grew fond of the experience of dialogue giving rise to books, so much so that he continued doing it with other educators, producing celebrated works (in addition to the three already mentioned in partnership with Sergio Guimarães), namely: Freire; Guimarães, 2021a; Freire; Guimarães, 2021b; Freire; Macedo, 2021; Freire; Faundez, 2017; Freire; Betto, 2004; Freire; Horton, 2003; Freire; Guimarães, 2002; Freire; Nogueira, 1993; Freire; Shor, 1986; Gadotti; Freire; Guimarães, 1995.

Freirean literature is striking for the variety of its formats and contents. By way of illustration, and without any intention of establishing classifications, four major groups of publications can be identified: essays, letters, collections of articles and lectures, and spoken books. It may be said that Paulo Freire’s most important book, Pedagogia do Oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), is an essay, as he himself classifies it (Freire, 2014). Alongside the essay, Freire adopted the genre of letters; works such as Cartas a Cristina (Freire, 2003b), Cartas a Guiné-Bissau (Freire, 1984), and Professora, sim, tia, não: cartas a quem ousa ensinar (Freire, 2016) exemplify the diverse nature of his works. Regarding the “letters” style, notable are Paulo Freire’s last manuscripts, the so-called Cartas pedagógicas, published only posthumously in Pedagogia da indignação (Freire, 2022). In that same work, his second wife, Nita Araújo Freire, states Freire’s preference for writing in epistolary form.

Additionally, some books compile previously published articles, such as A importância do ato de ler (Freire, 2011), and others collect presentation texts and lectures delivered in Brazil and abroad, such as Política e educação (Freire, 2024). Concerning this last work, even in these traditional written formats, Freire maintains a distinctly dialogical tone, writing to address questions and criticisms he received throughout his career.

Books published in a “pocket” format, such as early editions of Pedagogia da autonomia (Freire, 2001) – his last book published during his lifetime in 1996 – also contribute to the diversity and adaptability of the Freirean literary collection, further demonstrating the varied reach of his works.

Freire gave countless interviews to newspapers and academic journals. One notable example is an interview with Educação & Realidade in 1986, conducted by Tomaz Tadeu Silva (Freire, 1986a). Gadotti (1996) and the Paulo Freire Institute (IPF) cite a survey listing 125 interviews that did not become books in Brazil, plus others not in the IPF collection.

This study focuses on the spoken books – narrative-rich texts structured as question-and-answer exchanges between Paulo Freire and his conversation partners. This approach enhances readability while sustaining interest and interactivity. In volume 1 of Sobre educação, Freire labeled this approach a “mutual interview” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 22). This feature reflects Freirean pedagogy, where questioning assumes a central epistemological role, as highlighted in Por uma pedagogia da pergunta (Freire; Faundez, 2017, p. 72), another book in the spoken-book series:

What does asking really means? [...] The problem actually posed [...] is that, in practice, one should create with students the habit, as a virtue, of asking, of “being astonished” [...] I am certain, however, that it is necessary to make clear, once again, that our concern regarding the question cannot remain merely at the level of asking for the sake of asking. What matters above all is always, whenever possible, to connect the question and the answer to actions that have been implemented, or to actions that may come to be so or redone. The learner must come to discover the dynamic, strong, living relationship between word and action, between word-action-reflection.

Questioning in the spoken works stimulates curiosity about the discussed themes and highlights responses from respondents. It also encourages readers to reflect and form their own answers to educators’ reflections on daily common problems. As a result, readers may find themselves as new interlocutors for Freire, not just passive recipients. They thus recreate and find new meaning, supporting the Freirean claim: “Knowledge is not transferred; it is known, created, recreated, curiously and riskily” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 79).

Geraldi (2005) affirms that, in the reminiscences of the past, the meaning of life, and the authority of experience, Freire created in the spoken books a language marked by orality that characterized his post-exile period. The author states that Freire urgently needed to recover an absent time that could never be restored. Certainly, there was much to say after the silence of distance. Above all, however, there was a profound respect for the spoken word, “that in which the voice does not hide – and often tries to erase itself – beneath the grooves of the linearity of letters” (p. 9). According to Geraldi (2005), in academia, we are always distancing ourselves from orality, mainly because we consider writing to allow deeper reflection, one less marked by the conditions of its emergence, purer and more neutral in relation to the event of the encounter between partners who turn to what has been lived in order to draw meanings and lessons from it. “Writing spoken books was an exercise in situated reflection, without any desire for neutrality or the false distancing supposedly produced by writing” (Geraldi, 2005, p. 9).

The spoken books have been republished since the 1980s and reissued in posthumous editions, but some original editions had chapters split off as separate books, making it challenging to identify the works that make up the original collection. However, this did not hinder the research.

Notably, the importance of historically valuing the works and collection of Brazilian thinkers who interpreted Brazil and still remain academic references, and Paulo Freire is certainly one of them. Freire innovated by publishing dialogical books, works that carry universal and local a thematic universe, which, although written in the 1980s, remain current, such as the issue of the use of technologies in everyday school education. Interestingly, in the second volume of the collection, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2003) observes the importance of written memory in human history and uses the metaphor “concrete forest” to criticize the fading of written culture and – above all – the erasure of oral-culture traditions.

What do we do with this past that is also constitutive of the present, of the now, and even of that other extension of the future? What do we do with it? Would there be a loss of memory? It was then no longer that humanity of which we are part. It was another one, born in a concrete forest (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 57).

Before presenting the analysis of the dialogues on education, however, we should introduce Paulo Freire’s very concept of dialogue, a preliminary concept in the Freirean extra-literary universe that constitutes the epistemic basis of the spoken works. In the first book of the collection, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) states that, in order to engage in dialogue, one must genuinely want to, and that dialogue in a pedagogical context is characterized as an experience for which educators prepare themselves, unlike an informal conversation among friends. Although such preparation can never be complete in all its details, preparation around the central theme is feasible. According to Freire (1982), pedagogical dialogue belongs to the very nature of the act of knowing. “Ultimately, then, dialogue seals the act of knowing and communicating. It is communication already” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 132).

The reflexivity of the generating themes arising from the dialogues presented here consists of matters that invariably emerge from the authors’ experience and freedom of thought, intertwining life trajectories, critical reflection, and social utopias. Notably, the excerpts selected and analyzed stemmed primarily from Paulo Freire’s own statements, although the mutual influence of ideas and opinions regarding the themes emerging in the dialogical process is recognized. Thus, fragments of his interlocutor’s texts (Guimarães) were included on a smaller scale, but, in the end, our aim is to bring Freire’s own observations and ideas to light, which was certainly the very objective of Guimarães as well.

This article advances the thesis that the spoken books is a landmark in Freirean literature and in the heritage of Brazilian pedagogical thought, whose dialogues produced knowledge about problems experienced in the history of Education and democracy in Brazil, especially during the period of Freire’s return from exile in the 1980s. Therefore, it mainly aims to debate the principal generating themes emerging from the dialogue developed in the first three works of the spoken books collection entitled Sobre educação (On Education).

The generating themes of the dialogues

After reading and analyzing the first three spoken books, six principal generating themes were defined. For the selection procedure, aspects of Paulo Freire’s own method, suggested by the author in Educação como prática de liberdade (Freire, 1986b), were adopted. Freire states that the thematic universe generating dialogue arises from existential situations that function as challenges to the participants. It is a thematic repertoire generally composed of the themes considered most striking in the dialogue: “problem-situations [...] local situations that open perspectives for the analysis of national and regional problems” (Freire, 1986b, p. 114). In this vein, the following generating themes were established for analysis: teachers’ everyday work and social solidarity; class and democracy; school and authoritarianism; school (in)discipline, teacher distress, and affectivity; political education and the knowledge process; communication, knowledge, and democracy.

Teachers’ everyday work and social solidarity

When debating the practice of and the everyday difficulties faced by teachers in schools on the urban suburbs, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) defended the importance of holding meetings in which the practice of teaching work could be collectively analyzed so as to break isolation. Thus, if there were twenty isolated schools in a given working-class area, the teachers should meet at least every two weeks.

[...] one morning, one whole day, considered a workday, in which those teachers would discuss [...] the difficulties of an isolated school; how to overcome the authoritarianism that comes from the very Education Secretariat, from the top down

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 23).

For Freire, the teacher working in an isolated school must therefore struggle greatly not to lose hope. He underscores the statement: “she must have a certain political clarity so that hope does not die!” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 23). Then there would be a morning of study, an afternoon of study, and an evaluation of the teachers’ practice, beginning from the question: “What are the fundamental problems I face with the children I work with? [...] How have I been responding to them?” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 48).

Freire (1982) believes that participatory debate should involve reflecting on practice through the theorization of practice itself. Many problems would be recognized collectively and solutions planned in common. It is an “analysis of the worker’s experience” (Freire, 2024, p. 65), as Freire states in Política e Educação (Freire, 2024). Freire insisted that education-related problems are also political culture problems, and from there, he establishes a connection with Gramsci’s thought (Freire, 2024, p. 49), considering that one of the centers of Gramsci’s philosophical concern was social transformation and political culture. Gramsci (2006) affirms that every analysis of work should establish the theory-practice relationship with a view to praxis, considering work as a theoretical-practical activity and the starting point for a historical and dialectical conception of the world. This means recognizing work as an educational principle for the worker’s upbringing. In the case of teaching work, Gramsci (2006) emphasizes the teacher’s strategic role in establishing unity between school and life, between theory and practice, thus underscoring the importance of the teacher’s “living work,” that which is performed in daily school life toward the possibility of social transformation (Gramsci, 2006, p. 44).

From a Freirean perspective, social labor relations in schools should be based on solidarity and comradeship rather than competition; education would then be substantively different. To achieve this, it is necessary “to train ourselves to do something more difficult than competing: to become solidaristic” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 105). Notable, in Paulo Freire’s works, is a connection established between social solidarity, class struggle, and democracy. In the first letter published in Pedagogia da Indignação, Freire states his concern with the construction and permanent improvement of democracy and with the State’s role as practically responsible for developing social and political solidarity.

[...] the State, while refusing licentious or authoritarian positions and truly respecting citizens’ freedom, does not abdicate its regulatory role in social relations. It, therefore, intervenes democratically, as responsible for the development of social solidarity

(Freire; Guimarães, 2022, p. 54).

Freire developed the premise that democracy is, first of all, a fundamentally practical process, as he stated in Educação e Atualidade brasileira (Freire, 2003a). He criticizes a formal conception of democracy when it is reduced merely to the text of the law.

I do not believe in purely formal democracy that ‘washes its hands’ in the face of relations between those who can and those who cannot, simply because it has already been said that “all are equal before the law”. More than saying and writing this, it is necessary to make it happen

(Freire, 2022, p. 55).

In the spoken book Pedagogia, diálogo e conflito (Gadotti; Freire; Guimarães, 1995), Freire asserts what might be understood as the deepest meaning of critical education: enabling everyone, in light of a materialist understanding of history, to perceive themselves as subjects capable of changing history. Within this framework, a profound meaning of politics stands out as a specificity of education and of the process of producing knowledge. During Freire and Guimarães dialogues, the theme of democracy in the classroom also came into focus.

Class and democracy

Freire’s critique of the traditional model of classes is well known as the “banking” conception of education (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 111). Freire returns to this theme in the spoken books in greater depth and points to three fundamental aspects to debate regarding the educator-learner relationship: the educator considers himself the learner’s sole educator (i); the educator breaks with or fails to accept the fundamental condition of the act of knowing, namely its dialogical relation (ii); and the educator transfers knowledge to the learner, who is regarded as not bearing that knowledge (iii) (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 111). Complementarily, Freire also describes types of lecture classes and argues that there are indeed lecture classes that are “pure” transfer of accumulated knowledge and are, therefore, authoritarian classes. “That is the one I criticize” (p. 111).

On a second plane, there is another type of class in which the educator, while apparently not transferring knowledge, ends up nullifying the learner’s critical capacity because such classes do not constitute challenges. They are lectures that, for Freire, domesticate, making the learner fall asleep, because they resemble lullabies far more than challenges. “On the one hand, the learner falls asleep rocked by the sonority of the teacher’s words. On the other, the teacher is also lulling himself” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 112).

As a third description, Freire refers to the deeply valid type of class, one in which the teacher presents the theme to be proposed to the learners and, following that brief exposition, for thirty or forty minutes, a studied and methodically prepared lecture as a challenge, the group of students participates with the teacher in the analysis of the lecture itself. “A challenge so that the students, now questioning themselves and questioning the teacher, would delve deeper into and unfold the initial challenging lecture” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 112). Freire believes that there is also a fourth group of classes, which he likewise does not regard as “banking education”: that of the teacher who places himself in a relationship of deep respect, affection, and humility with the theme and with the group. “This teacher is not properly dialogical, without being anti-dialogical. He is not authoritarian, nor is he a traditionalist in the bad sense of the word” (p. 113).

These analyses were developed in the dialogues with Guimarães in vol. I of the spoken books (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) suggest that teachers themselves must continually challenge themselves so that their classes do not become mere transfer of knowledge, excluding students as active subjects in the process. According to Freire, democratic educators must show coherence between discourse and practice, always with the precedence of practice over discourse.

What I want, in my practice, is for the learner who works with me also to assume the role of educator of me [...] I am an educator and learner [...] that is to say: it is the rupture with authoritarianism that I preach and live, and not merely preach. That is what I think is important

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 119).

The theme of authoritarianism occupied a significant part of the dialogues recorded in the spoken books. Despite the context of the books – the late 1970s and early 1980s, a moment of political opening in the country – it still persists today as an issue in the field of Education.

School and authoritarianism

Authoritarianism in Education is a prominent and controversial theme in the dialogical books. In Paulo Freire’s view, school is an authoritarian institution superimposed upon the students’ world. “It imposes itself from the top down, unconcerned with what occurs in that world” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 37). On this theme, Freire cites Anísio Teixeira, an important Brazilian educator and member of ISEB (Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies) from 1955 to 1964, and the book Educação não é privilégio (Teixeira, 1957). For these educators, the school should have

roots in local and regional conditions, without forgetting their national aspects, which will allow us to identify learners with their time and space. This is because its program will be the community’s own local life itself, brought into the school as much as possible, as well as researched and known outside it

(Teixeira apud Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 39).

Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) believes that schools, as social institutions, manipulate the language used in official curricula and are not interested in the language of the popular classes. “It really is something that leaves me astonished: authoritarianism in this country is an extraordinary thing, isn’t it? Extraordinary!” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 75). Freire calls attention to the fact that authoritarian education is an inhibiting element of learners’ spontaneous experience and states that the theme of fear lies alongside authoritarianism.

The impression I have, Sergio, is that this really exists, this fear of asking, this fear of taking risks [...], but this fear – I do not know whether you agree with me – is not only the learner’s; it is also the educator’s, including the authoritarian educator’s [...] I believe that the more authoritarian the educator is, the more afraid he is of taking risks [...] it is fear of freedom, too, insofar as freedom implies risk, insofar as freedom demands knowledge

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 89).

Freire states that the authoritarian position that silences the learner protects the educator from questions and anxieties that might threaten the educator’s “scientific” security.

A vicious cycle is then established, which, in the end, is the vicious circle of silence, in which the only voice authorized to speak in an assertive tone is the educator’s voice. And the learner’s voice resonates less and less in the classroom

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 90).

Paulo Freire affirms that the democratic, open, and critical stance of educators would be precisely to understand certain fears of learners and, on the other hand, not to encourage those fears but rather the courage to criticize and the courage to inquire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 93). Taking curricular programming as the basis of his critique, he states that one should not adopt a naive position regarding the act of programming. He therefore proposes guiding questions such as: “Who programs? And who programs for what, for whom, with whom, against what, in favor of what, and in favor of whom?” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 74). According to Freire, education – whether authoritarian or democratic – always implies a certain directedness; in the democratic perspective, however, such directedness is limited by the learner’s participation and creative capacity.

Indeed, authoritarianism is a structural mark of Brazilian history and persists in the present. For historian Lilia Schwarcz (2019), Brazilian authoritarianism has many faces, among them bossism, which persists as an oligarchic, patriarchal, and slaveholding root. It continues in ways that place at risk feelings and values proper to the expansion of democratic rights, such as equality and diversity. Aligned with Freire’s understanding, the author stresses that democracy is not limited to the act of voting; it lives in daily life, which helps to establish it. Therefore, written and unwritten democratic norms that must necessarily be shared become essential. Authoritarianism and bossism serve as a “reminder” of our past, whose social legacy must also be confronted and changed in the sphere of education (Schwarcz, 2019, p. 229).

As an important counterpoint regarding authoritarianism, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) gives special attention to the theme of the social pedagogy exercised by class-based and trade union organizations. In criticizing the history of authoritarianism in Brazil, Freire highlights the importance of class organizations in relation to their role in the political preparation of educators, which contributes to broadening democracy in schools.

Notably, in the spoken book Por uma pedagogia da pergunta, Freire and Faundez (2017) develop the debate on the relationship between popular movements and the emergence of a new pedagogy. From this perspective, education is understood “as a process of transforming itself” (p. 133) and must renew itself permanently, without fearing change; on the contrary, change should be the driving force of all educational transformation: contents, methods, and curricula must be constantly questioned. Freire (2017, p. 83) believed that every educational practice grounded in standardization and routine, where everything is pre-said, is bureaucratizing and therefore anti-democratic. According to the authors, the pedagogy of the question lived in school or in political struggle is substantively democratic and must invariably extend to criticism of the social structure that generates oppression and inequality - that is, “the capitalist system itself”.

Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) affirms that the formative role of class organizations should transcend demands of a salary nature (admittedly important) and reach eminently political work through training processes that also show teachers’ historical role and their power to improve teaching conditions as they organize and live democracy through the exercise of democracy, which includes debate with the students themselves.

From this perspective, Mészáros (2005) stresses the historical need to break with the logic of capital and the strategic importance of disseminating the broader conception of education, well represented by the aphorism “Learning is our very life” (Mészáros, 2005, p. 53). This author states that a significant part of the learning process occurs outside formal educational institutions. These processes encompass a broad repertoire of issues, including work experiences and the people with whom we share everyday labor, its conflicts, and its confrontations.

In Pedagogia da autonomia (Freire, 2001), Freire underscores as an ethical mistake what public authorities in Brazil have historically committed since Brazilian society was created: falling into cynical indifference that leads them to stand idly by the problems and teachers’ struggle in defense of their rights and professional dignity.

We observed that the theme of the pedagogical role of organizations and teacher class movements appears recurrently in Freire’s works, not only in the spoken books. In an interview granted to the Union of Education Workers of Minas Gerais in March 1989, Freire adds that the meaning of the struggle for teachers’ dignity is part of the democratic struggle for the transformation of Brazilian society.

It means encouraging the mobilization and organization not only of one’s own category, but of workers in general, as a fundamental condition of the democratic struggle for the necessary and urgent transformation of Brazilian society

(Freire, 2019, p. 104).

School (in)discipline, teacher distress, and affectivity

One of the generating themes in the dialogue between Freire and Guimarães in the first volume of Sobre educação was precisely school discipline. Here, we should highlight Guimarães’ account of suffering, in dialogue with Paulo Freire, when he was still an elementary-school teacher in the first cycle of primary education in the inland region of northeastern Brazil.

My most difficult moments often lasted only seconds, and I lived them with myself, sometimes facing the blackboard, for five or six seconds, hearing things that told me ‘indiscipline’ in the classroom, to which I would say: ‘What do I do to react? How do I react?’

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 58).

This passage on the theme of (in)discipline in the dialogues, voiced by Guimarães, rekindles an old dilemma still experienced by many teachers today: reconciling one’s own conception of discipline with respect for students’ freedom. On this issue, Freire comments that moments of anguish over indiscipline seem to refer to the fear of being incoherent with what the teacher believes and with his or her practical response to students. Moreover, Freire states that in work the educator is constantly exposed to risks, including the risk of the teacher “going mad,” and Guimarães adds:

[...] Let me tell you something: when the end of the year came [...] nothing is more nerve-racking than an unresolved, displaced relationship between teacher and student [...] daily, constant conflicts between authority and the victim of authority [...] forty children in the classroom, after three and a half hours! ... The period from 11:30 to noon was the period of pedagogical sanctification!

(Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 64).

At this point, it is worth noting teachers’ mental illness vis-à-vis their work process, a theme that remains current. In this regard, the study by Neves and Silva (2006) addresses experiences of psychological distress and pleasure among teachers in the first stage of elementary education. In the study, the authors mention an expression used by teachers similar to that used by Freire and Guimarães (1982): a “feeling of going crazy.” According to Neves and Silva (2006), mental health is a strategic element for analyzing the relationship between health and teaching work, considering that, even in the face of various constraining situations at work, teachers manifest a range of signs and symptoms of psychological distress. This distress is expressed in discouragement, fatigue, frustration, depression, helplessness, insecurity in carrying out daily activities, manifestations of irritation, anguish, and even the aforementioned “feeling of going crazy.” In the study, the authors particularly highlight those teachers who teach the first grades because of the pronounced wear involved in working with younger children. In that same study, the authors found that teachers refer to the anguish of classroom control, but paradoxically observed that interaction with students is one of the most fertile requirements for the experience of pleasure and affection in teaching work.

Freire returns to the theme of teacher distress and malaise in the second volume of Sobre educação and states that “for a long time it was said that teaching is a priesthood. Nice story! (Laughs) It is a priesthood, provided the teacher does not complain about exploitation” (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 88).

Guimarães (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 62) argues for the need to prepare teachers to face dilemmas in the classroom in order “to try to achieve harmony.” Complementarily, Freire points to an important premise: “discipline is not imposed; it is midwifed” (p. 65). Thus, he observes that authoritarianism lies centrally in the rupture of this relationship. During the dialogue, Guimarães emphasizes situations of conflict in the classroom as an “extreme situation”, an expression well known in Freire’s works (Freire, 2014). However, Freire (2014, p. 70) stresses the issue of affectivity in the relationship with students as strategic for overcoming extreme situations, which Guimarães validates by using the expression “to live affectively” with responsibility and a climate of trust, which should be established in any pedagogical relationship. Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 70) states that “scientific competence must be associated with the educator’s capacity to care deeply.”

During the dialogues, Freire and Guimarães agree that students are sometimes more critical than the teacher and that “all of this is not always easy to live”, but investment in the affective dimension of the learning relationship is necessary (Freire and Guimarães, 1982, p. 117).

Political education and the knowledge process

Freire unquestionably develops the foundations of a theory of knowledge whose fundamental pillars are curiosity and humility. He states that the cycle of knowledge consists of two stages: the moment in which non-existent knowledge is produced, in which knowledge that does not yet exist is created (i), and the moment in which already existing knowledge is known (ii). Curiosity exercises the conditions necessary to create “intellectual habituation” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 79) and to create paths of search and apprehension in order to know the object better. Geraldi (2005) observes that Freirean texts bear a mark of vivid coherence both regarding cognitive doing and to the epistemological process that necessarily implies dialogue with others as its basis.

From this perspective, the educator’s role is to sharpen curiosity so that learners practice the search for knowledge and autonomy. After all, both learner and educator end up developing humility rather than arrogance before the universe that opens up to knowledge. Educators remake their own process of knowing in the learner’s capacity to know. Thus, “while the learner is knowing, the educator is re-knowing” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 83), that is, a different kind of knowing anew.

Thus, the invitation to embrace curiosity is fulfilled in the effort to read the real, the concrete, through the development of critical capacity and respect for children’s spontaneity. Freire emphasized the value of educators having the courage to be humble in the search for knowledge: “As a teacher, I very much embraced the courage [...] to say simply to the student that I did not know how to answer the question asked” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 92).

In Pedagogia da autonomia, Freire (2001) returns to the same issue and stresses that in the pedagogical relationship, teachers must cultivate humility and tolerance in living with differences, and that intellectual arrogance is not a sign of competence. For Freire (2001), teachers are part of the collective process of knowledge.

Thus, Paulo Freire states that the production of knowledge does not end in the object; in other words, the relationship is not that of the knowing subject (or the subject who knows) with the knowable object (or the object that can be known). Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 1982) argues that it is a subject-object-subject relation, not subject-object; in other words, it begins from one subject toward the object and extends to another subject, collectively. From this perspective, a “pedagogical triangulation” should occur by stimulating questions directed to other subjects involved. “At some point in the class [...] the more often he does this triangulation in the form of a question, the better” (Freire; Guimarães, 1982, p. 114).

At this point, we return to Por uma pedagogia da pergunta (Freire; Faundez, 2017) and to the Freirean premise of the need to permanently stimulate curiosity, the act of asking, instead of repressing it. Freire says schools “bureaucratize” the act of asking, thereby running the risk of generating adaptation rather than creativity during the process of knowledge.

The issue is not simply to introduce into the curriculum a period for questions, from nine to ten, for example. That is not it! Our issue is not the bureaucratization of questions, but recognizing human existence as an act of asking

(Freire; Faundez, 2017, p. 74).

In the third book of the series Diálogos sobre educação, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) acknowledges the qualitative and radical change in his conception of education, which had previously been a naive one: “one cannot deny the political aspect of education. That was still naive” (p. 27). He then states an important postulate of his thought: “Today I say, radically: education is political in itself” (Freire; Guimarães, 2011, p. 27).

In this context of the dialogues, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) assumes his Marxist side, even while saying, in his own words, that he is not “an unquestionable knower of Marx” (p. 26); he adopts a clearly coherent and humble position. During the dialogues, Freire highlights elements of Marxist analysis for critiquing social reality, among them the interpretation of the political context and, above all, the analysis of the stage of development of the productive forces. He declares: “I have no reason to be wrong, because Marx got it right” (p. 28). With Marx, Freire validates, in the first place, “praxis as a source of knowledge” (p. 27), that is, the explanation of the stage of development of the productive forces of a given society as the level of social practice occurring in that society. Freire (2011) affirms that social practice has to do with production levels, but above all with the struggle and conflicts existing among antagonistic groups or social classes.

Notably, in the third volume of Sobre educação, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) emphasizes the role of adult education and popular education in the context of educators’ political practice and the dispute with hegemonic classes in the face of oppression and inequalities in Brazil. This theme is certainly very current, since conducting a project of education for working adults that includes the workers themselves and their organizations may in fact contribute to the “balance of power, of forces” (p. 31), or to greater symmetry in the struggle against exploitation and social domination. In the Freirean perspective, class confrontation should restrain authoritarian political eruptions, such as “coups d’état” (p. 31). This seems to be the core of Freirean pedagogy in the spoken works, which was born, according to Freire himself, from his political-pedagogical experience and his wanderings around the world during exile. Indeed, Freire’s contact with societies undergoing social revolution during his exile, such as African countries recently liberated from Portuguese colonialism, allowed the maturation of the Freirean political-pedagogical framework (Souza, Santos, 2024). Thus, it was in the texts of the spoken books that Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) explicitly assumed popular education as a foundational pedagogical strategy of the oppressed in the process of class struggle.

Let us then return to the concept of “social practice” developed during the dialogues of the spoken books. We should recall that, in Cartas à Guiné-Bissau, Freire (1984) textually establishes the precedence of practice over theory. In the spoken books, however, he qualifies this practice as political action per se, the kind that threatens the ruling class. We observed that the concept of social practice in Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) consists of a collective and historical practice, a tradition of thought, ideas, and struggles of which he recognizes himself as an integral part. “[...] I am neither the first nor will I be the last. I am an echo of a universal social practice that has its local roots” (p. 46).

In the context of the debate on the meaning of social practice, Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2011) mentions the figure of an important African revolutionary leader who worked for the liberation of two former Portuguese colonies, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, as an important reference for his idea of social practice and political action: “But I say this with joy, not with pride, because of the coincidence I feel there is: the more I study the work of Amílcar Cabral, the more I feel in agreement with him” (Freire, 2011, p. 48).

Amílcar Cabral is no accidently an important political and theoretical reference for the patron of Brazilian education. In his work, Cabral (2024) states the need for a universal social practice of political resistance against imperialist interests, something Freire (2011) also defends. Cabral (2024) argues that one of the fundamental aspects of political practice is precisely political resistance and struggle, above all through collective organization, expanding the debate on the exploitation of the people and building anti-colonial resistance beyond borders, multiplying liberatory actions articulated at the international level. “It is necessary to struggle with political consciousness [...] consciousness of serving a just, well-defined, clear cause” (Cabral, 2024, p. 27).

Communication, knowledge, and democracy

The theme of communication occupied a significant place in the dialogues of the spoken books, especially in the second volume of Sobre educação. Freire (2003) affirms it is impossible to think about problems in education without thinking about media and, consequently, power and politics. Thus, he suggests that one should always ask in whose service and for whose benefit the media operate. Freire was a man of his time, as he himself insisted on describing himself, and therefore, he did not deny technology. For Freire, “technology does not exist in itself. It also expresses the development of the productive forces in a given society” (p. 86); and he stresses that experiences with technological artifacts and instruments are also class experiences (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 101).

Communication and information technologies have knowingly advanced greatly since the publication of the spoken books. Thus, upon examining the second compendium in the Sobre educação collection, the emphasis given in the dialogue between Freire and Guimarães to “television” as a cutting-edge technological artifact at that moment might suggest a certain thematic anachronism. However, the dialogue raised issues that remain surprisingly current for education. Strictly speaking, what emerged was an updated debate on the use of communication technologies in schools that still endures. More precisely, Freire problematizes the school in a context of permanent technological change. The central and still current question in this debate would be whether, with all the technological apparatus that keeps emerging over time, one could proclaim “the end of school” (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 35).

Chauí (2006, p. 72) states that “previously, TV was the world. Now, the world is the multimedia network, confirming Marx’s saying that, in the capitalist mode of production, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’” Chauí reminds us that the media constitute an industry – the culture industry – governed by the capital’s imperatives and that, in the context of the neoliberal economy, the communications industry undergoes continuous cyclical and profound changes, generating volatile digital artifacts and prompting new market fetishes.

Nevertheless, noteworthy is Freire’s observation that school cannot oppose the new technological “presence” that arise from the development of science and that, in terms of dynamism, surpass the school. Freire (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 37) affirms that “the fundamental thing is for the school to know that it has to change”. School needs to stop being a predominantly memory-manufacturing space of repetitive content and become a communicative, and thus creative space in which the media can be important auxiliaries. However, one has to analyze the power and force of communication instruments and see to what extent it is coherent and possible for the school to make use of them (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 40).

Sergio Guimarães (Freire; Guimarães, 2003) brings up an issue that remains central today, namely the pedagogical use of new communication instruments and the market logic that continues to confine students to the condition of consumers:

Sergio: In this acceptance of new technologies, we sometimes see a still archaic attitude toward the didactic-pedagogical use of these new instruments. Students continue to be limited to the task of consumption.

Paulo: Exactly! And so such dynamic means of communication end up domesticating students, subjecting them once again to school bureaucracy, to scholasticism. And that is a disaster!

(Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 43).

At this point, Freire calls attention to the importance of always challenging students with regard to the emergence of technologies: “How did this appear?” (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 44). One must problematize the fact that science is constituted within history and that reading society is fundamental to understanding what constitutes a consumer society.

One should recall the point concerning the State’s role in the debate on the need to build public platforms for pedagogical use, and the questioning of global corporate platforms that constitute true economic oligopolies, such as Meet (Google) and Zoom, created for corporate videoconferencing. Thus, regarding the development of virtual pedagogical environments, attention is drawn to the need to develop dialogical platforms built with the participation of teachers themselves, those who hold the experience and knowledge about their own work (Souza et al., 2024).

Freire asserts that technological instruments must be used by demystifying them rather than standing before them as though they were a fait accompli: “we should place ourselves before it [technology], as before everything else, very critically” (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 51). At this point, it is appropriate to bring in the current debate on the federal law regulating cellphone use in classrooms. This is Law N°15.100 of January 13, 2025 (Brazil, 2025), signed by President Lula. It governs the students’ use of personal portable electronic devices, including cell phones, in public and private basic education institutions. The law’s primary objective, as stated in its text, is “to safeguard the mental, physical, and psychological health of children and adolescents”. Indeed, it is necessary to consider the excessive use of mobile digital devices, especially in the post-pandemic period, as a Public Health problem.

In practice, the use of Mobile Communication Technologies increases challenges in everyday school life. Bento and Cavalcante (2013) affirm that the use of cell phones – a popular device equipped with applications – can become a strategic pedagogical and didactic resource in the classroom. For this to happen, their use should be included in both the teacher’s lesson plan and the school’s planning, and the teaching staff, families, and the school should communicate with one another and promote collaborative work (Bento; Cavalcante, 2013).

Undoubtedly, the theme of technologies in education is highly controversial and will require broad societal debate. Rodrigues, Segundo, and Ribeiro (2018) mention that mobile media in school spaces are an irreversible reality, and the directions to be taken in this regard can open rich possibilities. In the authors’ view, legislation should encourage the integration of technologies into school spaces in articulation with the curriculum, rather than be guided by prohibitive norms that make the school environment obsolete in educational practice.

We should recall that Freire believes that schools are always very delayed regarding the use of technology, and he argues that one reason is the lack of public funding for this purpose. The author (Freire; Guimarães, 2003, p. 56) affirms that there is no antagonism between the culture of the written word and the new technologies, whose predominance is the oral and visual world. On the contrary, they are reconcilable, and there would be “an immense richness in that reconciliation.”

It may be interpreted that, although the texts of the spoken books were written in the 1980s, the problem of lack of funding for public education remains chronic. Piovezan and Ri (2019) problematize how adherence to the neoliberal State model gives rise to reduced funding for public services such as health, education, and social security, as well as reduced labor rights and the growth of private initiative occupying the shrinking supply of the public sector.

Complementarily, we should debate, aligned with Freire’s considerations (2003), the role of the teacher who finds himself overburdened when new communication technologies are added to school programming. Lelis (2012) draws attention to the fact that, in recent decades, the teacher’s work process has been affected by escalated working time and expanded tasks, characterizing significant labor changes that generate professional malaise and estrangement, with consequences for health. The author considers that one of the important changes in teaching work consists precisely in that provoked by the growing role of information and communication technologies, which calls for further investigation from the standpoint of education workers and their trade union organizations.

Final considerations

But wherever I go, Bombay or New York, Fiji or the Caribbean, Jamaica, Angola or Berlin, wherever I may be, Geneva, Frankfurt, I carry with me the marks of my culture and my history that make me who I am [...] that give meaning to my wandering around the world

(Freire, 2001, p. 37).

When questioned by Guimarães about the impossibility (in 1978) of returning to Brazil, one could perceive – as in the excerpt above – a tone of resentment and melancholy, but one that reverberated like song lyrics with the sound of hope, a hallmark of Freire’s works and especially of the spoken books.

Many important themes addressed in original and spontaneous ways do not fit within the limits of this essay. Freire and his interlocutors did not follow pre-established scripts for dialogue, exactly as his pedagogy advocates. Nevertheless, the theme of democracy was always present. Perhaps because the dialogues were produced in a context of Brazil return to democratic life. However, we can affirm that, even today, in 2025, democracy faces permanent threats, which shows the contemporary relevance of the themes debated here. The question, therefore, arises: Will we be able to carry forward the educational project with the radicality with which Freire defends it in the spoken books? Is this a practice confined to the past of the Brazilian Education’s history?

Finally, we should note that, while reading the spoken books, it was almost possible to hear the laughter during the dialogues, since the editors took care and had the sensitivity to preserve, in parentheses, the spontaneous laughter episodes’ records, which certainly brought the reading to life. Thus, we were able to laugh and be moved with Freire, rereading Brazil (as he often says), free from the muzzles of authoritarianism and faced with the challenge of a horizon of practical, emancipatory, and democratic pedagogical possibilities.

Availability of research data

The dataset supporting the results of this study is published in the article itself.

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Edited by

• Editor in charge:
  Lodenir Karnopp

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  07 Sept 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  18 Mar 2025
• Accepted
  25 Nov 2025