A Historian Reads Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy

Except for a few books in Portuguese which concern his early years, the literature on Paulo Freire so far has been deficient in its analysis of the fullness of the Brazilian educator's life and work. As author of the first multi-national, archive-based monograph to present a complete political biography of a man whose work left a major impact on what was then called the Third World during the Cold War, Kirkendall's discussion will examine the ways in which biographies can be written to buttress ideologies and regimes, even to the point of falsifying connections and events. For example, previous authors have made basic factual errors about Freire's career, such as suggesting that he worked for the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, rather than that of the more moderate Eduardo Frei, and even placed him at the centre of the 1961 Cuban literacy campaign. Some think that he was always a Leninist and that his ideas never changed over time, while others dismiss him as a populist. Because adult illiteracy had become a major issue for governments concerned about their societies' failures to achieve “modernity,” the Paulo Freire's life and work can be invoked to inspire, add credibility, or detract from the activities of opponents, depending on one's political agenda. Because Freire participated in the overthrow of governments (as in Brazil in 1964), the polarization of forces in a pluralistic democracy (Chile from 1964 to 1970), the building of nations (in newly independent Portuguese African countries in the 1970s), the construction of a revolutionary order (Nicaragua in 1980), and the reconstruction of civil society after decades of dictatorship (Brazil once again in the 1980s), his life story becomes a contested site for biographers and ideologues alike.