Freire was the youngest of four children born to a middle-class family. Paulo Regulus Neves Freire was born on September 19, 1921, in the port city of Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil, one of the poorest regions in the country. This entry does not take into account literature written in other languages, including Freire's mother tongue, Portuguese. The development of this essay involved searching the standard bibliographic databases: Academic Search Complete, Academic Search Premier, ATLA, ERIC, Humanities International Index, International Political Science Abstracts, MLA International Bibliography, Social Work Abstracts, SocIndex with Full Text, EBSCO and ProQuest.

Freire's insistence that his pedagogy is neither a system nor a method but an approach that educators must 'create anew' in each context sustains both Freire's mystique and the dialogue among scholars and practitioners who continue to discover new insights from a pedagogy that remains dynamic long after Freire's death. (See John Elias, Daniel Schipani.) Four particular experiences shaped the development of the man and his pedagogy: childhood poverty, the abandonment of a law career, 'homelessness' in exile and his later return 'to relearn' his country, Brazil. Rarely mentioned in biographies is his participation in Catholic action movements and the influence of Latin American liberation theologians in the development of his ideas.

Raised in a Roman Catholic home, Freire insisted that he never abandoned his faith despite the strong influence of Marxist philosophy in his writing. Freire struggles to reform institutions that promote banking education, narrow the gap between theory and practice in praxis approaches to social transformation, participate in the redevelopment of countries emerging from post-colonialism and revolution, and integrate epiphanic life experiences into his personhood and pedagogy. His reader follows Freire - the philosopher, writer, educator and social activist as he engages in his own conscientization. The absence of accurate information reinforces Freire's mystique. In light of Freire's contribution to adult education, it is surprising that biographical sketches of Freire in English remain incomplete. It has contributed to the development of popular education, participatory-action research and transformative learning theory. Freire's pedagogy is synonymous with critical pedagogy, critical literacy, dialogical pedagogy and praxis learning. PAULO FREIRE (1921-1997) is regarded as one of the most influential educators of the 20th century.

Freire 1970