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In this article, John Holst presents findings of his historical research on Paulo Freire's educational work in Chile from 1964 to 1969. Freire's Education as the Practice of Freedom, which was written in 1965 from notes he brought from Brazil, was informed by a liberal developmentalist outlook. In contrast, his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written toward the end of his stay in Chile from 1967 to 1968, was influenced by Marxist humanist ideology. Considering this relatively rapid change in Freire's educational philosophy, Holst explores the manner in which Freire's time and work in Chile affected his ideological evolution. Holst contributes to Freirean studies by demonstrating that Freire's work in the Chilean political context proved to be decisive in his ideological and pedagogical growth. Freire's ideological evolution inspired his writing of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, widely considered one of the most important books on education in the twentieth century. Ultimately, Holst argues that Freire's pedagogy, like all pedagogy, can only be understood fully when seen within the specific sociopolitical and economic contexts within which it developed. Pedagogies are collective in nature, and Freire's, as he himself recognized, was no exception.
The Chilean masses know very well that the fundamental contradiction human beings face is not between them and nature but that it takes place in the economic, political, and social spheres. Those are the things, I confess, that I learned in Chile. It is not that Chile made me a completely different man from the person I was before, but what it did exactly was to deepen in me a radicalization that was already in process. (Paulo Freire, in Freire & Guimaraes, 1987, p. 127)*1
The year 2004 marked the fortieth anniversary of the military coup in Brazil, and therefore the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of Paulo Freire's exile (along with thousands of others) that took him briefly to Bolivia and then to Chile.2 He arrived in Chile in November 1964 and stayed until April 1969, when he accepted a temporary position at Harvard University. Later, Freire moved on to a position with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland.
Biographical references to Freire's exile generally give a chronology similar to what I have provided above. What is sorely lacking, however, is an...