Apart from his academic and institutional life, Freire participated in movements for popular education in the early 1960s. The most important of these were the Movement for Popular Culture (MCP) in Recife, the Cultural Extension Service (SEC) at the University of Recife (now the Federal University of Pernambuco: UFPE) and the "Bare feet can also learn to read" campaign in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte where Freire got his first chance to try out his method with three hundred sugarcane sharecroppers in the interior village of Angicos in 1963. When that experiment proved successful, he was invited by President Joao Belchior Goulart to implement a national literacy campaign. The program intended to make five million adults literate and politically progressive within the first year. According to the national law at the time, adults could only vote if they were functionally literate to some degree. For years this limiting of the Brazilian electoral college had worked in favor of the hegemonic oligarchy. Now the landowners were threatened by the possibility that the peasants would organize into leagues, become literate and swell the ranks of the voters. The coup d'etat of March 31, 1964 deposed the Goulart government and imposed military rule which lasted for over twenty years. Freire was arrested twice and imprisoned in Olinda and Recife for over two months before receiving political asylum in the Bolivian embassy in Rio and proceeding to La Paz where he found the altitude and uncertain politics contrary to his health and left for Santiago, Chile within a month.
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