ABSTRACT
As is well known, Paulo Freire’s pedagogic theory eschews what he calls the ‘nutritionist’ concept of knowledge, a view which implicitly construes literacy as a tool provided to an already formed and existing subjectivity that can therefore be modified only in a narrow technical sense by the acquisition of this skill. Instead, for Freire literacy is a process, ‘an act of knowing’, which empowers the nonliterate and reactivates a moribund subjectivity (Freire, 1985:45). It might even be argued that his theory and procedures permit the nonliterate ‘peasants’ to create themselves as new subjects, though he is rather cautious in claiming that those who have become literate are thereby radically transformed.
