ABSTRACT
The name of Paulo Freire has reached near iconic proportions in the United States, Latin America, and, indeed, in many parts of Europe. Freire’s ideas have been assimilated to the prevailing obsession of North American education, following a tendency in all the human and social sciences, with methods—of verifying knowledge and, in schools, of teaching; that is, transmitting knowledge to otherwise unprepared students. Presumably, given a more thoroughly democratic context such as that which marks the political systems of North America and Western Europe, the core of Freire’s teaching, the Method, would become apparent. In adopting the language of humanism, Freire’s debt to the early Marx and to Sartre is all too evident. The prospect for the radical left democratic administration was to achieve some reforms in health, transportation, and education. In 1990, after a year of reform, Freire and his associates were speaking about democracy—social democracy—rather than “revolution” in the strict political sense.
