EDUCATOR PAULO FREIRE was born September 19, 1921. He grew up in the Northeast of Brazil where his experiences deeply influenced his life work. The world economic crisis forced Freire to know hunger and poverty at a young age. He recalls in Moacir Gadotti's book, Reading Paulo Freire, "I didn't understand anything because of my hunger. I wasn't dumb. It wasn't lack of interest. My social condition didn't allow me to have an education. Experience showed me once again the relationship between social class and knowledge" (5). Because Freire lived among poor rural families and laborers, he gained a deep understanding of their lives and of the effects of socio-economics on education. Freire became a grammar teacher while still in high school. Even then his intuition pushed him toward a dialogic education in which he strived to understand students' expectations (5). While on the Faculty of Law in Recife, Freire met his wife, Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, an elementary school teacher and an important force in his life. They married in 1944 when Freire was 23 and eventually had five children, three of whom became educators (4). Gadotti asserts that it was Elza who influenced Freire to intensely pursue his studies, and helped him to elaborate his groundbreaking educational methods. Freire's arsenal of educational thought began to manifest with his appointment in 1946 as director of Education at SESI, an employer's institution set up to help workers and their families (Gadotti, 6). Here he began to see more disconnections between elitist educational practices and the real lives of the working class. Gadotti says, "Thus, a study of the language of the people was the starting point for the development of his work ... " (7). During this time Freire also participated in the Movement for Popular Culture, and supported the active exercise of democracy in lectures and in his Ph.D. thesis, "Present-day Education in Brazil," written in 1959. His convictions would earn him the title of "traitor." FREIRE'S PEDAGOGY Freire's pedagogy of literacy education involves not only reading the word, but also reading the world. This involves the development of critical consciousness (a process known in Portuguese as conscientização). The formation of critical consciousness allows people to question the nature of their historical and social situation-to read their world-with the goal of acting as subjects in the creation of a democratic society (which was new for Brazil at that time). For education, Freire implies a dialogic exchange between teachers and students, where both learn, both question, both reflect and both participate in meaning- making.
Concretely, this pedagogy begins with the teacher mingling among the community, asking questions of the people and gathering a list of words used in their daily lives. The teacher was to begin to understand the social reality of the people, and develop a list of generative words and themes which could lead to discussion in classes, or "cultural circles" (Gadotti 20). By making words (literacy) relevant to the lives of people, the process of conscientization