Fifty Years of Pedagogy of the Oppressed : A Book Review Essay

What Are the Various Versions of PTO in Spanish and English?

The new Spanish translation of PTO published in Chile by UTEM is not widely available in Latin America. The original Spanish translation was published by the Catholic Christian Uruguayan publisher Tierra Nueva in 1970. This translation was done by Jorge Mellado in collaboration with Marcela Gajardo. Both Mellado and Gajardo worked with Freire in Chile during his time there. This Spanish version of PTO is basically the exact same translation that was later published by the major Spanish-language publishing house Siglo XXI, which has become the standard version of PTO throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Myra Bergman Ramos did the translation of PTO into English, with oversight from Freire (1994), which was first published by the Catholic Christian publisher Herder & Herder. This translation is the standard translation for all the subsequent versions later published by Continuum and now Bloomsbury.

Are We All Reading the Same PTO?

In order to address the question of whether the English version of PTO is comparable to the original Portuguese version, I have closely read and compared the original Portuguese manuscript, with the original Spanish translation, the new UTEM translation, and the various editions of PTO in English, beginning with the original 1970 Herder & Herder version. Based on these close readings and comparisons, my short answer to the question of whether the versions are comparable is a resounding yes. Moreover, my answer to the question of whether the new UTEM Spanish translation is better or more authentic is no. My conclusion is that, beyond some minor word choice translation differences, and some omissions and additions of some sentences across the versions in all three languages, we are all reading basically the same text. None of the differences across the versions of the text are significant; the content across all three languages is basically the same. This is the case, because when one compares the original Portuguese manuscript with the original English and Spanish translations, it is clear that the translators were working from the same manuscript. The idea that there are widely varying versions of PTO across at least Spanish and English compared with the original manuscript is simply not true. Very little, I would even say nothing, is lost, in reading any of these versions compared with the others. Spanish readers of the Spanish versions and English readers of the English versions are all reading, apart from slight modifications and translator word choices, the same text. I think it is time to put to rest any anxiety that there is only “one” authentic version of PTO. How PTO is interpreted in different languages and cultures creating perhaps “many Freires” is a whole different issue recently addressed by Sandro Barros (2020).

I will now discuss in more detail some of the differences across the latest “50th anniversary” Spanish and English versions of PTO compared with the original handwritten Portuguese manuscript. Compared with the 1970 Tierra Nueva Spanish edition of PTO, the new UTEM Spanish translation is more faithful or closer to the original Portuguese manuscript. This is also the case if we compare this edition with the English translation; although, it is much easier to closely translate from Portuguese to Spanish than it is from Portuguese to English. This faithfulness to the original, however, does not necessarily make the UTEM edition a better translation, for at least two reasons.

First, there are a number of very unfortunate errors in the UTEM translation that undermine the obvious care that was put into designing what is a beautiful edition of PTO. The developers of the UTEM text provide a translation of Freire’s letter to Jacques Chonchol and Maria Edy that he gave to them along with the handwritten manuscript. This is very beneficial for Spanish-language readers and does not appear in other Spanish or English language versions of PTO. Unfortunately, in the letter, years is mistranslated as months, and so the letter reads as if it had been 4 months since Freire had arrived in Chile and not 4 years. Since the letter is signed Spring of 1968, readers, like Luis Pinto Faverio, President of the Metropolitan Technical University, whose Preface is included in the text, could make the error that he does, and think that Freire arrived in Chile in 1968 and not in 1964, as was the case.

Second, there are a few more unfortunate, poor translation choices of interest to Spanish-language readers of the text that I will not detail here for an English-speaking audience. Nevertheless, these poor choices are not made in the original Spanish translation by Jorge Mellado in collaboration with Marcela Gajardo. It is evident that Mellado and Gajardo, who were working with Freire at the Institute of Training and Research for Agrarian Reform (ICIRA—Spanish acronym) when he was writing PTO in Chile, could not make these poor translation choices because they were direct participants with Freire in the development of PTO and its application in the practice of agrarian reform workers.

The UTEM translation of PTO provides Spanish readers with a more “faithful” translation of the original Portuguese manuscript. It is not, however, in my opinion, a better translation that the original Spanish translation by Mellado.

From the original 1970 Herder & Herder English edition to the 2018 Bloomsbury edition, very little has changed in terms of the actual English translation of the text of PTO. The 1970 English translation of the text is based on the original Portuguese text. There are slight differences between the 1970 English translation and the original manuscript. Some of these differences correspond to the 1970 Spanish translation and some are just slight differences seemingly independent of any other version. There is an interesting change in the 1970 English edition, which is carried through all the subsequent English editions. The last five to six sentences of Chapter 4 in the original Portuguese manuscript, and in all the Spanish editions, are inserted into the end of the Preface just before the acknowledgements in all the English editions of the text. In other words, the Portuguese and Spanish editions of the book end with sentences that are inserted in the Preface of all the English editions.

The biggest changes in the various English editions of the text are the materials not written by Freire that appear at the beginning of the book and now, as in the case of the 50th anniversary edition, that appear at the end of the book. The most important and only change in the actual text of the translation came in the 20th anniversary edition published in 1994. This version is labeled as “Newly Revised,” which refers to the fact that the sexist use of man and men is changed to more gender-neutral language. The actual text of PTO in the 30th anniversary edition published in 2000, is an exact copy of the 1994 20th anniversary edition. The latest, 50th anniversary edition published in 2018 is also an exact copy of the 1994 and 2000 versions. One can do a page-by-page comparison and each page begins and ends with the same words and footnotes in the same positions. The only thing that changes across these editions is the page numbers because of the changing introductions and forewords not written by Freire.

Texts That Help Us Understand PTO

PTO is generally not an easy text to read. One’s level of understanding, enthusiasm, and ability to engage the text has a lot to do with how familiar one is with the context in which Freire wrote the text and the intellectual and theoretical currents that Freire draws on and adds to in presenting his ideas. Darder’s Student Guide is an effort to help people who are new to the text navigate this context and currents. A book like this is helpful for those of us who teach PTO; I can attest to the fact that my own engagement of PTO and that of students I have worked with over the years, is incumbent on an understanding of PTO’s historical and theoretical context. The heart of Darder’s book—Chapter 1, an intellectual biography, Chapter 2, a mini encyclopedia of authors Freire cites in PTO, and Chapter 3, a chapter-by-chapter summary of major points in PTO—provides context and straightforward explanations of the theories Freire draws on, and his own arguments. Unfortunately, however, because of the errors and shortcomings I detail below, I cannot agree with Henry Giroux who calls this book a “national treasure” in his back-cover endorsement blurb.

The book is organized into the three main chapters mentioned above, along with a fourth chapter that is a short interview with Freire’s second wife Ana Maria Araújo Freire, a preface by Darder, and foreword by Donaldo Macedo.

The preface places PTO in the contemporary language of Epistemologies of the [Global] South as popularized by the Portuguese author Boaventura de Sousa Santos. It is somewhat ironic that Freire, the anticolonial writer from the once Portuguese colony of Brazil, is immediately discussed in terms of a paradigm developed by a Portuguese scholar. I understand the effort to immediately place Freire within contemporary academic scholarship, but for a guide for people new to PTO, this just adds a whole other body of scholarship that readers may think they have to know in order to understand Freire. I am afraid new readers looking to understand PTO will feel the need to not only have a working knowledge of the countless theories and theorists summarized in Chapter 2 of the Guide but will also feel compelled to know postcolonial theory and the ideas of Southern epistemologies. I think this preface would have worked better at the end of the book as a way to place PTO in contemporary scholarship.

If readers are not intimidated by the preface, they then must run the intellectual gauntlet thrown down by Donaldo Macedo in his six-page foreword. Beyond his justifiable praise for Antonia Darder, Macedo manages to attack “domesticated educators,” “pseudo-Freireans,” “wanna-be-Freireans,” “pseudo-critical educators,” and “self-proclaimed Freireans” any or all of whom can be accused of “conducting fake research” based on “folk theories.” Do novice readers of Freire need to know that Freirean studies is a select club that guards its territory with a whole arsenal of slanderous labels?

If novice readers of PTO are not scared off by the potential intellectual hazing by the likes of Macedo in his foreword, they then enter the much more friendly territory of the three main chapters of the Guide. Before Chapter 1, however, readers are advised to avoid the error in the “About this Book” section, repeated in a footnote on page 16, in which Darder makes the common mistake I have already discussed, of claiming PTO was first published in Spanish in 1968. Actually, this is a double error in that PTO was not published in 1968, but in 1970, and the first language PTO was published in was not Spanish but English. One merely need read Freire’s (1994) own “Guide to PTO,” Pedagogy of Hope, in which he clearly states that it was published in English in September of 1970 (p. 120).

Chapter 1 of the Guide, “living history” is an intellectual biography of Freire. This chapter is helpful in understanding Freire generally, yet, not very helpful for understanding PTO because the section on Freire’s 4½ years in Chile where he wrote PTO, and that by Freire’s own account (1994) were so important for PTO, only accounts for about one page of the 21-page chapter. There are a few errors the reader should be aware of in this chapter. In the discussion of Freire’s exile in Chile, the then Chilean president’s second last name Montalva is misspelled as Montalvo and Darder incorrectly claims on page 17 that Freire briefly worked with Amilcar Cabral while in Guinea-Bissau. Freire (1978) himself states in Pedagogy in Process: Letters to Guinea Bissau that his invitation to work in Guinea-Bissau came in 1975 after Amilcar Cabral’s assassination. Moreover, in Freire’s (2009) lecture on Amilcar Cabral he clearly states that he “did not know Amilcar Cabral in person” (p. 160); it was with Mario Cabral, among others, with whom Freire and his team worked.

Chapter 2 is the most impressive part of the Guide. In this chapter, Darder provides 39 subsections in which she summarizes all the major intellectual currents and individual intellectuals or revolutionary thinkers Freire references in PTO. This chapter is impressive in scope but like the rest of the book has its shortcomings. Frequently, the summaries, some of which stretch four to five pages, provide little in the way of how Freire uses these theories in PTO. To be fair, Darder does do a lot of this in her chapter-by-chapter summary of PTO in Chapter 3 of the Guide; readers, who may feel like they are reading an encyclopedia in Chapter 2, must be patient and realize that this will be related to PTO in the following chapter. It might actually be helpful for readers to read Chapter 3 first and only refer back to Chapter 2 for the less familiar theories or theorists. Moreover, there are some spelling errors in Chapter 2. Francisco Weffort is referred to as Francisco Weiffert and Rosa Luxemburg is referred to as Rosa Luxembourg. More troubling with the Rosa Luxemburg summary is the implication that she engaged in a polemic with “increasingly dogmatic Stalinism.” Luxemburg was assassinated in 1919, well before Stalin emerged as the leader of the U.S.S.R. in the wake of Lenin’s death in 1924. Last, over three pages are dedicated to a summary of Antonio Gramsci, when Freire never refers to or cites Gramsci in PTO.

After Darder’s very helpful and insightful chapter-by-chapter summary of PTO in the Guide’s Chapter 3, the book’s final chapter consists of a disappointing and rather unhelpful interview with Freire’s second wife, who did not know Freire when he wrote PTO in the late 1960s. She claims, for example, inaccurately and ahistorically that a major influence on Freire’s ideas in PTO came from Amilcar Cabral, who Freire did not read until after writing PTO. On page 165 of the interview, Araújo Freire makes reference to Freire’s book A sombra desta mangueira [Under the shade of a mango tree]; there it is inserted inaccurately that this book was published in English as Pedagogy of Hope when in fact it was Pedagogy of the Heart. The interview also includes banalities about Paulo Freire such as “he felt life and experiences within his body” and that he “could put himself in the other’s shoes” (p. 161). The fact that the book ends with an interview with someone who did not know Freire at the time he wrote PTO points to a more general weakness of the Guide as a whole. In a footnote at the beginning of Chapter 3, Darder says that, in selecting the theories and theorists to summarize, she relied on Freire’s own accounts and of “those who knew him closely” (p. 24). Darder is of a generation of justly renowned critical pedagogy scholars like Donaldo Macedo, Peter McLaren, and Henry Giroux, who, like Freire’s second wife, did not know Freire when he wrote PTO. They all came to know the world-famous, bearded Freire but not the 40-something, beard-less, much lesser known, and less radical, catholic humanist Freire, who, in an accelerating process of radicalization, wrote PTO in Chile. This same weakness appears in the 30th and 50th anniversary issues of PTO in English. Both contain rather unhelpful introductions by Donaldo Macedo and, in the case of the 50th anniversary edition, finishes with short interviews with famous scholars. In my opinion, none of these efforts do much in providing the very important description and analysis of the context in which Freire wrote PTO. Readers themselves can consider PTO’s relevance for today, we do not need Noam Chomsky to tell us what that is. The only helpful additional material is the Afterword in the 50th edition by Ira Shor, who, in just more than three pages, provides a very succinct and helpful summary of what he sees as the nine major concerns addressed by Freire in PTO.

In order to understand the beard-less Freire of PTO, one needs to read Marcela Gajardo’s book Paulo Freire: Crónica de sus años en Chile [Paulo Freire: A chronical of his years in Chile]. Gajardo, who at the time was a young Chilean college student, first met Freire in early 1966. She would go on to be a part of Freire’s team in ICIRA, where they formed a close working relationship and friendship that would only end with Freire’s death in 1997. In this book, that is both personal and analytical, Gajardo provides a personal and professional portrait of the Paulo Freire in exile in Chile from 1964 to 1969, as well as excerpts from their mail correspondence throughout the years after Freire left Chile, an analysis of his developing ideas during his years in Chile, an appendix of pdfs of unpublished Freirean manuscripts of the period, and a detailed description of how his writings at that time were deeply influenced by and emerged from his professional practice of training literacy and agrarian reform workers. Gajardo, as a participant, takes us into Freire’s intellectual and professional Chilean workshop to show how specific training activities resulted in specific unpublished manuscripts that formed the basis for specific sections of PTO. To borrow from Henry Giroux, this book is an international treasure and deserves to be translated into several languages so that those interested in Freire, and in particular in PTO, can read this intimate, yet also analytical chronicle of Freire and the Chilean context in which he wrote PTO. Fortunately, the text is available open-access for the Spanish-language community around the world. Unlike the critical pedagogy scholars mentioned above, Gajardo knew and worked with Freire when he was writing Education for Critical Consciousness [Education as the Practice of Freedom and Extension or Communication?], Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the first eight chapters of The Politics of Education. Not only did Gajardo work with Freire in the very research and training activities on which most of these books were based, she also worked on many of them as editor and translator. For those seeking a guide to PTO, by someone who witnessed and was a participant in the formation of PTO, look no further than Gajardo’s book.

Conclusion

What are we to make of this new scholarship on and new editions of Freire’s PTO? Misconceptions surrounding Freire and PTO still abound. In part, because the most prominent Freirean scholars today did not know Freire when he wrote PTO. When one reads those, such as Marcela Gajardo, one gets a much richer understanding of Freire: the actual person, the radicalizing Christian Humanist of the time, and not the mythical, bearded Marxist guru image portrayed by the current generation of Freirean scholars who write the Guides, Forewords, and Introductions to PTO. The Freirean scholars of today help us think about the relevance of Freire for today and can certainly provide stingy criticism of educators who would water-down the radical insights and implications of a text like PTO, but they do not provide much guidance in understanding how these insights and implications came to be written and published 50 years ago.