Both in North America and Western Europe, Paulo Freire has become a veritable symbol of nondirective methods in teaching and is widely known for an amiable brand of utopian Christian personalism. How such a congenial international image has developed around someone once involved in the government-led manipulation of public sentiment and the radical, often xenophobic, nationalism in Brazil during the early 1960s is explored in this book by Vanilda Paiva. Basically a study of the relation between Paulo Freire’s educational method and the developmentalist nationalism promoted by ISEB (the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros) in the 1950s and early 1960s, this book not only helps to correct overly romantic views of Paulo Freire’s early educational experience, but also makes an important contribution to the history of ideas in Brazil through its careful study of literature dealing with the themes of nationalism and developmentalism influential during the period.
Although the author does not fully explain the underlying motives for the transition, she provides a detailed discussion of the work of a prominent group of intellectuals associated with ISEB, including Hélio Jaguaribe, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Roland Corbisier, and Alvaro Vieira Pinto, as they evolved away from earlier concerns with speculative philosophy to become political militants in the late 1950s. Applying the existentialist notion of “being for itself” to the social collectivity, these intellectuals hypothesized that social development would lead to a heightened state of national self-consciousness. By the end of the 1950s, they had devised a project of national development for the Brazilian middle class, a class project to be advanced by exploiting nationalist sentiment to cement a multiclass alliance united around the higher national goal of development. Espousing the need for an ideology of national development in 1956, Alvaro Vieira Pinto had argued that a program of ideological clarification could transform a prior state of “naïve consciousness” into a state of “critical consciousness” characteristic of bourgeois forms of rationality, thereby converting the mass of the population into a voluntary agent of national development.
Vanilda Paiva discusses the influence of these ideas on Paulo Freire’s instructional method of conscientização, concluding that the method effectively provided a pedagogical dimension to the sociopolitical program originally conceived at ISEB. As a consequence, early experiments with the method in Brazil were neither in practice nor in theory free of an ISEB-inspired authoritarian impulse to manipulate consciousness to serve opportunistic ends, despite post hoc rationalizations to the contrary in Paulo Ereire’s later writings.
