He was 75. Freire drew on humanist and Marxist ideas to forge a concept of popular literacy education for personal and social liberation. To Freire, no form of education could be neutral.
All pedagogy is a call to action.
In a society animated by inequality and authoritarianism, he chose the side of the many, and exposed the partisanship of those who claimed to stand above it all. Freire became a world figure after he was briefly jailed for using literacy methods developed by Catholic-based communities among poor peasants. He was driven from his native Brazil by a rising dictatorship in 1964. He fled to Chile to work with the democratically elected Allende government which fell to a CIA-manufactured coup. He spent the next 15 years in exile, working at Harvard and for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, organizing and writing books for social justice.