Racial unrest had, since 1965, flared into violence on the streets of American cities. Minority spokespersons and war protesters were publishing and teaching, and they influenced Freire profoundly. His reading of the American scene was an awakening to him because he found that repression and exclusion of the powerless from economic and political life was not limited to third world countries and cultures of dependence. He extended his definition of the third world from a geographical concern to a political concept, and the theme of violence became a greater preoccupation in his writings from that time on. It is during this period that Freire wrote his more famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Education is to be the path to permanent liberation and admits of two stages.
The second stage builds upon the first and is a permanent process of liberating cultural action. After leaving Harvard in the early 1970's, Freire served as consultant and eventually as Assistant Secretary of Education for the World Council of Churches in Switzerland and traveled all over the world lecturing and devoting his efforts to assisting educational programs of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, such as Tanzania and Guinea Bissau. In 1979, Paulo was invited by the Brazilian government to return from exile where he assumed a faculty position at the University of Sao Paulo. Three days of festivity and workshops, sponsored by the New School for Social Research, marked the ongoing, vital impact of the life and work of Paulo Freire. He leaves behind a legacy of commitment, love, and hope for oppressed peoples throughout the world.