Paulo Freire

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (/ˈfrɛəri/, Portuguese: [ˈpawlu ˈfɾeiɾi]; September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement.

Biography

Freire was born September 19, 1921 to a middle-class family in Recife, Brazil. Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1931, the family moved to the less expensive city of Jaboatão dos Guararapes, and on October 31, 1934 his father died. In school, he ended up four grades behind, and his social life revolved around playing pick up football with other poor children, from whom he learned a great deal. These experiences would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint. Freire stated that poverty and hunger severely affected his ability to learn. This influenced his decision to dedicate his life to improving the lives of the poor: "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" (Freire as quoted in Stevens, 2002). Eventually his family's misfortunes turned around and their prospects improved.

Paulo Freire (astronomer)

Paulo Freire (born 1970) is a Portuguese astronomer.

He was born Oct 27, 1970 in Lisbon. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2001, at the University of Manchester in Manchester, England; his supervisor was Andrew Lyne. From 2001 to 2009 he worked at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and since 2009 he has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

In 2011, he won a 1.9-million euro Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council.

In April 2013, he was part of the team addressing the expansion of the experimentally verified scope of Einstein's theory of relativity as a result of observations of the pulsar PSR J0348+0432.

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