This essay was written by Rex P. Nielson, Director of the BYU Humanities Center.
In 1962, Paulo Freire, a young and idealistic lawyer-turned-educator, embarked on an ambitious educational experiment that aimed not merely to teach people how to read, but to transform Brazilian society itself. Consider this startling fact: the 1960 Brazilian census recorded an illiteracy rate of approximately 40% of the population aged 15 and older; in other words, four out of ten Brazilian adults could not read or write. [1] In absolute terms, this represented tens of millions of Brazilians, who lived disproportionately in rural areas, especially in the Northeast region of the country. At this point in Brazil’s history, illiteracy carried profound political consequences because many civic activities, including the right to vote, required literacy. [2] Limited educational opportunities meant that countless citizens were effectively excluded from meaningful participation in public life and condemned to cycles of poverty and social marginalization. For Freire, reading was not merely a technical skill, but a pathway to dignity, empowerment, democratic participation, and, ultimately, hope.
Determined to address these challenges, Freire launched a radical educational experiment. Rather than treating students as submissive recipients of information (which he often referred to as the “banking model” of education), he encouraged them to engage critically with the world around them. Freire argued that education should focus less on the passive transfer of information and more on the process of developing critical consciousness. The term he adopted for this was conscientização. [3] He maintained that educational practices should follow a problem-posing model that connected reading and writing to the everyday experiences of workers and farmers, helping learners recognize their own capacity to analyze and transform their circumstances. In one famous campaign, Freire and his colleagues demonstrated that adults could learn to read in a matter of weeks when instruction was connected to issues that mattered in their lives.
Freire’s success quickly attracted attention and generated hope among those seeking social reform. Unfortunately, it also engendered concern among political authorities. His emphasis on critical thinking and civic awareness was viewed by some as a threat to the existing social order. In the fallout and chaos of the political upheaval that accompanied the military coup of 1964, the Brazilian military government responded swiftly and decisively: Freire was arrested and ultimately forced into exile, bringing his short-lived educational experiments in Brazil to an abrupt end.
Living in exile in Chile, Freire continued his work, and in 1968 he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a work that synthesized his thinking about the relationship between education, power, and social change. The book circulated rapidly, resonating with educators, activists, and scholars around the world. Today, according to a recent report published by the University of Cambridge, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the third-most cited social text available on Google Scholar, and remains a touchstone within educational theoretical contexts.
The impact of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Freire’s personal history—the opposition he faced in Brazil, his arrest (he spent over two months in jail), and his time abroad in Chile, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland (he lived in exile for fifteen years)—is all well documented. But I have been thinking recently about one of Freire’s lesser-known works published years after his eventual return to Brazil, titled Pedagogy of Hope (1992). In this work, Freire reflects on some of the painful personal trials he faced in life in tandem with the resistance his work confronted. His response to this difficult history surprises and inspires me. Far from expressing bitterness over the injustices he faced, Freire draws our attention to the need for hope. He argues: “A esperança é uma necessidade ontológica” [Hope is an ontological necessity] (11). In other words, hope is a fundamental condition of what it means to be human. Human beings need hope in order to live toward possibilities, to imagine futures that do not yet exist, and to bring about change so as to improve the world. What makes Freire’s conception of hope so powerful is that he sees it not as optimism, but as a prerequisite for meaningful action. As he explains:
Uma das tarefas do educador ou educadora progressista, através da análise política, séria e correta, é desvelar as possibilidades, não importam os obstáculos, para a esperança, sem a qual pouco podemos fazer porque dificilmente lutamos e quando lutamos, enquanto desesperançados ou desesperados, a nossa é uma luta suicida, é um corpo-a-corpo puramente vingativo. (11)
[One of the tasks of the progressive educator, through serious and rigorous political analysis, is to reveal the grounds for hope, regardless of the obstacles. Without hope, there is little we can accomplish, for we rarely engage in struggle. And when we do struggle in a state of hopelessness or despair, our struggle becomes self-destructive, reduced to a purely vengeful confrontation.]
And he warns:
Desesperança, esperança que, perdendo o endereço, se torna distorção da necessidade ontológica. … é um modo excelente de tombar na desesperança, no pessimismo, no fatalismo. (10)
[Hopelessness is hope that has lost its bearings and becomes a distortion of a fundamental human necessity … it is a sure path toward despair, pessimism, and fatalism.]
For me, Freire’s turn to hope is both compelling and moving. Freire’s enduring contribution may not be his critique of the banking model of education or even his remarkable literacy campaigns—it may be his insistence that hope is a moral and human necessity. Having experienced poverty, imprisonment, exile, and opposition, Freire nevertheless refused to surrender to pessimism or fatalism. Hope, for him, was not naive optimism or passive wishfulness. It was the conviction that the world, however flawed, remains unfinished and therefore open to transformation.
In an age when cynicism often masquerades as realism and despair can seem more sophisticated than hope, Freire’s message strikes me as timely. To educate is not merely to transmit knowledge, but to help others imagine and create a better future while becoming their best selves. The task of the teacher, the citizen, and indeed every human being is to uncover “the grounds for hope” despite its obstacles. As Freire reminds us, without hope, there is little reason to act; with it, even the most entrenched social realities can become subjects of human agency rather than objects of resignation.
What continues to resonate with me is that Freire’s faith in hope emerged not from comfort but from struggle. He had every reason to become bitter, yet he chose hope over cynicism. In doing so, he offers a profound lesson for our moment. Hope is not the denial of obstacles; it is the courage to confront them without surrendering to despair. If Freire is right that hope is an “ontological necessity,” then nurturing hope is not merely an educational task. It is a human one. And perhaps that is why his work continues to speak to us half a century later.
[1] By comparison, the illiteracy rate of the United States in 1960 was about 2.4% of the adult population. Adult literacy in Brazil has improved substantially since the 1960s and is approximately 95% today.
[2] Historically, Brazil linked voting rights to literacy through electoral laws dating back to the nineteenth century. From 1889 (the founding of the Brazilian republic) to 1985, citizens had to be literate to exercise the right to vote. This restriction was eventually lifted in 1985 at the conclusion of the military dictatorship as Brazil transitioned back toward democracy. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution maintained voting rights for illiterate citizens, although illiterate individuals remain ineligible to run for elected office.
[3] Conscientização does not have an easy English equivalent. It is variously translated as “critical consciousness,” “critical awareness,” “critical conscientization,” and even just “conscientization.”
