Paulo Freire is one of the most influential educational thinkers of 1900's. Paulo was born in Recife, Brazil on September 19, 1921 and grew up in the Northeastern region of Brazil, where he experienced a multitude of events which later influenced his life's work. Freire lived in a poor socio economical area, this allowed him to achieve an understanding for the poor rural families and their hardships.
While in high school, Freire concurrently became a grammar teacher. Through the mixture of dialogic education and teaching grammar, Freire struggled to understand the students' expectations. Freire had a brief career as a lawyer then began teaching Portuguese at secondary schools. Freire was appointed director of education at SESI in 1948, where he helped set up and employer's institution to help workers and their families. It was there that he really started seeing the disconnections between the theoretical educational practices of learning opposed to the real lives of the legitimate working individuals. He believed in the Marxist theory, to Freire the idea of education was focused on the concept and the experience of the learning process rather than the facts that are taught.
Freire developed his own educational theory known as conscientization. A formation of critical consciousness which allowed people to question and inquire about various the historical and social situations they learn about. "Education as the practice of freedom" (Freire 2), Freire's vision was for an education system that was based creative learning and freedom to think differently. Freire's method became known as the "problem posing" concept, allowing students to converse with their instructor during the learning course. He worried that throughout the years education had become so standardized that deviation was almost unapparent. The teachers had come to class with a monologue set and ready to teach to the kids with or without questions.
