Paulo Feire's Second Letter Analysis

Brittany Proctor
EDF3604
3/19/14

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Paulo Freire was both an educator and a philosopher who was an extremely influential individual thinker. Theorists believed that how teachers and students are taught to write critically was not something that could be easily explained. Freire’s idea was instead of teaching the lower class information of the higher or middle it would be better to start from the students’ own experiences and understandings and go from there. Freire includes his own experiences in his letters that help to understand how he came to conclude the lessons he had learned. He also believed that it was important for a teacher to love what they do. As a teacher you are not just that, everyday a teacher’s job requires
He quotes the Aurelio Dictionary on the definition of fear being, “a feeling of unrest before the notion of real or imaginary danger.” (Freire) When there is a real danger it is okay to feel fear, he wants the reader to understand that sometimes that danger is just fiction, made up in a person’s head and can be overcome. He gives three simple steps on conquering this fear. First, one must decide if they truly have reasons for their fear. Second if the reasons truly do exist, then match the fear with possibilities of overcoming it successfully. Last if the fear cannot be overcome right away to take your time and the necessary steps on overcoming them tomorrow. Every individual’s difficulty level is different; a person just needs to understand that it can be overcome. A person can go into a state of panic because of fear or a feeling that they are unable to respond to a text, Feire states, “I experience panic in a city struck by an earthquake.” (Feire) Basically to some a person’s fear can look minuscule but to them be huge. A person just has to understand that it is only fear, a feeling, and can be
Freire says that teacher’s cannot just see themselves as teachers, “we are political militants because we are teachers.” (Freire) Every day teachers go above and beyond as he tells in his story of Carla when his daughter was teaching. Carla was a poor, dirty child and her grandmother could not pay for her education so she went to Madalena for help. Madalena agreed to waive the school fee if Carla would come to school dressed and cleaned up (there were plenty of other students whose fee was surrendered as well). Because of this Carla was able to thrive in school and no one noticed that she was poor; she looked like any of the other students. “A naïve bystander would say that the educator’s intervention had been somewhat bourgeois, elitist, alienated- after all, how can one require that a child of the slums come to school bathed?” (Freire) But, because of this there was no chaos in the classroom, no one was above another. Basically she was able to remove the distraction and teach the class. This story is relevant to progressive teaching because it is important not to have rankings in the classroom. No teacher should be above or below their students, just as no students should be seen as above or below their peers. Everything in the classroom should be equal, to an extent, so that the classroom can be best