In the late 1960s, Paulo Freire's words leapt off the page at me. It was a shock of surprise and also of recognition. Here was a kindred spirit from another generation and another culture.

At age twenty-one, I had dealt with many teachers. The elitism of professors had propelled me into the student movement at the University of Toronto. Other than humanists like Christian Bay and Ginny Griffin, most pulled me into conceptual games around education, asserting the inevitable hierarchy between teacher and student. Studying educational theory, then, was a way of equipping myself to fight back. I sought cracks in the wall of the learning hierarchy.

Reading Paulo Freire was like a door opening in the wall. His phrase "there is no neutral education" resonated with everything I had experienced in years of school and university. And his blunt taking of sides with illiterate people, with street-smart people, was his starting point, not his concluding paragraph. This was a whole new kind of professor. His writing burned with anger against injustice, and the flame didn't seem to flicker in the changing winds of struggle, exile, exclusion and fame. Throughout the 1970s, his ideas had a formative effect on my life.

I had not grown up expecting inspiration from the South. Most images of the South that had reached me as a child were coloured with colonial nostalgia or outright racist stereotyping. In my childhood were adventure stories of the Spanish Main, with lean and gallant English adventurers and fat, corrupt Spanish priests. Mixed in with this older literature (the so-called leyenda negra or black legend) were the more contemporary adventure films featuring John Wayne and other American heroes, with Latin Americans mostly in the backdrop. So the idea of learning from the South was as unfamiliar to me as the idea of learning from students was to traditional professors. Travelling in Latin America, and the influence of friends like Rick Arnold, helped to shift my approach. And reading Paulo finished the job.

I read everything in English that I could get my hands on. There wasn't much in 1969. Then I pursued his ideas around Latin America. I spent a couple of months in the fall of 1970 in the library of Ivan Illich's institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I sweated with my limited Portuguese, rolled through texts from his Chilean work, and pondered Freire?s world view over beer and coffee.

In the time after the murder of Che Guevara in 1967 and before the murder of Salvador Allende in 1973, Latin America was a potent learning laboratory for me. I met with adult educators in different countries, relating what they said to the political rallies in public squares, the intricate commerce of peasant markets and the texts I found in the discount bins of street bookstores.

A turning point for me was my contact with a group called indicep1, in the highland city of Oruro, Bolivia. The population was largely Aymara, with a small Europeanized elite. The economy turned on tin mining, subsistence agriculture and commercial transport. In this complex situation, some educators had heard of Paulo Freire's ideas, and began to apply them in a stunningly creative way.

The indicep staff found that the Aymara culture was anchored in a practice of collective work and celebration, known as the ayni. Yet the ayni itself had no strict control on quantity, no assurance that equal amounts of labour were being exchanged. The principle of reciprocity, then, was on a qualitative level which was not subject to strict measurement. So when Europeanized educators tried to teach basic numeracy, they were in fact calling into question a basic tenet of the culture. Since the indicep group sought to dynamize rather than eradicate the culture, they decided to look more deeply.

They noted that the same people who practiced the ayni also engaged in cash transactions, such as the sale of produce or animals at market. If questioned by a teacher, they could not perform basic addition and subtraction; yet somehow they calculated quantities for commercial transactions. The adult educators probed further. How could adults who apparently lacked numeracy skills keep track of sheep in a herd, or make change for purchases in a food market. From these conversations, they concluded that the basic unit in these calculations was ten fingers, rather than one. From this initial breakthrough flowed an understanding of how objects like stones and grains of corn could be used to symbolize multiples of ten. It was then a simple step to develop study materials which depicted these symbols as the basis for learning basic mathematics. Instead of insulting people by rote repetition of 1+1=2, the "psychosocial method" suggested starting from units of ten, and multiplying them with familiar symbols. Indeed, using this approach, the number "one" would likely be the very last number under 100 to be learned. This seemed so simple, so elegant, so radical as an educational approach that it took my breath away.

Gradually, from practical workers like the indicep team, I picked up a different way of thinking, a new set of reflexes about politics. I started to emphasize personal and intellectual connection more than rigid boundaries and lines of ideological demarcation. I looked for social and political tension as a source of energy rather than as an obstacle to grand educational plans. Instead of brushing aside establishment thinking, I tried to search out its internal contradictions, to problematize its assumptions. In short, I began to think and act dialectically.

For me, one of Paulo's key insights was the distinction between sectarian and radical. He recognized that many social activists - sectarians - were unprepared to spend the time, and show the humility required to establish real dialogue with oppressed people. Rather, they would replicate the cultural invasion practiced by the establishment, and exchanges among them would centre on the best strategy for such invasion. On the other hand, radicals were engaged in continuous inquiry and self-criticism, listening carefully to oppressed people in order to provoke questions within their own thematic universe. At one point, when asked if the radical stance might not take too much time, Paulo responded irritably that time spent any other way was essentially wasted. These words were in my mind during my time in Latin America, watching explosive debates among "vanguard" social activists. I began to define myself as a radical rather than a sectarian, convinced that the "correct line" was of less importance than creating the conditions for authentic dialogue: freedom from violence and equality of power. With the hood lowered over the heads of both radicals and sectarians in Latin America, it was hard to maintain the dichotomy between them. What conditions would allow both to contribute to the struggle?

This was exciting, but it got me into trouble when I returned to Canada. Friends said I was losing my clarity and focus because my response to new ideas and situations became less predictable. Colleagues said my focus on participatory process meant avoiding the responsibilities of political leadership. They were puzzled by my limited attention span for the ideological debates of the English Canadian left, including the social democratic New Democratic Party (ndp) and its nationalist breakaway group, the "Waffle", the Communist Party and the various Marxist-Leninist organizations. In one brief personal meeting with Paulo Freire in Switzerland, I was encouraged to work through, in more depth, the ways in which the lessons from my experience in Latin America could enrich education practice in Canada.2

Integrating

But then the South came North. When the dreams of the Chilean left were shattered in September of 1973, many people fled the orgy of imperialist violence. Among the refugees to land in Toronto were four Brazilian couples. Their acknowledged leader was a frail, playful genius named Herbert José de Souza, or Betinho3. Betinho included me and my wife Anita in his 40th birthday, a small and highly emotional celebration of his survival through ill-health, political persecution and exile. In an alien culture, climate and political environment, and in daily struggle against the risk of hemorrhage from hemophilia, he embraced his small circle of friends and told jokes. As we ate and drank, talked and sang, I was humbled and inspired.

While I engaged in adult education work, I continued with serious academic reflection. I now felt completely at home with Paulo's thinking, not only its substance but the "peculiar prose" which North American progressive educators found so elusive and irritating. After all, Paulo was a specialist in language... perhaps the problem here was not that he wrote badly, but rather that he thought differently from those reading him in a "common sense" perspective.

For example, Paulo observes:
In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity", the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity", which is nourished by death, despair and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.4

Here there is no jargon to impede understanding, no technical or philosophical terms alien to everyday speech. There are no obscure references or footnotes. Further, the overall intent seems reasonably clear, at least for any radical educator who has tried to raise funds. Yet Paulo has traced here a whole set of relations: false generosity - charity - true generosity - injustice - poverty - oppression. These are the six elements in the statement, the reference points in his argument.

In a curious way, it is difficult to define a focus, for these comments can be restated in an equally meaningful way by starting with any one of the reference points. The argument is hard to "pin down" because it simultaneously considers relations among several elements rather than focusing attention on a single element. The specific sense given to the words "generosity" and "charity", for example, is defined in relation to the whole statement. Each of these two terms implies the other at the same time that it is distinguished from the other; each term is subjected to a value judgment in terms of the other; and the progression from one to the other is not a linear sequence but an exploration of internal and external relations. A similar set of relations is implied among other elements as well - for example, between false generosity and poverty, or between charity and oppression. In a sense, then, the subject matter of the statement is not the six "facts" which are isolated at first glance as reference points, but rather the relations among them.

My point here is that most readers in North America find Paulo?s style bewildering, not because he uses jargon or rhetoric, but because his thought patterns are different from their own. Their efforts to "explain" his writing, then, reflect a refusal to adjust their own intellectual process to accomodate a thinker who sees the world relationally rather than factually. Hence it turns out to be more fruitful to assume that Paulo knows what he is doing in his choice of words than to assume that he does not. Pulling fragments out of his writing, and criticizing them in isolation, accomplishes little. A critical stance on Paulo's theoretical work needs to start from his dialectical coherence among assumptions, values, methodology and language. When he fails to integrate specific elements into the relational framework (as so often happens with gender), or when he truncates or distorts a particular relation (as also happens with gender), he should be taken to task. These become the basis of debate among those who are already within a dialectical mode of thought.5

Certainly Betinho worked in a dialectical way. But I didn?t know that he shared more than an epistemology with his fellow Brazilian Paulo Freire. You don't ask political refugees questions about their past. So it wasn't until Paulo came to teach a summer course at the University of Toronto in 1976, that I found Betinho had long been one of his closest political allies and personal friends. It was Betinho who passed Paulo my M.A. thesis, and told him of my plan to make a film about experiments in applying popular education in central Canada. Paulo and his wife Elza became part of the social circle of Brazilians in Toronto, who had already taught me so much.

When Paulo read my reflections on his writing, he became excited. I was just in my mid-twenties, but he enthusiastically promoted my work in public and private meetings with the Canadian adult education establishment. That gave me the nerve to ask him one evening if he would be interviewed for our film.

He looked stern at first. "I have never done a film or TV interview alone," he said, and went into a lengthy speech about how the media can manipulate, edit and contain radical messages. Swept along by the force of his argument, I was starting to have second thoughts about the whole project. Then, in a characteristic twist of logic, he said, "Don't you see the opportunity this gives us, D'Arcy? The American and European TV people chase me now precisely because I refuse their offers. So if you interview me, that film will be worth money for resale. It could be my contribution, not just to your film, but to the financing you need to make it."

One afternoon, we squeezed lights and cameras into Betinho and Maria's apartment, and filmed an interview with Paulo. It was wonderful. Two months later, a TV producer phoned me from Frankfurt, saying Paulo Freire wasn't willing to appear in his upcoming series for West German TV, and had said that I had the only available interview. The producer flew to Toronto and purchased the rights. With the proceeds, we edited and released our half-hour documentary Starting from Nina: The Politics of Learning. We took the title from one of Paulo's stories,
about a man in a literacy class whose first written word is his wife's name, Nina.

By this time, with the help of both Paulo and Betinho, I was learning to recognize political capital as a resource to use, rather than only a privilege to denounce. Rather than shrinking from what they had built up, both men were able to use political capital as a lever for collective benefit.

One evening, Paulo was telling us about the needs in the newly-independent republic of Sao Tome and Principe, off the west coast of Africa. He had been invited to help set up adult education programs there, but was not able to go. He asked us if we would do it on his behalf. By March of 1977, three of the Brazilians, together with Anita, me and our baby Danielle, were on our way to these small islands. For two months, we helped develop popular communications capacity for the revolutionary government. And I had a taste of what a completed revolution could be... at once more profound and more routinized than I had imagined.

By this time, I was carrying a heady mix of ideas about learning, struggle, personal survival, educational method, revolution and political leverage... mostly drawn from the South. It was time to apply them at home in a sustained way.

Applying

At this point, two decades ago, my personal path diverged from that of Paulo and Betinho. Both were beginning to move back towards Brazil, and I was moving from international solidarity into the Canadian trade union movement. I was increasingly troubled by the "floating" nature of popular education discussions in non-governmental organizations, and the disembodied nature of my participation in them. Like Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, it felt like many texts in search of a social base.6 An academic literature based on Paulo?s ideas began to grow in the United States. Yet the application of his ideas in Latin America was being crushed in the long totalitarian night, and the first flush of enthusiasm in Portugal's former African colonies was passing. For me personally, it was time to begin the work my daughter Nyranne has called "teaching workers how to talk back".

I have written elsewhere of the pleasure and pain of activist educators in Canada's labour movement. I am one of those who have planned, designed and led courses for union members who step forward to represent their fellow workers, developing their capacity for thinking, feeling and acting. By putting my heart into this work, I have joined with kindred spirits across the country, the radical democrats in the unions.

This group works with the left sectarians, both social democratic and Leninist, who promote banking education in support of good causes. We all have to judge timing carefully in order to know when problem-posing dialogue is needed, and when unity and discipline are required in the face of an employer offensive. We have to build organization carefully, lest it become bureaucratic. In other words, we have to be good at our trade, as reliable as a competent electrician or neurosurgeon. And we can all draw on Paulo's writing for inspiration. As recently as last summer, a special issue of a Canadian union magazine on member education quoted Paulo in several articles and on the back cover: "Without a minimum of hope we cannot so much as start the struggle." 8

Inside the union culture, we work with generative themes. As Paulo repeatedly demonstrated, this is a high-precision task. For example, in the early 1980s, I began researching technological change in the workplace, and the new management methods associated with computerization. I soon found that computer technology wasn't working in my courses as a generative theme. Action proposals emerging from the courses were too abstract, too costly or too contradictory. The time wasn't right. After a few trial courses along these lines had flopped, we put our findings into policy papers and handbooks, and moved on.

The theme "management methods" however, had resonance and energy. People could bring in their own experience. Bridges could be built across workplaces and sectors in class discussions, and people liked to read material usually reserved for managers, rather like slipping into a private party. But with titles like "Psychology of Management", the course just never took off. Only when the title was changed to "Facing Management" did members line up to enrol.

The impact of this change in "packaging" made sense. First of all, the title was active, since a verb gave it dynamism. Secondly, it echoed many people's direct experience, namely having to deal directly with the workplace hierarchy. And thirdly, it implied facing up to real power dynamics: a union representative in a workplace cannot avoid or ignore the employer for long, nor can one wage endless war with the source of the members' income. The title implied a practical immediacy. A more recent case in point is the 1997 Prairie Labour Women's Conference, in midwestern Canada where a course called "Popular Economics" was cancelled due to low enrolment. In 1998, the same course, now called "Women hold up half the economy", was over-booked.9

Relying on Paulo's framework, I was engaging in dialogue with workers, identifying their generative themes, and setting up occasions where collective de-codification could take place. Most of these actually took place in steward training courses, the bread and butter of union education.

Paulo's ideas grew from bread and butter work, too, from engaging peasants in reading, writing and math, but not in a spirit of technical literacy. His was political literacy. And in a media-saturated society like English Canada, to limit Paulo's ideas to literacy programs is to put them in a political corner. We should be working to extend the practice of dialogical, critical, and collective adult learning into every corner of Canadian society.

In the labour movement, we have tried to find images and words that resonate with the popular culture. So instead of calling a course "strategic planning", we promote the title "union judo". That is why "train the trainer" work is a crucial educational practice in the labour movement. Support for this work from labour movement allies, like those in the Doris Marshall Institute (1986-96), has played a key role in strengthening the internal capacity of unions.10 And today in British Columbia, in western Canada, an informal network of community-based and union-based popular educators is sustaining the spirit of such cooperation.

But this work is not without controversy. I remember vividly the reaction of one veteran unionist after using one of our course manuals:

"I don't want to teach again," Andy told me. I was confused and surprised. The three-day steward course he had been co-teaching was over, and the participants were thrilled with it. I asked what had gone wrong.

Oh, the course material was beautiful, and the people got completely involved. I could see my co-instructor helping them discuss options and build conclusions, and could feel the power of that participation. I think it's just what we need to rebuild the union. But personally, I felt really out of it. I kept slipping out the door for smokes, for phone calls, for anything to keep me from grabbing people by the throat and telling them what to think. I?m built for bargaining, where my impatience is an asset. But if I ever had to teach this way alone, I'd screw up for sure. So let me know anytime you need political support for this program, but don?t push me into teaching in it.

I admired Andy's directness, and sympathized with his discomfort. I had to fight the impulsive feeling that the whole situation was Paulo Freire's fault. After all, I was trying to apply popular education approaches inside the labour movement, and the fit wasn't a simple one. Labour activists tend to gain leadership by speaking, not by reflective listening; they tend to mobilize people behind tangible goals, not to problematize the goals themselves; and they emphasize the power of unity, not the painful process by which differences are put on the table in order to build coalition.

In all these ways my work was clashing with the union culture, and making honest and committed people like Andy uncomfortable. Rather than deal with his discomfort, I preferred to project the problem onto Paulo Freire. I guess that happened to Paulo a lot during his life. But after a lot of discussion, Andy and I found a peace. And after much internal reflection, I am at peace with Paulo Freire, as well.

Full Circle

At times, Canadian labour education is consciously linked back to Paulo's writing, while at other times it has an energy flow of its own. This kind of flow carried a small group of artists, historians and union activists to establish a centre to showcase the creative accomplishments of workers and their unions. In late 1996, after years of planning, the Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre opened its doors in Hamilton's historic Custom House.11 Within six months, a filmmaker approached us about documenting our experience for a series on, of all people, Paulo Freire.

It seems that George Stoney, a veteran progressive media producer, was seeking locations in North America where Freirean principles were being applied. In conversations with policy people in the Canadian Museums Association, he became interested in our Centre's approach. When staff presented his request to a meeting of our board, some members had never heard of Paulo Freire. I remembered Paulo helping me with a more modest film two decades earlier. I remembered the shock and recognition I had felt when I first encountered Paulo's ideas a decade before that. And I gave thanks for the larger mysteries by which things come full circle.

Paulo Freire's contribution to my own struggle for insight, integrity and skill was elemental, basic, unforgettable. Nonetheless, in drawing on Paulo's work, I have always thought it necessary to keep simultaneously a critical distance. In her wonderful essay on Paulo, the American black feminist writer, bell hooks, comments that she was always aware of the sexism in his work. Yet she says:

To have work that promotes one's liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not
matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some
dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water...When you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your disposal of something that you consider impure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. ...If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the people in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo's work has been living water for me.12

Both Paulo and Betinho died in 1997. Now there are lists of websites where people can find out about Paulo's ideas.13 And the mass movement founded by Betinho in Brazil, which led to his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, continues to build a popular civil society. At last count, fully ten per cent of Brazilians belonged to local groups committed to ending hunger and misery in their communities, groups inspired and guided by his compassionate and joyful spirit.14 Betinho's wife, Maria Nakano de Souza, has never taken the public spotlight. When he died, she would only make one comment to the press: "Now it's up to us." With Paulo's death, the same can be said.

I am honoured to have known these brave and wise people, to have learned from them, to have learned from the South. For radicals, both North and South, now it's up to us.

D'Arcy Martin designs and leads courses for members of Canada's labour movement, and does social justice work in universities, the arts and adult education associations. He can be reached at 428 Roxton Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6G 3R4. Tel: 416-533-7514. His E-mail address is darcym@web.net

Notes

The author thanks Barb Thomas, Bev Burke, Jorge Garcia-Orgales and Deborah Wise Harris for helpful comments on the first draft of this article.

1 indicep, Instituto de Investigación Cultural para Educación Popular, flourished under the presidency of Juan Jose Torres, and was suppressed by subsequent military regimes. See "Problems of Practice: The case study of indicep", Chapter III in my unpublished M.A. Thesis Reappraising Freire: The potential and limits of ?conscientization?.Toronto: University of Toronto,
1975.

2 I was sustained in my conviction that the South had much to teach us by colleagues like Judith Marshall, Bev Burke, Deborah Barndt and Jonathan Forbes.

3 For some of Betinho?s exile experience, see "Betinho (Herbet José de Souza)", Memórias do Exílio, Brasil. Lisboa, Portugal: Editora Arcádia, 1976. A vivid and comprehensive set of memoirs is by Ricardo Gontijo, Sem Vergonha da Utopia: Conversas com Behinho. Petrópolis, Brasil: Editora Voces, 1988.

4 Paulo Freire (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder and Herder, p.29.

5 For me, the deepest insights into dialectical method have come from Bertell Ollman, particularly Alienation: Marx?s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971 and Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge, 1993.

6 Luigi Pirandello (1970). Six Characters in Search of an Author. English version by Eric Bentley. Penguin: New York.

7 D?Arcy Martin, Thinking Union: Activism and Education in Canada?s Labour
Movement.Toronto: Between the Lines Publishing, 1995.

8 "We Have the Power to Change Things", a special issue on labour education of Our Times Magazine, Vol.16, No.5, September/October 1997.

My hope is sustained by people like Bob Hatfield, Denise Nadeau, Barb Thomas, Michel Blondin, Rick Williams, Jorge Garcia-Orgales, Lynn Brophy and Dan Benedict. They have each worked independently, but have also helped me and each other with ideas, materials and encouragement. All of us share a respect for the courage and creativity of popular educators from the South.

9 Thanks to Barb Byers and Bev Burke for this story.

10 See Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D'Arcy Martin and Barb Thomas (1991). Educating for a Change.Toronto: Between the Lines Publishing.

11 The Centre can be reached at 51 Stuart Street, Hamilton, Ontario, L8L 8E8, Canada, or by E-mail at "owahc@web.net".

12 bell hooks (1994). "Paulo Freire", in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge, p. 50.

13 A list of websites, courtesy of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE), can be found in this issue on page 158.

Aprendizaje desde el sur

D'Arcy Martin

D'Arcy Martin detalla cómo las ideas de Paulo Freire - y el mismo Freire - han afectado su vida y su tarea de educador de adultos. Al conocer a Freire hacia el fin delos años sesenta, Martin ingresa al "potente laboratorio de aprendizaje" de América Latina, aprendiendo de educadores de adultos durante dos años y en diferentes países. Habiendo completado la investigación de la maestría, Martin regresa a Toronto y se aboca a integrar la comprensión de Freire. En los setenta,
Freire visita Toronto y trabaja con exiliados brasileños, incluyendo al paladín de la sociedad civil popular, Herbet José de Souza, "Betinho". Ambos colaboran en la producción de la película Starting from Nina: The politics of Learning. Martin continúa utilizando y contraponiendo las ideas de Freire dentro del contexto de la educación laboral del Canadá. Directa e indirectamente, aquéllas siguen influyendo en la educación sindical canadiense y en las iniciativas de divulgación de derechos y prestaciones tales como el Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre.

En apprenant du Sud

D'Arcy Martin

D'Arcy Martin explique comment les idées de Paulo Freire - et Freire lui-même - ont eu des répercussions sur sa vie et son travail d'éducateur d'adultes. Découvrant Freire vers la fin des années 60, Martin est entré dans le «puissant laboratoire d'apprentissage» de l'Amérique latine, au cours de deux années d'études auprès d'éducateurs d'adultes dans divers pays. Une fois la recherche de sa maîtrise terminée, Martin est rentré à Toronto et s'est occupé d'intégrer sa compréhension de Freire. Vers le milieu des années 70, Freire est venu en visite à Toronto, où il a travaillé avec des exilés brésiliens, dont le champion de la société civile populaire Herbet José de Souza, connu sous le nom de Betinho. Freire et Betinho ont aidé Martin et ses collègues à produire le film, «En commençant par Nina : La politique de l'apprentissage». Plus tard Martin s'est servi des idées de Freire dans le contexte de l'éducation des travailleurs au Canada. Les idées de Freire continuent d'avoir une influence directe et indirecte sur l'éducation syndicale canadienne, tout comme dans d'autres activités d'action sociale tel un centre de travailleur «Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre».