Foreword: Memory's hope in the shadow of paulo freire's presence

Paulo Freire tells a story in one of the chapters in this book about being asked by someone “What can we do in order to follow you?” Paulo, in typical form, answers “If you follow me, you destroy me. The best way for you to understand me is to reinvent me and not to try to become adapted to me.” Paulo had little patience with education as either a form of training, method, or as a political and moral practice that closed down history, the potential of individual and social agency, the joy and importance of engaged solidarity, the importance of social responsibility, and the possibility of hope. Paulo was a critical intellectual who was prescient because he took risks, took positions without standing still, and strongly argued that education was not merely the foundation of learning but a prerequisite for critically reading the world and transforming that world with the aim of making it better. Paulo was incredibly insightful in creating dialectical webs that connected seemingly unrelated practices. When he talked about the relationship between authority and freedom, he not only engaged the issue of the limits and possibilities of freedom in a democratic society, he also focused on how such a dialectic worked itself out in the theory and practice of the classroom. When he talked about all human activity beginning with history, he not only grounded his understanding of the unfinished human being in a logic of self-determination and hope, he also talked about the importance of intellectual curiosity in the classroom and how it and a culture of questioning were central to a pedagogy of the unfinished. When he wrote about social justice and our responsibility to others as part of a broader discourse of global democracy, he also made clear how justice and responsibility were central to honouring the experiences, voices, and beliefs that students bring to the classroom, and how important it was to not only affirm such voices, but also to fulfill our responsibility as teachers to enable them to become more than they were, to expand the knowledge they brought to the classroom, and to broaden their sense of community and solidarity beyond their family, village, neighbourhood, and even nation. Paulo was a worldly intellectual who never allowed himself to forget the connection between the abstract and the everyday, the global and the local, the self and the other. His ongoing interrogations over the everchanging relationship between determinism and hope, privatization and solidarity, training and critical learning, conversation and substantive dialogue, and freedom and authority are as crucial today as they were during the many years in which addressed them in numerous talks, articles, and books. Right up to his untimely death, he was more concerned about asking better questions than providing answers or offering his readers what some have called methodologies. Freire was an intellectual who turned his own exile into a matter of destiny rather than fate, from a misfortune into an opportunity to become an intellectual who was worldly and spoke to a global audience. Transforming fate into destiny was central to Freire’s understanding of what it meant to be human and to his comprehension of the intellectual as a crucial social, cultural, and ethical critic, and how both were integral to his own life and work.