Education as a Practice of Freedom was published in 1965, during his exile in Chile. It was the first of Paulo Freire's great works in which he implacably criticized traditional education systems, becoming one of the main engines of the educational revolution in Brazil. Together with his wife, Elza, another great educator, he developed an innovative (and necessary) literacy method that was linked to the interests of the homeless and that he developed in his hometown, Recife. This model was based on an education built on dialogue, allowing each person to contribute to their personal development. Freire managed to make education abandon its domesticating function to become a path to freedom, whose first objective was the awareness of people as individuals, in order to avoid massification.
Freire's pedagogy could be called that of consciousness. The author argues that education should be conceived as a cultural action aimed at change: the educational system should help the subject contribute to social change by providing the learner with the instruments against uprooting, since education in decision and social and political responsibility replaces the previous passivity with new patterns of participation.