Bibliographic Information
Title: The Importance of the Act of Reading
Author: Paulo Freire (Translated by Loretta Slover)
Year: 2020. Originally published in 1983
Citation
Freire, P. (2020). The Importance of the Act of Reading. In Steinberg, S. R., & Down, B. (Eds.). (2020). The sage handbook of critical pedagogies (pp. 3-8). SAGE Publications, Limited.
Realms of Application
Summary
Freire draws a distinction between reading in the sense that it is traditionally taught in schools, and reading in the sense that he uses it when he talks about reading the word and the world. In the traditional sense, reading is about proficiency. Freire bemoans the amount of reading that teachers assign to students, the mechanistic understanding that produces lists of books to be “devoured rather than truly read or studied” (p. 6). In contrast, he describes his act of reading the world, which means paying attention to the world around him, learning not just to observe but to understand, to decipher the complex relations that the objects around him have with each other, and with himself. Reading, for Freire, means not just being able to consume the letters on a page, but to consider them, to truly understand their impact, to be able to interpret the links between the words on the page, the things in his environment, the constructs in his mind.
Freire contrasts two tools for understanding Learning. On one hand is the traditional form in which reading is understood is mechanistic, skill based. It answers the questions How do we learn? and What does it mean to learn? implicitly, through its emphasis on the rote skill of consumption and face-level interpretation of the symbols on the page. We learn by repetition, so we must read many many pages. To know how to read is to be able to understand the symbols on the page, and nothing more.
Freire’s reading, however, is much more nuanced, and much more interested in addressing the Learning questions directly. To the second one, How do we learn?, he proposes the idea that we learn by reading: we must observe and interpret our world around us, which includes codified language, but not exclusively. This reading, we understand through his narrative, we learn in turn through practice. We learn to read the world by reading the world, by practicing how to do it ourselves, by paying attention to our own environments. When we’re capable of that, reading the word becomes easy: “Deciphering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world; it was not something superimposed on it” (p. 5). To the first question, What does it mean to learn?, he also proposes a clear answer: to learn, to truly learn is to be capable of reading: to see the world and to interpret it and the written word in context.
On a more abstract level, this piece is a clear example of the use of the personal narrative as a piece of Research. Defining reading is not enough; to understand the concept, to document it and communicate it and abstract it for interpretation in other realms Freire employs his own personal story of coming to the capability of reading:
Quote
In this reflection on the importance of the act of reading, I want to make clear once again that my primary effort has been to explain how I became increasingly aware of its importance in my own life. It’s as if I were doing the archaeology of my understanding of the complex act of reading in my own existential experience.
- p. 6
Through a live reading of his experience, he can more fruitfully explain his concept of reading, and therefore it is the story, the reflection on personal experience, and the communication of this reflection that documents and transmits the idea.