Quote by Paulo Freire: “Reading the world always precedes reading the word.”

Before anyone learns to read a text, they have already learned to read their environment — to make sense of relationships, power, and survival. Freire argues that literacy education which ignores the lived world of learners is starting from the wrong place and teaching the wrong thing.

Freire wrote this in Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, co-authored with Donaldo Macedo in 1987. Brazil had recently returned to democratic governance after years of military dictatorship, and questions about education, literacy, and civic participation were politically charged.

Brazilian educator and philosopher whose 1968 work Pedagogy of the Oppressed became one of the most cited educational texts in the world. He developed a theory of critical pedagogy arguing that education should empower students to question and transform the world, not simply receive information.