Shortly after turning 70, Paulo Freire prepared the set of essays that make up the book that the reader has in his hands. In full intellectual maturity, the Brazilian pedagogue was far from adopting a dogmatic or conformist position: his was a permanent state of search, always open to change, no doubt, because he acted with the serenity of one who does not trust too much in his certainties: "The more certain I feel that I am right, the more I run the risk of dogmatizing my position, to freeze myself in it, to lock myself sectarianly in the circle of my truth," he says with grateful honesty in the introductory note to this volume.

Freire was long interested in human nature, not as a fixed entity but as something that is constituted in history itself, not before or outside of it. A key idea in his thinking is that we are finite beings, unfinished, but with a marked vocation to be more, which requires freedom and the possibility of deciding. To achieve these minimum conditions, political struggle is necessary and in that struggle education occupies a crucial place, since "it is a fundamental factor in the reinvention of the world". The author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed addresses in these pages the importance of literacy in the emergence of authentic citizens, the links between education and community participation, the prominence of responsibility and the right to criticize.

Without false modesty, he recognized that he would be satisfied if these texts succeeded in moving readers towards a critical understanding of history and education; We trust that, in today's troubled society, his commitment to understanding and transforming reality – to reinvent it – remains valid.