In an age of globalization, where multinational corporations seem to dictate to governments the considerations of the polity, the status of the poor and their education has never seemed more hopeless or urgent. For decades, Paulo Freire - the Brazilian educator and social theorist who died in September 1997 - was the champion of the poor everywhere. He offered a very different notion of the teacher-student relationship that, in this book, looks forward to raising up of poor people everywhere to make them a viable force for change in the 21st century.