The Bartlett Summary

The author leaves out some major details I'd like to address.
1) The area where Freire was raised was the heartland of colonial slavery and sugar plantations via Portuguese and Dutch capital. 
This area also had some of the lowest literacy rates in the Americas and with a much deeper and wider range of racial and ethnic diveristy. 
2)  Freire very likely came across anti-colonial or decolonization writings or heard some discussions about it from resistance fighters seeking temporary shleter in Recife, Salvador, Natal and Fortaleza.
3)  The complexity of political populism among leftists and rightists isn't properly addressed in the political summary, imposing too much of an Americans lens into perceiving the more nuanced circumstances of Brasilian politics.
4)  Literacy in Brasil is still exceedingly low and misrepresented in Brasil at 92%, with far more likely numbers around 60-65%
5)  It's very hard to tell the difference between liberal populists who generally support the rise of new colonial markets for their products with laissez faire policies and Marxist populists in many Latin American countries.  Both use the same rhetoric and invoke the same nationalist imagery and demagoguery. 
What seperates the two is often that Marxism in South America has been particularly disingenious in places like Venezuela, Colombia, Brasil, Uruguay and Argentina, where corruption and graft prospered and money intended to go to the poor for upgrades in basic care was instead siphoned off to offshore accounts.  See Chavez. 

The experience of wanting and poverty up close gave Freire an ability and compassion to understand the peasant class and to sympathize with them and not feel sympathy for the ruling class.