Paulo Freire's views on adult education may be categorized as belonging to the radical or social transformationist school of thought. Basically, Freire felt that the correct objective of adult education is to engage actively in the transformation of society through changing or attacking its economic, legal, and political institutions. Born and raised in Brazil, Freire was particularly concerned with adult literacy education in the Third World. Generally speaking, Freire's earliest major works deal with the philosophy of adult education, whereas his later works begin to manifest more of a practitioner's approach to adult literacy education. Many of his earliest writings are devoted to the concept of the dialectic; however, what separated Freire's philosophy from that of earlier philosophers associated with teaching through dialogue is his focus on the combination of reflection and action within the pedagogical process. To Freire, literacy education is a student-centered process that includes the following steps: creation of education teams and cultural circles, creation of generative words, codification of words, decodification of words, and postliteracy education. Despite such shortcomings as their verbosity, occasional lack of objectivity, and fairly rare inconsistencies, Freire's writings on adult literacy education are remarkably consistent and attest to a great cohesiveness between his thoughts and his actions. (MN)