This was the phrase I shot back to a dear colleague during an especially excited brainstorming session regarding our vision for a summer camp for girls that would combine technology and social justice, similar to what Arizona State University is doing with their Compugirls program.

I’m not going to comment at length on the connection between P and B. Instead, I invite you to think about it. My brain is going a mile a minute, casting about for snippets of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and that great Bill Gates biopic starring Anthony Michael Hall, Pirates of Silicon Valley.

It almost sounds like the beginning of a really bad cocktail-party joke: “What do a Brazilian educational activist and an American technology entrepreneur have in common?”

But it’s really not a joke. At least, it doesn’t have to be.

“But it’s really not a joke. At least, it doesn’t have to be.”

B has claimed a lot of space for himself—and his products—in the world. Whether you love PCs or hate ‘em, there is no denying that innovation, combined with the kind of interminable drive Gates in known for, has resulted in some pretty awesome transformations to our world.

P taught people how to claim space for themselves. Space that they deserve and should rightly and doggedly pursue.

B might very well never had made something of himself had he not, somehow, acquired a strong sense of his own self-efficacy.

P taught people self-efficacy, which is the foundation of transformation:

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”