This paper will briefly give insight into two of many great educators, Paulo Freire and William Brickman, and the impact their contributions had on the field of education. This paper will discuss the life changing experiences both encountered that caused them to form their ideas about education during their specific time periods. Also, this paper will explain details around the challenges each faced while advancing in their research for their respective fields of education, both similarities and differences, and the factors that gave way to their success. Paulo Freire was born into a fortunate family but at the age of 8 experienced misfortunes that caused him and his family to move to the more impoverished side of Brazil in 1929. Paulo saw a firsthand glimpse the role education played in keeping the peasants oppressed. He called this the “culture of silence,” meaning that the peasants’ lack of education and ignorance caused them to accept the way life as natural order and not to speak out about the injustices that dominated their livelihood (Flanagan, 2005). Freire’s experience with the oppressors and the oppressed brought about his theory the banking concept of education. Freire explained that the banking concept of education was a system in which students are passive learners and teachers were the sole owners of knowledge (Flanagan, 2005). This system of education, the banking concept of education, did not provide students with opportunities to be the masters of their own fate so to speak. This system only allowed students to sit and listen while the teacher dictated information to them. This was unacceptable to Freire and he sought out to change the old way of education and introduced his theory called the student-teacher dialogue. This educational process specified that students will learn by praxis that involves students in the process of learning through problem-solving activities and personal life experiences (Flanagan,