I leave you 100 Quotes by Paulo Freire On education, the oppressed, freedom, life, children, pedagogy, humanity and much more.
Paulo Freire is considered one of the most influential educators in history. Born in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century, he witnessed the reality of a region and a world that was still debating between dominant and dominated classes (a phenomenon that continues today).
According to Freire, the division of classes and the maintenance of the status quo is not by chance, and has its roots in the cultural education that the citizens of the world receive. Through his work, he explains the causes of the problem, and proposes a series of solutions, applicable to the education system per se.
His ideas and thoughts, considered subversive, took him into exile after the military coup of 1964. Refugee in Chile, I continue with his work as educator and philosopher, participating in different educational and governmental plans.
Later, his book" Education as a practice of freedom "He gained such prominence that he was invited as a professor at Harvard University.
After his exile, he returned to Brazil, where he continued to work for education as he conceived it, receiving in 1986 the Nobel Prize for"Peace and Education"of UNESCO.
Nowadays, unfortunately, his ideas continue to be valid, being proof of the need that we have as a society to rethink our education, and the questioning of a system that leaves much to be desired, as far as human development is concerned.
In his quest to discover the causes of this inequality, he found clues and answers of great value and developed a line of thought in which he defended education as the main tool for social transformation.
You may also like These phrases about education .
1-Education is freedom.
2-I am an educator who thinks globally.
3-No one educates anyone - no one educates himself -, men educate one another with the mediation of the world.
4-If the structure does not allow a dialogue, the structure must be changed.
5-Glorifying democracy and silencing people is a farce; Giving a discourse of humanism and denying people is a lie.
5-Only the power that arises from the weakness of the oppressed will be strong enough to liberate all.
6-True generosity consists precisely in the struggle to destroy the causes that feed false charity.
7-The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become a prisoner of a"circle of security"within which reality is also trapped.
8-Leaders who do not act in a dialogical way, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize people, manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: oppress.
9-To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects.
10-Oppression is domestication.
11-Consciousness is the constant presentation of reality.
12-I know that things can even get worse, but I also know that it is possible to intervene to improve them.
13-There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Therefore, to speak a true word is to transform the world.
14-Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women on their world in order to transform it.
15-Jaspers said:"I am to the extent that others are also." Man is not an island. It's communication. So there is a close relationship between communion and seeking.
16-People educate one another, through the mediation of the world.
17-The right-wing sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, tame the time and therefore tame men and women.
18-He was a teacher with good ideas about life and education, but he expressed them with a prayer.
19-The search for full humanity, however, can not be carried out in isolation or individualistic, but only in communion and solidarity.
20-In order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.
21-The Pedagogy of the oppressed, stops being of the oppressed and happens to be the pedagogy of the men in process of permanent liberation.
22-Objectivity can not be conceived without subjectivity.
23. It is necessary that the weakness of those without power be transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denunciation of fatalism is necessary. We are beings of transformation and not beings of lodging.
24-Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.
25-The crowd is always wrong.
26-The word is not a privilege of a few people, but the right of all people.
27-The teacher is, of course, an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can profile and shape students. What the educator does in teaching is to enable students to become themselves.
28-Education, therefore, is constantly reworked in praxis. In order to be, you must become. Its"duration"(in the Bergsonian sense of the word) lies in the interaction of opposing permanents and change.
29-The educator has a duty not to be neutral.
30-The greatest task, humanist and historical of the oppressed: liberate themselves.
31-Looking at the past should only be a means to understand more clearly who and what we are, in order to be able to build the future in a smarter way.
32-As Fanon points out, it is with him (oppressor) with whom the oppressed learns to torture. With a subtle difference in this learning: the oppressor learns by torturing the oppressed. The oppressed, to be tortured by the oppressor.
33-I do not understand human existence and the necessary struggle to improve it without hope and without a dream.
34-The more we are able to become children, to keep ourselves childish, the more we can understand why we love the world and are open to understanding, to understanding; When we kill our inner child, we are no longer.
35-The oppressors do not favor the promotion of the community as a whole, but rather select leaders.
36-One should try to live with others in solidarity... only through human communication can life find meaning.
37-Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love that this situation made impossible. If I do not live the world, if I do not love life, if I do not like people, I can not enter into dialogue.
38-To assert that men and women are people and as persons should be free, and yet do nothing tangible to make this statement a reality, it is a farce.
39-Liberating education is an act of cognition, not the transfer of information.
40-Nobody is born completely formed: it is through our own experience in the world that we become what we are.
41. One of the most serious obstacles to the attainment of liberation is that the oppressive reality absorbs those included in it and acts to submerge the conscience of men in this way.
42-The tranquility of the oppressors, is based on how well people adapt to the world they have created, and how little they question it.
Language is never neutral.
44. This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become their heirs and form part of it.
45-While the oppressed continue to be unaware of the causes of their"fatalistic"condition, they accept"their exploitation."
46-No oppressive order could allow the oppressed to ask the question: Why?
47-The oppressed, as objects, as"things", have no ends, except those that the oppressors prescribe for them.
48-Oppression (supreme control) is necrophiliac; Is nourished by love of death, not of life.
49. Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic.
50-People's trust in leaders reflects the confidence of leaders in the people.
51-Reading is not walking in words; Is to take the soul of them.
52-Wash your hands in the face of conflicts between the powerful and the non-powerful, is to stand on the side of the powerful, not to be neutral.
53-From the beginning, the act of conquest, which reduces people to the condition of things, is necrophilia.
54-Revolution is born as a social entity within oppressive society.
55-Any situation in which some men prevent others from participating in the investigation process is violence; To alienate humans from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects.
56. Men and women seldom admit their fear of freedom openly, yet they tend rather to camouflage it (sometimes unconsciously) by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom.
57. I do not accept history as determinism. Embrace history as a possibility where we can demystify evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes neoliberal discourse at the end of this century.
No pedagogy that is truly liberating can remain aloof from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunate by presenting their models of emulation among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.
True generosity consists precisely in the struggle to destroy the causes that feed false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the"rejected of life,"to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in the effort that these hands, whether of individuals or entire populations, extend less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands that work and through work, transform the world.
60-I can not think for others or for others, or for others to think for me. Even if the thinking of people is superstitious or naive, it is only as they rethink their assumptions in action that can change. Produce and act on your own ideas, do not consume those of others.
61-The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to convey a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. The more consciously freedom assumes its necessary limits, the more authority it will have, ethically speaking, to continue the struggle in its own name.
62-But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of fighting for liberation, tend to turn themselves into oppressors, or"sub-oppressors." The very structure of his thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation for which it was formed. His ideal is to be men; But for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is his model of humanity.
In a situation of manipulation, the left is almost always tempted by a"rapid return to power,"the need to join with the oppressed is forgotten to forge an organization, and it is diverted into an impossible"dialogue"with the dominant elites . Thus they end up being manipulated by these elites, and it is not uncommon that he falls into an elitist game, which he calls"realism."
64-If I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but to transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, I have to make use of all the possibilities I have, not just to speak Of my utopia, but also to participate in practices consistent with it.
65-It is not the unloved who initiates disaffection, but he who can not love because he only loves himself. It is not the defenseless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation that engenders the"rejections of life." It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but tyrants. They are not those whose humanity has been denied, those who deny humanity, but those who denied humanity (which annuls theirs as well). Force is used not by those who have weakened under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong that has castrated them.
66. Every relationship of domination, exploitation, oppression is itself violence. It does not matter whether it is done through drastic means or not. It is, at the same time, a lack of love and an impediment to love. Obstacle to love insofar as the dominator and dominated, dehumanizing the former by excess and the latter by lack of power, become things. And things do not love.
67. Libertarian action must recognize this dependence as a weak point and must try, through reflection and action, to transform it into independence. However, even better-intentioned leaders can not grant independence as a gift. The liberation of the oppressed is a liberation of women and men, not of things. Consequently, while no one is freed by his own efforts alone, he is not freed by others either. Liberation, a human phenomenon, can not be achieved through semi - humans. Any attempt to treat people as semi - human only dehumanizes them.
68-One can not expect positive results from a program of educational or political action that does not respect the particular world view held by people. Such a program constitutes a cultural invasion, despite good intentions.
After all, the task of the humanists is surely not to confront their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the battlefield,"holding"the slogans first of one group and then the other . On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings,"holding"the oppressors within themselves, they can not be truly human.
70-Some may think that affirming the dialogue of the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world is naive and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other human beings.
Nobody teaches language to another. Language is a human invention that becomes socially and no one teaches it; All acquire language, create language. What one teaches the other is grammar. Even Syntax in certain dimensions is not taught, because the syntax of your analysis is the way that thinking is structured in the speech.
72-And to think simply about people, as do the dominators, without any self-surrender in that thought, to fail to think with the people, is a sure way to stop being a revolutionary leader.
73-The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and approved its guidelines, are afraid of freedom. Freedom would force them to expel this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
74. Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives serve, attempts to numb people so that they do not think. Indeed, if people join their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their appearance materialized in the revolution... One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate in individuals the bourgeois appetite for personal success . This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and, sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.
75-Apart from research, apart from praxis, individuals may not be truly human. Knowledge is obtained only through invention and re-invention, through the restless impatient, continuous and hopeful investigation of human beings in pursuit of the world, with the world and with others.
76-Education must begin with the solution of the student-teacher contradiction, by reconciling the poles of contradiction, so that both are both teachers and students.
It is absolutely essential for the oppressed to participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of transformation.
Manipulation,"sloganization", deposit of ideas, regimentation, and prescription can not be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are the components of the praxis of domination.
79-Our advanced technological society is making objects of us quickly and subtly; We are programmed in accordance with the logic of its system and as this happens, we are also being immersed in a new"culture of silence".
80- The more radical the person, the more fully he or she enters into reality and thus, knowing her better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world without veils. This person is not afraid to meet other people or enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself the holder of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; But he or she commits himself, within history, to fight at his side.
81. One of the basic questions we have to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into more revolutionary ones in the process of radical transformation of society. Merely rebel attitudes or actions are insufficient, even though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger. It is necessary to go beyond rebel attitudes to a more radical critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply denouncing injustice, but of making a new utopia known. The transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: it denounces the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society. On the basis of this knowledge, that is,"changing things is difficult but possible", we can plan our political-pedagogical strategy.
82-No doubt, nobody can look at the exclusive, individually. This solitary search could translate into a longer one, which is a way of being less. This search should be done with other beings who also seek to be more and in communion with other consciences, otherwise, it would make one's conscience the objects of others. It would"reify"consciences.
83. The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation and is not yet able to enter into communion with people, whom he or she still considers totally ignorant, are self-deluded seriously. The convert who approaches people, but is alarmed at every step they take, every doubt they express, and every suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose their"status,"remains nostalgic toward their origins.
84. Freedom is acquired through conquest, not as a gift. It must be carried out consistently and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal outside of man; Nor is it an idea that becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the pursuit of human realization.
85-No one leaves his world without being pierced by his roots, or with a vacuum cleaner for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a car soaked in our history, our culture; A memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes clear and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of adolescence; The reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and incomprehension, a sentence, a simple prayer, possibly already forgotten by the one who said it. A word that for so long tried to speak, always drowned in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected, which implies a lack of confidence in ourselves and also means the rejection of risk.
86-Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intention of reality, are the subjects, not only in the task of discovering reality and thus to know it critically, but in the task of recreating that knowledge. And as they attain this knowledge of reality through reflection and common action, they discover themselves as their permanent re-creators.
87. Dehumanization, although it is a concrete historical fact, is not a determined destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
88. The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly to have more as a privilege that dehumanizes others and themselves. They can not see that, in the selfish pursuit of having a possessing class, they drown in their own possessions, ceasing to"be"; They simply"have".
89. A non-authentic word, that which is capable of transforming reality, results when a dichotomy is imposed on its constituent elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection also suffers automatically; And the word becomes idle talk, in verbalism, in an alienated and alienating"blah." It becomes an empty word, one that can not denounce the world, denunciation is not possible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.
89- (The oppressors) Conditioned by the position of oppressing others, a situation different from their old scheme, seems oppression. Previously, they could eat, dress, wear footwear, have education, travel and listen to Beethoven; While millions did not eat, had no clothes, no shoes, no education, no less traveled or listened to Beethoven.
90. Until the revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression through the establishment of the liberation process, must face this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolutionary intention are conditioned by the myths of the old order, wanting their revolution to be private. The shadow of his former oppressor is still cast upon them.
91. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressors and oppressed is prescription. Each recipe represents the imposition of choice from one individual to another, transforming the consciousness of the prescribed person into one that fits the prescriber's consciousness. Therefore, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following the directives of the oppressor.
Generally, when the oppressed legitimately rebels against the oppressor, in whom he identifies oppression, he is described as violent, barbaric, inhuman, cold. It is that among the countless rights that is adjudged for itself, the dominating consciousness includes that of defining violence, characterizing it, locating it. And if this right assists you, with exclusivity, it will not be in itself where you will find the violence. He will not call himself violent. In truth, the violence of the oppressed, in addition to being merely a response in which it reveals the attempt to recover its humanity, is, in essence, what it received from the oppressor.
93-Because love is an act of courage, not fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are, the act of love is the commitment to their cause, the cause of liberation.
94. The fact that some members of the oppressed class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, they move from one pole of contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and it has been along Of the history of this struggle. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in people, which commits him in his struggle, than by a thousand actions in his favor, without trust. It happens, however, that as they cease to be indifferent exploiters or spectators, or simply the heirs of exploitation and pass by the exploited, they almost always carry with them the traces of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which Include a lack of confidence in people's ability to think, love and know. Consequently, these adherents to the cause of the people are constantly in danger of falling into a kind of generosity as evil as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify generosity. Our converts, on the contrary, truly have the desire to transform the unjust order; But because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. People are spoken of but not trusted; And trusting people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change.
95-I was maybe 19 years old. And I always remember it was a great feeling of happiness. Because of that, I told Myles that it was no different for me to read poetry or read Marx. I try to get the beauty in the same act of reading, you understand? This is for me something that many times teachers do not try to do.
96- (The myth of the absolutization of ignorance) supposes the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is making the decision to decree defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or have been born wise; In this way he defines others as alien entities. The words of their own class come to be the words"true", which imposes or tries to impose on others: the oppressed, whose words have been stolen. Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the capacity of others and consider them incompetent. Whenever they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guidance, order and command. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to. In these circumstances, dialogue is impossible.
"But you do not release someone alienating you. The true liberation, the process of humanization, is not to create another deposit in a person. Liberation is a praxis: action and reflection on the world in order to transform it. Those who are truly committed to the cause of liberation can not accept either the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel that is filled, or the use of banking (pedagogical methods) of domination (propaganda, slogans = deposits) in the name Of liberation.
98-How can I dialogue if I always project my ignorance on others and never perceive mine own? How can I dialogue if I am closed, and even offended, by the contribution of others? At the meeting point we are neither ignorant nor perfect wise; There are only people who are trying, together, to learn more than they now know.
"I like being human because, unfinished, I know I'm a con man, but, aware of the incompleteness, I know I can go further.
100-Such is the profound difference between the conditioned and the determinate, the difference between the unfinished, which is not known as such, and which, historically and socially, ascended to the possibility of incomplete knowledge.