I leave you the best phrases of Paulo Freire, one of the most influential educators in history, about education, the oppressed, freedom, life, children, pedagogy, humanity and much more.
Born in Brazil in 1921, Paulo Freire witnessed the reality of a region and a world that was still debated between some dominant classes and others that were dominated (a phenomenon that continues today).
According to Freire, the division of classes and the maintenance of the status quo is no accident, and has its roots in the cultural education that the citizens of the world receive. Through his work, he exposes the causes of the problem and proposes a series of solutions, applicable to the educational system per se.
His ideas and thoughts, considered subversive, led him into exile after the 1964 military coup. Refugee in Chile, he continued his work as an educator and philosopher, participating in different educational and governmental plans.
Later, his book "Education as a practice of freedom", obtained such relevance that he was invited as a professor at Harvard University.
After his exile, he returned to Brazil, where he continued working for education as he conceived it, receiving in 1986 the Nobel Prize for "Peace and Education" from UNESCO.
Today, unfortunately, his ideas are still valid, being proof of the need we have as a society to rethink our education.
In her quest to discover the causes of this inequality, she found valuable clues and answers and developed a line of thought in which she defended education as the main tool for social transformation.
You may also be interested in these phrases about education.
Your best quotes
-Education is freedom.
-I am an educator who thinks globally.
-Education is an act of love.
-If I cannot stimulate impossible dreams, then neither should I deny the right to dream to the one who dreams.
-The oppression is fed by the love of death and not by the love of life.
-Changing is difficult but it is possible.
-The joy does not come to meet the discovery, but is part of the search process.
-There is no such thing as knowing less. There are simply different types of knowledge.
-The terrible consequences of negative thinking are perceived very late.
-I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but to transform it.
-No one educates anyone, no one educates himself, men educate each other through the mediation of the world.
-If the structure does not allow a dialogue, the structure must be changed.
-Glorifying democracy and silencing the people is a farce; giving a speech of humanism and denying people is a lie.
-Only the power that arises from the weakness of the oppressed will be strong enough to liberate everyone.
-True generosity consists precisely in the struggle to destroy the causes that feed false charity.
-The liberation is a praxis: action and reflection on the world in order to transform it.
-Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, tries to anesthetize people so that they do not think.
-The oppressed, after having internalized the image of the oppressor and approved his guidelines, are afraid of freedom.
-Freedom is acquired through conquest, not as a gift. It must be carried out consistently and responsibly.
-One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressors and oppressed is prescription.
-How can I dialogue if I always project my ignorance on others and never perceive my own?
-The leaders who do not act in a dialogic way, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize people, they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
-To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects.
-Oppression is domestication.
-The conscience is the constant presentation of reality.
-I know that things can even get worse, but I also know that it is possible to intervene to improve them.
-The liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women about their world in order to transform it.
-Jaspers said: "I am to the extent that others are also." Man is not an island, he is communication. So there is a close relationship between communion and seeking.
-People educate each other, through the mediation of the world.
-The sectarian rightist wants to slow down the historical process, domesticate time and therefore, domesticate men and women.
-The search for full humanity cannot be carried out in an isolated or individualistic way, but in communion and solidarity.
-In order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.
-The pedagogy of the oppressed, ceases to be of the oppressed and becomes the pedagogy of men in the process of permanent liberation.
- Objectivity cannot be conceived without subjectivity.
-Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle.
-The crowd is always wrong.
-The word is not a privilege of a few people, but the right of all people.
-The educator has a duty not to be neutral.
-The greatest, humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves.
-Looking at the past should only be a means to understand more clearly what and who we are, to be able to build the future more intelligently.
-I don't understand human existence and the necessary struggle to improve it without hope and without a dream.
-The oppressors do not favor the promotion of the community as a whole, but rather select leaders.
-One should try to live with others in solidarity… only through human communication can life find meaning.
-Free education consists of an act of cognition, not the transfer of information.
-No one is born fully formed: it is through our own experience in the world that we become what we are.
-The tranquility of the oppressors is based on how well people adapt to the world they have created, and how little they question it.
-The language is never neutral.
-This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are part of it.
-As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their fatalistic condition, they accept their exploitation.
-No oppressive order could allow the oppressed to ask themselves the question: Why?
-The oppressed, as objects, as "things", have no ends, except those that the oppressors prescribe for them.
-The critical conscience, they say, is anarchic.
-The trust of the people in the leaders reflects the trust of the leaders in the people.
-Reading is not walking in words; is to take their soul.
-Washing one's hands in the face of conflicts between the powerful and the not powerful is to stand on the side of the powerful, it is not to be neutral.
-The revolution was born as a social entity within the oppressive society.
-Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however they tend rather to camouflage it, by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom.
-No pedagogy that is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed, treating them as unfortunate.
-True generosity consists precisely in the struggle to destroy the causes that feed false charity.
-I cannot think for others or without others, nor that others think for me.
-It is not the unloved one who initiates disaffection, but the one who cannot love because he only loves himself.
-Any relationship of domination, exploitation, oppression, is itself violence. It doesn't matter if it is done through drastic means or not.
-If the nature of the human being is respected, then the teaching of the contents cannot be taken away from the moral formation of the student.
-There is no teaching without research, and no research without teaching.
-Instead of communicating, the teacher makes deposits that students receive, memorize, and repeat over and over again.
-Education is transformed into an act of depositing, where the students are the depositories and the teacher is the one who deposits.
-Men are not formed in silence, they are formed in words, in work, in action, in reflection.
-I like being a man, being a person, because I know that my passage through this world is not something that is predetermined. I know that my destiny is not a piece of information but something that must be realized.
-Teaching is not a simple transfer of knowledge, it is creating possibilities for the own production or construction of knowledge.
-Accept and respect the differences of each one of us, is one of the virtues without which "listening" does not exist.
-The word is a place of reunion and recognition of oneself.
- Any book requires a simple thing: that the reader or the reader is delivered to the book of critical form.
-Stop life, by reducing human beings to simple things, alienate them, mystify them, violate them, is an attitude typical of the oppressors.
-Sectarianization turns reality into something false.
-Sectarianization represents an obstacle to the emancipation of human beings.
-The narration, which has the teacher as its subject, directs the students towards the mechanical memorization of the content that is narrated… the narration turns them into containers that the teacher must fill.
-In the conception of banking education, the educator is the one who has the knowledge, while the students are the ones who do not have the knowledge.
-In the banking concept of education the educator is the one who speaks, while the students listen to what he says.
-In the banking conception of education the educator is the subject of the education process, while the learners are considered simple objects.
-There is no dialogue if there is no humility, nor if there is not a strong and unwavering faith in human beings.
-What is being a peasant? It is not having an education, it is working from sunrise to sunset without hope for a better day. And why is that the life of the peasant? Because that's how God wants it. Who is God? He is the father of us all.
-I looked at a peasant and asked him how many children do you have? Three - he replied. Would you sacrifice two of your children by subjecting them to sufferings, so that the third could study? No - he answered… then is it really God who does these things?… No. It is not God who does them. It is the pattern.
-When I say man, the woman is included. And why don't men feel included when it is said: women are determined to change the world?
-How do I justify that a room where there are two hundred women and one man, I still have to say: "they are all excellent workers"? This is not really a grammatical problem, but an ideological problem.
-I began to refer to women and men, or to human beings. And sometimes I choose to make the phrase look ugly to make my rejection of macho language explicit.
-Rejecting the macho ideology, implies redirecting the language. Changing language is part of the process to change the world.
-The student begins to recognize himself by knowing the objects, discovering that he has the skills to be able to know. The learner needs to become an learner, understanding that he is a subject and not an object that receives the educator's discourse.
-There is no life without correction, without rectification.
-No person ignores everything. Nobody knows everything. We all know something. We are all ignorant of something. That is why we always learn.
-If education alone does not transform society, without it society does not change either.
-Humility expresses one of the strange certainties of which I am sure: that no one is superior to anyone.
-I am an intellectual who is not afraid to be loving. I love all people and I love the world. That is why I fight for social injustice to be implanted before charity.
-It is not enough to know how to read that “Eva saw the grape”. It is necessary to understand what position Eva occupies within her social context, who works to produce the grapes and who benefits from this work.
-Education is to impregnate with meaning everything we do at all times.
-Every morning a yesterday is created, through a today… we have to know what we were, to know what we will be.
-The reading of the world precedes the reading of the word.
-The need to promote division to facilitate the maintenance of the oppressive state is manifested in all the actions of the ruling class.
-The true education is not the one carried out by A for B or by A on B; true education is that which is carried out from A to B, together with the mediation of the world.
-No one teaches the language to another. Language is a human invention that is made socially and nobody teaches it; everyone acquires the language, creates the language. What one teaches the other is grammar.
-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.
-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 the radical transformation of society.
-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 continues to consider totally ignorant, are seriously self-deceiving.
-Dehumanization, although it is a concrete historical fact, is not a specific destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
-Love is an act of courage, not fear, it is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are, the act of love is commitment to their cause, the cause of liberation.
-Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love that this situation made impossible. If I don't live off the world, if I don't love life, if I don't like people, I can't enter into dialogue.
-Affirming that men and women are people and as people should be free, and yet not doing anything tangible to make this statement a reality, is a farce.
-The more we are able to become children again, to remain childish, the more we can understand why we love the world and are open to understanding, understanding; when we kill our inner child, we are no more.
-The teacher is, of course, an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile and shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for students to become themselves.