Paulo Freire (1921 – 1997)
Brazilian educator and theorist of critical pedagogy.
"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing."
"They have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class."
"In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they existin the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation."
"It is when the majorities are denied their right to participate in history as Subjects that they become dominated and alienated."
"How can the oppressed, as divided unauthentic beings, participate in the pedagogy of their liberation?"
"It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education."
"Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world."
"The revolutionary's role is to liberate, and to be liberated, with the people--not to win them over."
"Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."
"Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue."
"For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking."
"One might say they failed to perceive the untested feasibility lying beyond the limit-situations which engendered their needs."
"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success."
"The object of a dialogical-liberterian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality."
"As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power."
"The dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-teachers in pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about."
"Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world."
"Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries"; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation - the process of humanization - is not another deposit to be made in men."
"Organization is not only directly linked to unity, but a natural development of that unity. Accordingly, the leaders' pursuit of that unity is also an attempt to organize the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common task."
"The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in school, where students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think."