Paulo Freire (1921 – 1997)
Brazilian educator and theorist of critical pedagogy.
"Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.
"The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'"
"Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building."
"Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs."
"It is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason."
"Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers."
"For them, having more is an inalienable right."
"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."
"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."
"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."