The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.
This is the sense in which I am obliged to be a listener. To listen to the student’s doubts, fears, and incompetencies that are part of the learning process. It is in listening to the student that I learn to speak with him or her.
I am an educator who thinks globally.
It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.
No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
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.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.
Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause – the cause of liberation.
Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.
To speak a true word is to transform the world.
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them.
It doesnt hurt to repeat here the statement, still rejected by many people in spite of its obviousness, that education is a political act.
There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
Educators need to know what happens in the world of the children with whom they work. They need to know the universe of their dreams, the language with which they skillfully defend themselves from the aggressiveness of their world, what they know independently of the school, and how they know it.
I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.
Coherently democratic authority carries the conviction that true discipline does not exist in the muteness of those who have been silenced but in the stirrings of those who have been challenged, in the doubt of those who have been prodded, and in the hopes of those who have been awakened.
What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?
Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.