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.
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.
The more we become able to become a child again, to keep ourselves childlike, the more we can understand that because we love the world and we are open to understanding, to comprehension, that when we kill the child in us, we are no longer.
The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.
No matter how much someone may irritate me, I have no right to puff myself up with my own self-importance so as to declare that person to be absolutely incompetent, assuming a posture of disdain from my own position of false superiority.
Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.
It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished.
To teach is part of the very fabric of learning.
Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue.
Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.
Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.
To glorify democracy and to silence the people is a farce; to discourse on humanism and to negate people is a lie.
In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in 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.
Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.
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.
To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.
The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.