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.
Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.
Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage.
The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover thatin order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have ben set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.
Teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.
The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual.
Only through communication can human life hold meaning.
No reality transforms itself.
It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.
The educator has the duty of not being neutral.
It is not suprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings.
In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point.
Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.
The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of ‘correct thinking.’
The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given – something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.
One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.
The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures.
In order for the oppressed to unite they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature.
Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.
Love is an act of courage.