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Famous Paulo Freire Quotes

“The fact that one person imagines a "well-behaved" present and the other a predetermined future does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spectators (the former expecting that the present will continue, the latter waiting for the already "known" future to come to pass). On the contrary, closing themselves into "circles of certainty" from which they cannot escape, these individuals "make" their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction. Nor is it the truth of men and women who fight side by side and learn together how to build this future—which is not something given to be received by people, but is rather something to be created by them. Both types of sectarian, treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, end up without the people—which is another way of being against them.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors' power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“Any attempt to 'soften' the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their 'generosity', the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this 'generosity', which is nourished by death, despair and poverty. That is why its dispensers become desperate at the slightest threat to the source of that false generosity.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as people - not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the 'rejects of life.' It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well). Force is used not by those who have become weak under the preponderance of the strong, but by the strong who have emasculated them.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“The experience that makes possible the “breakthrough” is a “collective” experience. However, usually someone or another will, individually, put forward and explicate a new perception of this social reality. One of the fundamental tasks of the educator who is open-minded is to be attentive and sensitive to the way a given social group reads and re-reads its reality, so as to be able to stimulate progressively a generalized comprehension of this new reality.”

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Book:Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage
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“No que diz respeito às relações autoridade-liberdade, [...], corremos também o risco de, negando à liberdade o direito de afirmar-se, exacerbar a autoridade ou, atrofiando esta, hipertrofiar aquela. Em outras palavras, corremos o risco de cair seduzidos ou pela tirania da liberdade ou pela tirania da autoridade, trabalhando, em qualquer das hipóteses, contra a nossa incipiente democracia.”

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Book:Pedagogia de la esperanza
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“PAULO: [...] Não acredito na autolibertação. A libertação é um ato social. IRA: Não existe uma autoemancipação pessoal? PAULO: Não, não, não. Mesmo quando você se sente, individualmente, mais livre, se esse sentimento não é um sentimento social, se você não é capaz de usar sua liberdade recente para ajudar os outros a se libertarem através da transformação global da sociedade, então você só está exercitando uma atitude individualista no sentido do empowerment ou da liberdade.”

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Book:Miedo y osadía: la cotidianidad del docente que se arriesga a practicar una pedagogía transformadora
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“One of the most objectionable errors of political militants, especially those of the messianically authoritarian kind, has always been a total ignorance of grassroots comprehension of the world. Seeing themselves as bearers of the “truth” that no one can refuse, they regard their sublime task as one not of proposing some truth for consideration but of imposing it without question.”

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Book:Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage
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“é exatamente a sua politicidade, a sua impossibilidade de ser neutra, que demanda da educadora ou do educador sua eticidade. A tarefa da educadora ou do educador seria demasiado fácil se se reduzisse ao ensino de conteúdos que nem sequer precisariam de ser tratados assepticamente e assepticamente “transmitidos” aos educandos, porque, enquanto conteúdos de uma ciência neutra, já eram em si assépticos. O educador neste caso não tinha por que, ao menos, se preocupar ou se esforçar por ser decente, ético, a não ser quanto à sua capacitação. Sujeito de uma prática neutra, não tinha outra coisa a fazer senão “transferir conhecimento” também neutro.”

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Book:Pedagogia de la esperanza
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“Es por esto que [la educación liberadora] reconoce [a las personas] como seres que están siendo, como seres inacabados, inconclusos en y con una realidad que siendo historia es también tan inacabada como ellos. [...] De [la inconclusión de las personas y la conciencia que de ella tienen] que sea la educación un quehacer permanente. Permanente en razón de la inconclusión de los seres humanos y del devenir de la realidad.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls “realism.” Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution…One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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“It is truly difficult to make a democracy. Democracy, like arty dream, is not made with spiritual words but with reflection and practice. It is not what I say that says I am a democrat, that I am not racist or machista but what I do. What I say must not be contradicted by what I do. It is what I do that bespeaks my faithfulness or not to what I say.”

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Author:Paulo Freire
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“As one might expect, authoritarianism will at times cause children and students to adopt rebellious positions, defiant of any limit, discipline, or authority. But it will also lead to apathy, excessive obedience, uncritical conformity, lack of resistance against authoritarian discourse, self-abnegation, and fear of freedom.”

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Book:Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare Teach
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“No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.”

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Author:Paulo Freire
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“I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.”

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Book:Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare Teach
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“Finally, it is important to make it clear that imagination is not an exercise for those detached from reality, those who live in the air. On the contrary, when we imagine something, we do it necessarily conditioned by a lack in our concrete reality. When children imagine free and happy schools, it is because their real schools deny them freedom and happiness.”

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Author:Paulo Freire
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“... teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from which results machinelike memorization, which I have already criticized. Critical study correlates with teaching that is equally critical, which necessarily demands a critical way of comprehending and of realizing the reading of the word and that of the world, the reading of text and of context.”

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Book:Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare Teach
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“We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.”

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Author:Paulo Freire
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“A reader does not suddenly comprehend what is being read or studied, in a snap, miraculously. Comprehension needs to be worked forged, by those who read and study; as subjects of the action, they must seek to employ appropriate instruments in order to carry out the task. For this very reason, reading and studying form a challenging task, one requiring patience and perseverance.”

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Book:Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those who Dare Teach
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“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

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Book:The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation
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“Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.”

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Book:Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition
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