Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"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."

"In the process of the ongoing education of teachers, the essential moment is that of critical reflection on one's practice."

"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."

"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."

"Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs."

"Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading for hours on end, slaves to the text, fearful of taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from memory, fail to make any concrete connections between what they have read and what is happening in the world, the country, or the local community. They repeat what has been read with precision but rarely teach anything of personal value."

"In their turn, good listeners can speak engagedly and passionately about their own ideas and conditions precisely because they are able to listen."

"It is absurd for teachers to imagine that they are engaged in right thinking and at the same time to relate to the student in a patronizing way."

"It is absolutely essential that the oppressed participate in the revolutionary process with an increasingly critical awareness of their role as subjects of the transformation."

"It is essential for the oppressed to realize that when they accept the struggle for humanization they also accept, from that moment, their total responsibility for the struggle."

"It is impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school."

"It is important to be constantly vigilant and rigorously evaluate any practice in the light of common sense."

"It is also false to consider seriousness and joy to be contradictory, as if joy were the enemy of methodological rigor."

"It is accomplished by the oppressors depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo."

"It is necessary to trust in the oppressed and in their ability to reason."

"It is not systematic education which somehow molds society, but, on the contrary, society which, according to its particular structure, shapes education in relation to the ends and interests of those who control the power in that society."

"It is when the majorities are denied their right to participate in history as Subjects that they become dominated and alienated."

"It ought to be an integral part of our teacher preparation to discuss the qualities that are indispensable for our teaching practice, even though we know that these qualities are created by that practice itself."

"It's in making decisions that we learn to decide."

"It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education."

"It's no sin to make a critical study of Brazil's reality. A small percentage own land. Most people don't."

"It's really not possible for someone to imagine himself/herself as a subject in the process of becoming without having at the same time a disposition for change. And change of which she/he is not merely the victim but the subject."

"Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

"Just as it is important in Latin America to discuss ideas that come from North America, I think it is interesting for North Americans to discuss ideas that come from Latin America or Africa and do not insert themselves into capitalist interests."

"Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one."

"Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it."

"Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future."

"Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more--always more--even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have."

"Manipulation, sloganizing, depositing, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are the components of the praxis of domination."

"No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so."

"No one can be in the world, with the world, and with others and maintain a posture of neutrality. I cannot be in the world decontextualized, simply observing life."

"No one suddenly becomes mature at twenty-five years of age. Either we become mature with each day that passes or we do not."

"One might say they failed to perceive the untested feasibility lying beyond the limit-situations which engendered their needs."

"One of the essential tasks of the teaching process is to introduce the learners to the methodological exactitude with which they should approach the learning process."

"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success."

"No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?"

"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."

"One of the pedagogical tasks for parents is to make it clear to their children that parental participation in the decision-making process is not an intrusion but a duty, so long as the parents have no intention of deciding on behalf of their children. The participation of the parents is most opportune in helping the children analyze the possible consequences of the decision that is to be taken."

"Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders--in their communion, in their praxis--can this theory be built."

"Only the person who listens patiently and critically is able to speak with the other, even if at times it should be necessary to speak to him or her."

"Only through communication can human life hold meaning."

"Organization is not only directly linked to unity, but a natural development of that unity. Accordingly, the leaders' pursuit of that unity is also an attempt to organize the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common task."

"People will be truly critical if they live in the plenitude of the praxis, that is, if their action encompasses a critical reflection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from a purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level, one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality."

"Oppression?overwhelming control?is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life."

"Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation."

"Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently."

"Proper to right thinking is a willingness to risk, to welcome the new, which cannot be rejected simply because it is new no more than the old can be rejected because chronologically it is no longer new."

"Reflection upon situationality is reflection about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means which people discover each other to be 'in a situation.'"

"Respect for the autonomy and dignity of every person is an ethical imperative and not a favor that we may or may not concede to each other."