Pedagogy of Freedom Quotes

“Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“One of the basic questions that we need to look at is how to convert merely rebellious attitudes into revolutionary ones in the process of the radical transformation of society. Merely rebellious attitudes or actions are insufficient, though they are an indispensable response to legitimate anger. It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia. Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society. On the basis of this knowledge, namely, “to change things is difficult but possible,” we can plan our political-pedagogical strategy.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“It’s in making decisions that we learn to decide.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“true discipline does not exist in the muteness of those who have been silenced but in the stirrings of those who have been challenged,”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“I have a right to be angry, to show it and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle, just as I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle because I live in history at a time of possibility and not of determinism.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“The teacher who does not respect the student’s curiosity in its diverse aesthetic, linguistic, and syntactical expressions; who uses irony to put down legitimate questioning (recognizing of course that freedom is not absolute, that it requires of its nature certain limits); who is not respectfully present in the educational experience of the student, transgresses fundamental ethical principles of the human condition.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“The great challenge for the democratic-minded educator is how to transmit a sense of limit that can be ethically integrated by freedom itself. The more consciously freedom assumes its necessary limits, the more authority it has, ethically speaking, to continue to struggle in its own name.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“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.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“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.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“It's not possible to read critically if one treats reading as if it were a similar operation to buying in bulk. What's the point of boasting of having read twenty books-twenty books! Really reading involves a kind of relationship with the text, which offers itself to me and to which I give myself and through the fundamental comprehension of which I undergo the process of becoming a subject. While reading, I'm not just a captive of the mind of the text as if it were simply a product of its author. This is a vitiated form of reading that has nothing to do with thinking or teaching correctly.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“Não nego a competência, por outro lado, de certos arrogantes, mas lamento neles a ausência de simplicidade que, não diminuindo em nada seu saber, os faria gente melhor. Gente mais gente.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogia da Autonomia

“Opção por uma sociedade parcialmente independente ou opção por uma sociedade que se "descolonizasse" cada vez mais. Que cada vez mais cortasse as correntes que a faziam e fazem permanecer como objeto de outras, que lhe são sujeitos. Este é o dilema básico que se apresenta, hoje, de forma iniludível, aos países subdesenvolvidos — ao Terceiro Mundo. A educação das massas se faz, assim, algo de absolutamente fundamental entre nós. Educação que, desvestida da roupagem alienada e alienante, seja uma força de mudança e de libertação.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“the epitome of negation in the context of education is the stifling or inhibition of curiosity in the learner”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage

“Daí a crítica permanentemente presente em mim à malvadez neoliberal, ao cinismo de sua ideologia fatalista e a sua recusa inflexível ao sonho e à utopia.”
― Paulo Freire, Pédagogie de l'autonomie