Paulo Freire

The educator has the duty of not being neutral. Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others.

It is exactly in these conditions—in the conditions of oppression—that the oppressed can come to understand the oppressors and their oppression.

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and liberatory pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis transform it. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation.

Men are not built in silence but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

This is why a truly liberating pedagogy, the pedagogy of freedom, must be praxis.

To be truly critical means to be able to transform the world.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.

The teacher is not a dispenser of knowledge but a facilitator of learning.

The banking concept of education denies praxis to the students.

Liberation is not a gift, but a conquest.

The greatest tragedy of man is that he is born for freedom, but lives in chains.

Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

The task of the oppressed is to discover that they are oppressed.

The educator's role is to help people come to see the world as a problem to be solved.

The teacher is not merely a transmitter of knowledge, but a co-creator of knowledge.

The oppressed must be the architects of their own liberation.