pedagogy Quotes

“Self-deprecation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion of the oppressors hold of them. So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything – that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive – that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness.”

“Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem posing education makes them critical thinkers.”

“Each [sectarian], however, as he revolves about ‘his’ truth, feels threatened if his truth is questioned. Thus, each considers anything that is not ‘his’ truth a lie. As the journalist Márcio Morcina Alves once told me, ‘They… suffer from an absence of doubt.’”

“The pedagogy of the oppressed[…] is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians.”

“Worse yet, it [banking model] turns them [students] into ‘containers’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are”

“And since people ‘receive’ the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because he or she is better ‘fit’ for the world”

“Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in the power to make and remake, to create and recreate, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is a privileged of an elite, but the birthright of all)”

“The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think”.

“Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”

“Many of these leaders, however (perhaps due to the natural and understandable biases against pedagogy) have ended up using the ‘educational’ methods employed by the oppressor. They deny pedagogical action in the liberation process, but they use propaganda to convince.”

“Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing,’ regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are component of the praxis of domination”