Pedagogy of the Opressed Quotes

“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”.

“Those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly.”

“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”

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, and transferals of information.”

“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”

“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)”

“True generosity lies in striving so that these hands – whether of individuals or entire peoples – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world. This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them.”

“To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

″[The radical] is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed: but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”

“The oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers in the humanity of both.”

“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.’”

“People are fulfilled to the extent that they create their world (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labor”

“There’s no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”

“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”

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

“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.”

“The more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided… These focalized forms of action, by intensifying the focalized way of life of the oppressed (especially in rural areas), hamper the oppressed from perceiving reality and keep them isolated from the problems of oppressed men and women in rural areas.”

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”