The 45 best quotes by Paulo Freire

We review the great famous quotes of the Brazilian pedagogue and educator.

Paulo Freire (1921 - 1997) was an influential pedagogue, educator and activist for the rights of the underprivileged. Born in Recife, Brazil, he is considered one of the most important educational theorists of the 20th century.

Paulo Freire had to deal with poverty from birth. This personal background helped him to build what in his adulthood would become his theory on education. He studied law, psychology and philosophy at the University of Recife. He worked with poor communities that he introduced to literacy with a method he created, which is considered a variant of liberation theology, since knowing how to read and write was a prerequisite for the right to vote in Brazil at the time.

Paulo Freire's famous quotes and phrases.

His legacy as a pedagogue goes beyond the boundaries of education. Paulo Freire was a global thinker, committed to his people and who took an active part in the literacy of excluded minorities.

In today's article we are going to know the best quotes by Paulo Freire.

1. What is important, however, is that the working classes continue to learn in the very practice of their struggle to establish the limits for their concessions, that is, that they teach the dominant classes the limits within which they can move.

Education should promote the respect of social and labor rights.

2. The professor's gesture was worth more than the grade of ten he gave my essay. The professor's gesture gave me a still obviously distrustful confidence that it was possible to work and produce. That it was possible to trust me, but that it would be just as wrong to trust beyond the limits as it was wrong at the time not to trust.

On the importance of positive reinforcement.

3. Education is an act of love, therefore, an act of courage.

Paulo Freire's beautiful phrase about teaching.

4. Accepting and respecting differences is one of those virtues without which listening is impossible.

Empathy, in short, should govern our communication.

5. Pedagogy of the oppressed ceases to be the pedagogy of the oppressed and becomes the pedagogy of people in the process of permanent liberation.

On its pedagogical proposal.

6. Their ideal (of the oppressed) is, really, to be men, but for them, to be men, in the contradiction in which they have always been and whose overcoming is not clear to them, is equivalent to being oppressors. These are their testimonies of humanity.

Famous quote to reflect on the relations of domination.

7. My vision of literacy goes beyond ba, be, bi, bo, bu. Because it implies a critical understanding of the social, political and economic reality in which the literate is.

The depth of his philosophy is reflected in this reflection.

8. No one has freedom in order to be free, but because he is not free, he struggles to achieve his freedom.

Paradox to keep in mind. Free is he who struggles to be free.

9. The oppressed have to be the example of themselves, in the struggle for their redemption.

Very much in line with the previous sentence.

10. In the "banking" vision of education, "knowledge", knowledge, is a donation from those who judge themselves wise to those who judge themselves ignorant.

On the commodification of certain educational practices.

11. Education, as a practice of domination that we have been criticizing, maintaining the naivety of the educated, what it intends, within its ideological framework, is to indoctrinate them in the sense of their accommodation to the world of oppression.

Education without redemption is mere indoctrination.

12. Education as a practice of freedom, contrary to that which is a practice of domination, implies the negation of the abstract man, isolated, loose, detached from the world, as well as the negation of the world as a reality absent from men.

Gregariousness is part of the consumer culture imposed by capitalism.

13. Education is constantly remaking itself in praxis. To be, it has to be being.

An essential characteristic of teaching practice.

14. True education is praxis, reflection and action of man on the world to transform it.

The motives of the educational act.

15. Sectarianism creates nothing because it does not love.

Dogmatic people do not know how to contribute valid ideas or debate, according to Freire.

16. The more critical a human group is, the more democratic and permeable it is.

Reflection against democratic centralism.

17. Our presence in the world, which implies choice and decision, is not a neutral presence.

Everything we do is impregnated with a certain political vision.

18. Children need to be assured the right to learn to decide, which can only be done by deciding.

Childhood must be respected, and so must children's decisions, regardless of their economic resources.

19. Education is always a kind of theory of knowledge put into practice, it is naturally political, it has to do with purity, never with puritanism, and it is, in itself, an experience of beauty.

Paulo Freire's masterful philosophical phrase.

20. Existence is life that knows itself to be such, that recognizes itself as finite, unfinished; that moves in time-space subjected to the intervention of the existent.

21. As a presence in history and in the world, I fight hopefully for dreams, for utopia, for hope, with a view to a critical pedagogy. And my struggle is not in vain.

An ethical struggle through praxis.

22. Education is freedom.

Perhaps the most remembered phrase of the Brazilian pedagogue.

23. Only the power that arises from the weakness of the oppressed will be strong enough to liberate everyone.

On the power of the oppressed masses.

24. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not as a gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly.

No civil conquest was made in deference to the oppressors.

25. Jaspers said: "I am insofar as others are also. Man is not an island, he is communication. So there is a close relationship between communion and search.

Philosophical reflection about our personality based on interpersonal relationships.

26. Looking at the past should only be a means to understand more clearly what and who we are, in order to build more intelligently the future.

A phrase about time.

27. Language is never neutral.

It always has ideological and political connotations, according to Freire.

28. People's trust in leaders reflects the leaders' trust in the people.

About good politicians.

29. It is not the unloved who initiates disaffection, but the one who cannot love because he only loves himself.

Narcissism leads to unhappiness.

30. Men are not formed in silence, they are formed in words, in work, in action, in reflection.

On the contextual variables of the learning of each individual.

31. Narration, which has the teacher as its subject, directs the students towards the mechanical memorization of the content that is narrated... the narration turns them into vessels to be filled by the teacher.

A critique of the rote system of teaching.

32. There is no dialogue without humility, nor without a strong and unshakable faith in human beings.

A sample of his philanthropy.

33. There is no life without correction, without rectification.

To know how to forgive and to forgive oneself is absolutely essential.

34. No one person is ignorant of everything. No one knows everything. We all know something. We are all ignorant of something. That is why we are always learning.

We are all capable and good at some facets of life.

35. The reading of the world precedes the reading of the word.

To know in order then to reflect.

36. The more we are able to become children again, to remain childlike, the more we can understand why we love the world and are open to comprehension, to understanding; when we kill our inner child, we are no more.

The vitality of childhood is irreplaceable.

37. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not live from the world, if I do not love life, if I do not like people, I cannot enter into dialogue.

A phrase to apply to our daily life.

38. To educate is to imbue everything we do at every moment with meaning.

Nothing has pedagogical value if it does not explain or transmit an emotion.

39. I looked at a peasant and asked him how many children do you have? Three - he answered. Would you sacrifice two of your children by subjecting them to suffering, so that the third could study? No," he answered... "Then is it really God who does such things? It is not God who makes them. It is the boss.

A little story that should give us food for thought.

40. Sectarianism represents an obstacle to the emancipation of human beings.

To have a free and permeable thought allows a greater integration of knowledge and wisdom.

41. Every relationship of domination, exploitation, and oppression is in itself violence. It does not matter whether it is done through drastic means or not.

On the implicit forms of violence.

42. Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressive society.

In the line of thinkers such as Lenin, Paulo Freire establishes this characterization of social revolutions.

43. As long as the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their fatalistic condition, they accept their exploitation.

A kind of complacency of the slave.

44. Reading is not walking in words; it is taking the soul of them.

Reflection that gives meaning to the knowledge acquired.

45. Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, yet they tend rather to camouflage it by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom.

On the prevailing hypocrisy.