Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, " and practice, pure activism.
It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects that must be saved from a burning building.
What if we discover that our present way of life is irreconcilable with our vocation to become fully human?
Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood
Dialogue cannot exist without humility.
One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.
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. The more completely they accept the passive role impressed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
The world is split between those who do not sleep because they are hungry and those who do not sleep because they are afraid of those who are hungry.
The earliest language was body language and, since this language is the language of questions, if we limit the questions, and if we only pay attention to or place values on spoken or written language, then we are ruling out a large area of human language.
No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.
Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
... teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from which results machinelike memorization, which I have already criticized. Critical study correlates with teaching that is equally critical, which necessarily demands a critical way of comprehending and of realizing the reading of the word and that of the world, the reading of text and of context.
Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.
The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.
Within the word we find two dimensions-reflection and action. If one is sacrificed even in part, the other immediately suffers. To speak a true word is to transform the world.
Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.
As one might expect, authoritarianism will at times cause children and students to adopt rebellious positions, defiant of any limit, discipline, or authority. But it will also lead to apathy, excessive obedience, uncritical conformity, lack of resistance against authoritarian discourse, self-abnegation, and fear of freedom.
To speak a true word is to transform the world.
There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. 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.
Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.
Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.
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