Remembering Paulo Freire

Humanization—man's historical vocation.

(Freire, 1970/1990, p. 73)

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impaitient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

(Freire, 1970/1990, p. 58)

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. AS they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permamnent re-creators.

(Freire, 1970/1990, p. 56)

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

(Freire, 1970/1990, p. 39)

The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a "circle of certainty" within which he also imprisons reality. On the contrary, the more radical he is, the more fully he enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he can better transform it. He is not afraid to meet the people or to enter in dialogue with them. He does not consider himself the proprietor of history or of men, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he does commit himself, within history, to fight at their side.

(Freire, 1970/1990, pp. 23-24)

Teachers have as much a right to fear as learners do. The educator is not invulnerable. He or she is as human as the learner.

(Freire, 1990/2005, p. 87)

Humility helps us to understand this obvious truth: No one knows it all; no one is ignorant of everything. We all know something; we are all ignorant of something. Without humility, one can hardly listen with respect to those one judges to be too far below one's own level of competence.

(Freire, 1990/2005, p. 72)

The more a reader makes him- or herself a real apprehender of the author's comprehension, all the more he or she will become a producer of text comprehension, to the extent that such comprehension becomes reader-created knowledge rather than knowledge that is deposited in the reader by the reading of the text.

(Freire, 1990/2005, p. 56)

Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself.

(Freire, 1970/1990, pp.77-78)

We must remember that there is a dynamic movement between thought language, and reality that, if well understood, results in a greater creative capacity. The more we become critical subjects concnerning the process of knowing, teaching, learning, reading, writing and studying.

(Freire, 1990/2005, p. 3)

It is impossible to teach without the courage to love, without the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love.

(Freire, 1990/2005, p. 5)