Honoring Paulo Friere

I’ve been working here in Massachusetts to build the Poor People Campaign’s Popular Political Education Committee.  In doing so I have been looking back at my favorite  Paulo Friere quotes: Here are my top five, at least for this purpose.

1. “education is freedom.”  2) “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”    3) “The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual 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.” 4)“Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.” and 5)“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”― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed