1001Philosophers

Paulo Freire Quotes on Knowledge

Paulo Freire (1921–1997), the Brazilian educator whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) gave twentieth-century educational philosophy its most influential critique of what he called the banking model of education, defended the case that genuine knowledge cannot be transmitted from a teacher who possesses it to a student who does not, but can only emerge through the dialogical engagement of co-investigators with their shared world. The framework treats the literacy work Freire pioneered in northeastern Brazil as inseparable from the parallel cognitive process of conscientização — the progressive awakening of critical consciousness through which the previously unquestioned conditions of the learner's social existence become available as objects of analysis and transformative action.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Paulo Freire:

    “Education is never neutral; it is either domesticating or liberating.”

  • Attributed to Paulo Freire:

    “Reading the world precedes reading the word.”

  • “The Banking Concept of Education”

    Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.
  • “The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.”

    Wikiquote
  • “The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.”

    on the oppressed
  • “The oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.”

    Wikiquote

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