Education as the practice of freedom

Certain opressors change sides and join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation.

They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable p...

Education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Students become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.

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

The raison d’être of libertarian education lies in its drive towards reconciliation.

Education mu...

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the opressed to struggle against those who made them so.

In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), becom...

For the oppressors, “human beings” refers only to themselves; other people are “things”.

This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students).

The teacher talks about reality as if were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.

He expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the...

The interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the opressed, not the situation which oppresses them”.

The educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. People “receive” the world as passive entities. The educated individual is the adapt...

The pursuit of full humanity cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

Education as the practice of freedom- as opposed to education as the practice of domination- denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people.

Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.

The unfinished character pf human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing ...

Conditioned by the experience of opressing others, any situations other than their former seems to them like oppression.

Formerly they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, m...