The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
Paulo FreireRead
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information
Interpretation
Liberating education emphasizes understanding and critical thinking rather than just memorizing facts.
Paulo Freire's quote highlights the difference between traditional education, which often focuses on the rote transfer of information, and a more liberating form of education that encourages active engagement, critical thinking, and the development of consciousness among learners. This approach aims to transform learners into thinkers who understand and critique their world instead of simply absorbing information passively.
In practice
In a speech about reforming the education system, this quote could emphasize the need for more engaging teaching methods.
The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation?
Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality.
This is the sense in which I am obliged to be a listener. To listen to the student's doubts, fears, and incompetencies that are part of the learning process. It is in listening to the student that I learn to speak with him or her.
This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade
The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.
We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity β¦ by actually talking with them.
The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.
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