Paulo Freire Quotes

Whatever is the strongest power in society will obtain the governing authority; and a change in the political constitution cannot be durable unless preceded or accompanied by an altered distribution of power in society itself

'Prison Notebooks' gives me a basic understanding of how power can influence people through cultural products and intellectual groups, so they will voluntarily support the hegemony.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.

We have done a poor job educating people about education. Only when we have clarified that can we talk about how best to achieve it.

Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.

In every new generation, the impulses supposed to have been rooted out by discipline in the child break forth again when the struggle for existence - of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the state - begins. These passions are not transformed by the prevalent education of the day, but only repressed.

Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.

To make me believe that those men who have regulated education in our country have humanity in their hearts is to make me believe a lie.

What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?

The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and schools.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

We're living in a world of piranha economics in regard to education.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

...a state is not the same thing as a society ... A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.

The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we've taken this incredibly interesting subject - how the universe works - and made it boring.

The crowds, the praise, and the power are neither just nor unjust in themselves. As they are typically used in the schools, they represent the values of social order and of individual competitive achievement.

With no education, you have neocolonialism instead of colonialism, like you've got in Africa now and like you've got in Haiti. So what we're talking about is there has to be an educational program. That's very important.

We cannot, as a country, improve economically, socially, and culturally without quality education.

It's much easier to gain control over a mass population when you pit them against each other.

Most Americans, I don't think, could fathom the society that I grew up in. It is a completely different philosophy from America's. You are basically told what you can be by the educational system.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.