Paulo Freire Quotes about Reflection

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Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.

Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection.

Paulo Freire

Learning, Reflection, Understanding

Reflection and action must never be undertaken independently.

Paulo Freire

Reflection, Action, Discernment

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

Paulo Freire

Reflection, Names, People

Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.

Paulo Freire

Men, Reflection, Order

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.56, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, " and practice, pure activism.

Paulo Freire

Reflection, Practice, Requirements

Paulo Freire (2000). “Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage”, p.30, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Within the word we find two dimensions-reflection and action. If one is sacrificed even in part, the other immediately suffers. To speak a true word is to transform the world.

Paulo Freire

Reflection, Two, Suffering

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.63, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

It is truly difficult to make a democracy. Democracy, like arty dream, is not made with spiritual words but with reflection and practice. It is not what I say that says I am a democrat, that I am not racist or machista but what I do. What I say must not be contradicted by what I do. It is what I do that bespeaks my faithfulness or not to what I say.

Paulo Freire

Dream, Spiritual, Reflection

Libertarian action must recognize this dependence as a weak point and must attempt through reflection and action to transform it into independence. However, not even the best-intentioned leadership can bestow independence as a gift. The liberation of the oppressed is a liberation of women and men, not things. Accordingly, while no one liberates himself by his own efforts alone, neither is he liberated by others. Liberation, a human phenomenon, cannot be achieved by semihumans. Any attempt to treat people as semihumans only dehumanizes them.

Paulo Freire

Men, Reflection, People

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.47, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.

Paulo Freire

Teacher, Reflection, Reality

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.49, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.

Paulo Freire

Commitment, Reality, Reflection

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

Paulo Freire

Struggle, Reflection, Feminist

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.34, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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 reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

Paulo Freire

Independent, Reflection, Reality

Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.81, Bloomsbury Publishing USA