Paulo Freire: extraits utiles

" The teachers talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the student with the contents of his narration- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. (…) Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns then into “containers”, into “receptacles” to be filled by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. Education thus become and act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education in which the scope of the action allowed to the student extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits. They do it, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store but in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through the invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world." in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968

"When we (teachers) try to be neutral, like Pilate, we support the dominant ideology. Not being neutral, education must be either liberating or domesticating. (Yet I also recognize that we probably never experience it as purely one or the other but rather a mixture of both.) Thus, we have to recognize ourselves as politicians. It does not mean that we have the right to impose on students our political choice. But we do have the duty not to hide our choice. Students have the right to know what our political dream is. They are then free to accept it, reject it, or modify it. Our task is not to impose our dreams on them, but to challenge them to have their own dreams, to define their choices, not just to uncritically assume them." in The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, 1985.

Pour davantage de textes et de discussions sur Freire voir Irène Pereira ici.