Leaders Who Do Not Act

Transformation Is Only Valid If It Is Carried Out With The People, Not For Them. Liberation Is Like A Childbirth, And A Painful One. The Person Who Emerges Is A New Person: No Longer Either Oppressor Or Oppressed, But A Person In The Process Of Achieving Freedom. It Is Only The Oppressed Who, By Freeing Themselves, Can Free Their Oppressors.

Educators Need To Know What Happens In The World Of The Children With Whom They Work. They Need To Know The Universe Of Their Dreams, The Language With Which They Skillfully Defend Themselves From The Aggressiveness Of Their World, What They Know Independently Of The School, And How They Know It.

Education As The Exercise Of Domination Stimulates The Credulity Of Students, With The Ideological Intent (often Not Perceived By Educators) Of Indoctrinating Them To Adapt To The World Of Oppression.

Education Either Functions As An Instrument Which Is Used To Facilitate Integration Of The Younger Generation Into The Logic Of The Present System And Bring About Conformity Or It Becomes The Practice Of Freedom, The Means By Which Men And Women Deal Critically And Creatively With Reality And Discover How To Participate In The Transformation Of Their World.

No One Can Learn Tolerance In A Climate Of Irresponsibility, Which Does Not Produce Democracy. The Act Of Tolerating Requires A Climate In Which Limits May Be Established, In Which There Are Principles To Be Respected. That Is Why Tolerance Is Not Coexistence With The Intolerable. Under An Authoritarian Regime, In Which Authority Is Abused, Or A Permissive One, In Which Freedom Is Not Limited, One Can Hardly Learn Tolerance. Tolerance Requires Respect, Discipline, And Ethics.