Catholic Socialists

"He is a very disciplined man. He treated people with respect. He wasn't lavish in his lifestyle but he did have clear standards. He dressed well, invariably in a dark suit with a silk tie and matching handkerchief, but without ostentation. He wore a good watch but nothing flashy. You could tell that money and acquisitiveness were not part of his motivation. There was another motive that drove him."

"Mugabe has presided over the destruction of a nation. The country boasts great natural resources and rich farming land that once made it one of the most prosperous countries in Africa — but now there are frequent food shortages, and raging inflation. In 2008, Mugabe lost an election but he consolidated his tyranny and defied the world, using widespread murder, torture, arrests, violence and election fraud."

"In 1984 Mugabe effectively established a one-party tyranny. He became the country’s first executive president in 1987, and subsequent elections have been characterized by widespread intimidation and violence. Mugabe has also encouraged his paramilitaries and thuggish war veterans to seize the remaining land still held by whites, and the resulting chaos has led to a catastrophic decline in agricultural output. In recent years, the black community has also suffered displacement following large-scale schemes to destroy shanty towns in areas where the opposition is strongest. Despite the opposition of the Movement for Democratic Change, corruption and intimidation ensured that Mugabe’s party managed to hold onto to its grip on power in the elections of 2000 and 2002. Meanwhile, any sign of dissent was mercilessly suppressed by his secret police, the Central Intelligence Organization."

"Seeking refuge in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Mengistu Haile Mariam found a man after his own heart. For Mugabe is responsible for the murder. of thousands in the Matabeleland massacres, and for plunging his country into a state of economic and political despair. Mugabe had all the credentials to be a hero for Zimbabwe’s black majority. From the 1960s he became a key figure in the opposition to the minority white rulers of the country, then known as Rhodesia, and was imprisoned for ten years for subversion. In 1975 he emerged as the leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which launched a guerrilla war against the white regime. When in 1980 peace was restored and black-majority rule instituted, Mugabe was elected prime minister, Initially he proceeded cautiously, seeking a broad base of support among both whites and blacks, but before long he moved against his black rival, Joshua Nkomo, who spoke for the Ndebele people, while Mugabe derived his support from the majority Shona tribe. As tribal tensions increased, clashes in Ndebele areas such as Matabeleland were dealt with bloodily by Mugabe’s troops."

"The excess of power which has characterized our culture from the start created on the one hand an almost masochistic desire to submit to that power and on the other a desire to be all-powerful. This habit of submission led men to adapt and adjust to their circumstances, instead of seeking to integrate themselves with reality. Integration, the behavior characteristic of flexibly democratic regimes, requires a maximum capacity for critical thought. In contrast, the adapted man, neither dialoguing nor participating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and acritical frame of mind."

"Men are defeated and dominated, though they do not know it; they fear freedom, though they believe themselves to be free. They follow general formulas and prescriptions as if by their own choice. They are directed; they do not direct themselves. Their creative power is impaired. They are objects, not Subjects."

"Unfortunately, what happens to a greater or lesser degree in the various "worlds" into which the world is divided is that the ordinary person is crushed, diminished, converted into a spectator, maneuvered by myths which powerful social forces have created. These myths turn against him; they destroy and annihilate him. Tragically frightened, men fear authentic relationships and even doubt the possibility of their existence."

"The integrated person is person as Subject. In contrast, the adaptive person is person as object, adaptation representing at most a weak form of self-defense. If man is incapable of changing reality, he adjusts himself instead. Adaptation is behavior characteristic of the animal sphere; exhibited by man, it is symptomatic of his dehumanization."

"Integration with one's context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that reality. To the extent that man loses his ability to make choices and is subjected to the choices of others, to the extent that his decisions are no longer his own because they result from external prescriptions, he is no longer integrated. Rather, he has adapted. He has "adjusted." Unpliant men, with a revolutionary spirit, are often termed "maladjusted.""

"Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders—in their communion, in their praxis—can this theory be built."

"This work deals with a very obvious truth: just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action."

"Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress."

"Organization is not only directly linked to unity, but a natural development of that unity. Accordingly, the leaders' pursuit of that unity is also an attempt to organize the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common task."

"In order for the oppressed to unite they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature."

"I urge my students que se aprovechen el momento of their college years; to look beyond conventional career-oriented concerns toward something deeper, toward the discomfort and wonder of real conciencia, which comes, as the educator Paulo Freire understood, through a self-determined, self-defined education."

"In our culture, so often, people teach beliefs, values, ideas, that have no relationship to how they live their lives. And each of the many times that I saw Paulo, I saw him exemplify again and again a unity between theory and praxis. And that has inspired me both as an intellectual and as a teacher to want to have that kind of unity, to believe and to know that it’s not a dream or a fantasy, but that you can teach by being in the world as much as you can by the books you write."

"(What do you think Paulo Freire would say about how his theories are used today?) I think he would be generally appalled by the current teach-to-test doctrines. (What do you think a Freirean university would look like today?) Instruction should reject the notion of education as pouring water into a vessel, in favor of engaging students in an active quest for understanding in a faculty-student cooperative environment. To a significant extent something like that is true of science teaching, at its best, sometimes elsewhere. (If students took just one thing away from reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed what would you hope it would be?) They should recognize that education should be a process of self-discovery, of developing one's own capacities and pursuing interests and concerns with an open and independent mind, all in cooperation with others."

"It is not possible to remake this country, to democratize it, humanize it, make it serious, as long as we have teenagers killing people for play and offending life, destroying the dream, and making love unviable. If education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either."

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

"If education is the relation between Subjects in the knowing process mediated by the knowable object, in which the educator permanently reconstructs the act of knowing, it must then be problem-posing. The task of the educator is to present to the educatees as a problem the content which mediates them, and not to discourse on it, give it, extend it, or hand it over, as if it were a matter of something already done, constituted, completed, and finished."

"The best student in physics or mathematics, at school or university, is not one who memorizes formulae but one who is aware of the reason for them. For students, the more simply and docilely they receive the contents with which their teachers "fill" them in the name of knowledge, the less they are able to think and the more they become merely repetitive. The best philosophy student is not one who discourses, "ipsis verbis," on the philosophy of Plato, Marx, or Kant but one who thinks critically about their ideas and takes the risk of thinking too."

"Knowing is the task of Subjects, not of objects. It is as a subject, and only as such, that a man or woman can really know. In the learning process the only person who really learns is s/he who appropriates what is learned, who apprehends and thereby re-invents that learning; s/he who is able to apply the appropriated learning to concrete existential situations. On the other hand, the person who is filled by another with "contents" whose meaning s/he is not aware of, which contradict his or her way of being in the world, cannot learn because s/he is not challenged."

"Knowing, whatever its level, is not the act by which a subject transformed into an object docilely and passively accepts the contents others give or impose on him or her. Knowledge, on the contrary, necessitates the curious presence of subjects confronted with the world. It requires their transforming action on reality. It demands a constant searching. It implies invention and reinvention. It claims from each person a reflection on the very act of knowing."

"As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible."

"How can the oppressed, as divided unauthentic beings, participate in the pedagogy of their liberation?"

"This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity."

"The oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle."

"The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor."

"The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood.'"

"They have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class."

"The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors"

"The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves."

"Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed."

"Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.'"

"The object of a dialogical-libertarian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality."

"The behavior and reactions of the oppressed, which lead the oppressor to practice cultural invasion, should evoke from the revolutionary a different theory of action. What distinguishes revolutionary leaders from the dominant elite is not only their objectives, but their procedures."

"Finally, cultural revolution develops the practice of permanent dialogue between leaders and people and consolidates the participation of the people in power."

"I interpret the revolutionary process as dialogical cultural action which is prolonged in 'cultural revolution' once power is taken. In both stages a serious and profound effort at conscientização—by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects—is necessary."

"The culture of the dominant class hinders the affirmation of men as beings of decision."

"The participants begin to realize that if their analysis of the situation goes any deeper they will either have to divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them. Divesting themselves of and renouncing their myths represents, at that moment, an act of self-violence. On the other hand, to reaffirm those myths is to reveal themselves."

"The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in school, where students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think."

"For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority."

"Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems."

"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success."

"For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in a revolution. Whether one calls this correct thinking 'revolutionary consciousness' or 'class consciousness,' it is an indispensable precondition of revolution. The dominant elites are so well aware of this fact that they instinctively use all means, including physical violence, to keep people from thinking."

"People are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world (which is a human world), and create it with their transforming labor. The fulfillment of humankind as human beings lies, then, in the fulfillment of the world. If for a person to be in the world of work is to be totally dependent, insecure, and permanently threatened—if their work does not belong to them—the person cannot be fulfilled. Work that is not free ceases to be a fulfilling pursuit and becomes an effective means of dehumanization."

"The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders."

"As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power."

"It is accomplished by the oppressors depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo."

"The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given—something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt."