As one might expect, authoritarianism will at times cause children and students to adopt rebellious positions, defiant of any limit, discipline, or authority. But it will also lead to apathy, excessive obedience, uncritical conformity, lack of resistance against authoritarian discourse, self-abnegation, and fear of freedom.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people.

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.

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.

Education is freedom. Education will teach you how to do it yourself as opposed to asking someone else to do it for you. And around it our own town... Freemanville!

... teaching cannot be a process of transference of knowledge from the one teaching to the learner. This is the mechanical transference from which results machinelike memorization, which I have already criticized. Critical study correlates with teaching that is equally critical, which necessarily demands a critical way of comprehending and of realizing the reading of the word and that of the world, the reading of text and of context.