Read.

I have been reading We Make the Way By Walking, a spoken book by Paulo Freire and Myles Horton. After a long and disheartening discussion about education and social change last night, I read Chapter 5 with renewed hope and enthuse.

These are my favorite quotations by Paulo Freire:

"I hope that many of us are learning how difficult it is to make history, and how important it is to learn that we are being made by the history we make in the social process inside of history. Fortunately, I am not naively optimistic, idealistic, but I am critically optimistic...
We are in the sight of a process. I always say that the deepened transformation in society never arrived on a second Monday morning. Never. No, the radical transformation of society is a process, really, and it comes like this."

"If we could change a society like we can change the position of the furniture of this house, it would be fantastic. It would be just a question of muscular power, no? That is, I can take this chair and put it over there> We could change everything here in ten minutes. History is not like this. It takes time in history to make history. You cannot make it today, but the change comes up in all directions and dimensions of the life of society."

"It is a time of confrontation, this transition, the time of transition of the old society to a new one that does not exist yet, but it's being created with the confrontation of ghosts. There are many ghosts in society fighting against the dream of a much more open society. Generally revolutions have this in common. We cannot decide this period cannot exist. We have to understand that it exists historically, culturally, socially. We must fight also."

"One of the fears we have here as educators is the fear of experiencing new things, of exposing ourselves to mistakes. In the last analysis we have real freedom. We are afraid of risking. And it's impossible, just impossible, to create without risking. It's absolutely impossible, but it takes time to begin to risk."

"One of the most important tasks I think for a revolutionary government or a progressive government...is to think seriously about the formation of the educators. But understanding formation not as something that we do in some weekends or some semesters, but formation as a permanent process, and formation as being an exercise, a critical understanding of what we do. This is, getting the practice we have, the experience we have, and then reflecting on the experience and the practice in order to understand theoretically what it means."

"When I talked with [President Nyerere], he used to say to me, 'Paulo, it's not easy to put into practice the things we think about.' Yes, it is not easy, but it's not impossible. This is my conviction."