Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But the best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will all say we have done it ourselves.

It's necessary to laugh with the people because if we don't do that, we cannot learn from the people, and in not learning from the people we cannot teach them.

I remember that my mother used to say to me, after the death of my father, that my father always said to her, "This boy will become a subversive." He didn't say revolutionary. He used to say subversive. I liked it.

I learned when I was a child that a loving space is indispensable for development of the children.

The more we get this kind of alive love among parents, the more it's possible to help kids to grow up in good shape.

I'm much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my

Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all.

being a pro­gressive on one hand does not mean to be naive, but to make some decisions and then to risk the preservation of the revolution. On the other hand, being a progres­sive means to deepen the connection with the masses of people, means to respect the beliefs of the people, means to consult the people, means to start from the letters and words with which the people are starting the process of education.

Then, through this kind of very strong serious work, through a work that is at the same time tender and heavy and serious and rigorous, we need to shape, to reshape, to form permanently the teachers without manipulating them.

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.

I don't like the word training in English. Maybe it's a prejudice of mine, but I prefer formation, formation in French and foT1Tta(iio in Portuguese.

We must be free; we must be free to believe in freedom. Do you see this paradox? Without freedom it's difficult to understand freedom. On the other hand, we fight for freedom to the extent that we don't have freedom, but in fighting for freedom we discover how freedom is beautiful and difficult to be created, but we have to believe that it's possible.

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

When I talked with the presi­dent, 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.

There are many ghosts in society fighting against the dream of a much more open society

if we could do something over­night, it's not worth doing because if it's that simple and that easy, it'll take care of itself.

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.

It means to be patient, or the words I prefer, to be impatiently patient, in the process of struggling to change.

It is a center that wants to be a theoretical context inside of which the workers can make a critical reflection about what they do outside of the theoretical context.

The people in Nicara­gua are helping us in Brazil, are helping us as Latin Americans, and are helping you to the extent that you are also helping them. This is kind of a struggle here; on the one hand, you gave support to Nicaragua. On the other hand, you made an impression in the space inside of the country, do you see, and this is history.

Trying to co-opt is a kind of a struggle on behalf of those who have power to do so. It's a tac­tic; it's a moment of the struggle.

Does success mean that we're no longer subver­sive enough?

So the phrase I've always used when I talk is, "You have to bootleg education." You have to find a way to bootleg it. It's illegal, really, because it's not proper, but you do it any­way.

We have more space outside the system, but we also can create the space in­side of the subsystem or the schooling system in order to occupy the space. That is, I think politically, every time we can occupy some position inside of the subsystem, we should do so.

if you worked outside the system, you couldn't influence the system. The argument was that you could change the system. We concluded that reform within the sys­tem reinforced the system, or was co-opted by the system. Reformers didn't change the system, they made it more palatable and justified it, made it more humane, more intelligent

the dialecticity between patience and impatience.

My system is to make him thirsty, so he'll volunteer to drink.

the delicate relationship between teaching, giving knowl­edge, and learning knowledge

I think it's my responsi­bility to share what I believe in, not only in discussions but in the way I live and in the way the workshops run and in the way Highlander's run, the way life is.

The central meeting room at Highlander is circular in shape. Rock­ing chairs, a fireplace, and a spectacular view of the Smoky Mountains provide a comfortable atmosphere for workshops.

Starting from people's experiences, and not from our understanding of the world, does not mean that we don't want the people to come with us in order to go beyond us afterward

the quality of becoming more and more open to feel the feelings of others, to become so sensitive that we can guess what the group or one person is thinking at that moment.

they come absolutely convinced that the teacher has to give a class to them

You set the stage for doing something that they're uncomfortable with. You know they're uncomfortable with it, and you have to work through that business of getting them to be comfortable with trusting them­selves a little bit, trusting their peers a little bit

then they begin to see that you aren't going to play the role of an expert, except in the sense that you are the expert in how they're going to learn, not in what they're going to learn.

close enough to their expectation

You do have to make concessions like that

The more people partici­pate in the process of their own education, the more the people participate in the process of defining what kind of production to produce, and for what and why, the more the people participate in the development of their selves.

That was what they wanted. Now what we wanted in addition to that was to help them understand that they should work with a larger community. They should work with farmers, they should deal with integration, they should be part of the world. We had our own agenda.

They had to learn to think, make decisions-not learn gimmicks, not learn techniques, but learn how to think.

You've gotta have a structure that participants can feel comfortable with until they begin to have something to deviate from or add to

So we turned it all over to them, and they were in complete control. I mean they exercised that control.

of everyone united to get a grievance settled.

No matter where this kind of educator works, the great difficulty­or the great adventure!-is how to make education something which, in being serious, rigorous, methodi­cal, and having a process, also creates happiness and joy.

This transforms the practice of education into a kind of entertainment.

it's impossible for me in this kind of education to teach how to think unless. we are teaching something, some content to the students.

What Myles did was to touch their memory about a subject and to remake the road. I think that it's really impossible to teach how to think more critically by just making a speech about criti­cal thought

I mean what I'm doing with the mind is the same as nature does with the body. It's no different. I think you should stretch people to their limits and our limits

Money has to come from the system, and people that we identify with produce that wealth.

If I believe in social equality and don't practice it, then what I say is hollow. You have to have that kind of consis­tency.

You have to tie the practical with the visionary.

next is respect for people's abilities to learn and to act and to shape their own lives.

The third thing grows out of caring for people and having respect for people's ability to do things, and that is that you value their experiences.

Highlander can't be described as an organization because it isn't departmen­talized and mechanistically conceived. It's more of an organism, therefore it's hard to describe. It's a mosaic or a piece of weaving.

Highlander is a kind of a weaving of many colors, some blend and some clash, but you know it's alive.

Movements change what goes on and how things are organized.

We were part of the world but we had to start locally.

Authority is necessary to the educational process as well as necessary to the freedom of the stu­dents and my own. The teacher is absolutely necessary. What is bad, what is not necessary, is authoritarianism, but not authority.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to be­come themselves.

The people who use that label are people who unknowingly, for the most part, are dedicated to the support of the status quo.

I'm just saying that we understand that the people who claim to be neutral, and call us propagandists because we are not neutral, are not neutral either. They're just ignorant. They don't know that they're supporters of the status quo. They don't know that that's their job. They don't know that the institution is dedicated to per­petuating a system and they're serving an institution. They have influence nevertheless.

Conflicts are the midwife of consciousness.

Those who come tomor­row will start acting, precisely taking what we did as the starting point.

I think it is abso­lutely indispensable that educators be secure, capable, and have a capacity for loving and for curiosity.

I have noth­ing against teaching. But I have many things against teaching in an authoritarian way.

knowledge never is static. It's always in the process.

I am humble because I am incomplete

one of the virtues we have to create in ourselves as progressive educators is the virtue of humility.

I try to find ways to expose them to learning processes that would finally lead them to take a look at my conclusion.

MYLES: Well I think you have to divide that into principles. When I say what I believe, I'm talking about prin­ciples such as love and democracy, where people control their Jives. THIRD PARTY: Your vision. MYLES: My vision. Now the strategy for my vision, the ap­proaches and processes, I've learned from other people.

any kind of prob­lem has five or six good solutions and five or six bad solutions.

If you have a convic­tion, you have a responsibility to act on that conviction where you can, and if you're doing education, you act on it in an educational context.

For me it has always been a political question, not exclusively an edu­cational question, at what levels students take part in the process of organizing the curriculum.

It's hard to even see much of that spark anymore, that so many beliefs have been crushed, negated, that our society is mired with an unbearable weight of cynicism.

its going beyond pulling the quotes from the book and postulating about education