Creativity is Humanity

Mike Paul
2 min readMar 16, 2024
Pedagogy of the oppressed book quote

By our nature, humans were designed to create. It is the high cognitive portion of our mind, that 1% that stirs imagination and inquiry, that distinguishes us from our biological cousins on this planet.

When we don’t participate in the creative process, or, as happens so often in our schools, when we are prevented from participating in the creative process to conform to a preconceived notion of what we should do and how we should do it, we lose our humanity and become mere machines.

Do not waste the creative process. Do not float through your days and add nothing to the world around you.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

“But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Mike Paul

I dad, I tech, I teach, I write. Not always in that order. INTJ. Ravenclaw. 1w9. Wannabe academic and author. https://mikepaul.com