The meek cry contains one of Paulo Freire's last public interventions and is, at the same time, an expression of his mature thinking and a committed encounter with those who work every day with his ideas. It reflects on the problems besieging the practice of education at the edge of the twenty-first century, in this context both vulnerable and hopeful, but also his ideas about history, social change, utopias and the responsibility of man in the globalized world.

We intervene in the world through our concrete practice, responsibility, whenever we are able to express the beauty of the world. When the first humans drew animal figures on the rocks, they were already aesthetically intervening on their environment, and since they undoubtedly already made moral decisions, they also intervened ethically. Precisely, to the extent that we become capable of changing the world, of transforming it, of making it more beautiful or uglier, we become ethical beings.

Until today it was never known that, for example, a group of African lions dropped bombs on cities of Asiatic lions. We have not known until today of the existence of any lion that killed with premeditation. It is we, humans, who have the possibility to assume an ethical choice, who do these things.

[...] The educational process is above all ethical. It demands of us constant tests of seriousness. One of the good qualities of a teacher, of a teacher, is to give testimony to the students that ignorance is the starting point of wisdom, that making mistakes is not a sin, but is part of the process of knowing and that error is a moment of the search for knowledge.

Paulo Freire.