The Banking Theory

When reading about the banking theory in the excerpt from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I couldn’t help but think of my own experiences with educators. Freire explains that learning has become “lifeless and petrified” due to the way it is conducted. He says that subjects are taught with the expectation of students to record, memorize, and retain information without actually understanding it. This caused me to look back and compare this idea to my own experiences. I think that this has been the case in the majority of my past classes. They were very grade-oriented. Almost everything that was done in them was a determining factor in your grade for that class. All of the assignments were oriented around preparing you for the final exam and less about actually learning and understanding the material. This was the case for all but one of my classes. My sophmore year of high school, I took American Lit with Ms. Preston. Ms. Preston’s class was rigorous, with lots of assignments and homework. However, very few of these were for a grade. The thing I loved most about her class was that almost everything she did was for the purpose of making sure we were actually learning. It was the first class I ever had that made me feel like I personally mattered as a student because of the effort she put in to make sure every single one of us understood the material and didn’t fall behind. Her class stuck with me so much that a I chose to take AP Lang the next year just because she taught it. She is one of my biggest inspirations as an education major.