(Week 7) Education and “The Good Life”

I find this week’s topic of education and “the good life” particularly intriguing, partly because of the obvious: I have been a student for essentially my entire life. I have been enrolled in Gwinnett County Public Schools, a private school, was homeschooled for a very short amount of time, did dual enrollment through a college, and did online school, which I think gives me a fairly diverse perspective on education. I have always been a fairly accomplished student. I mostly attribute that to the fact that I figured out how to be seemingly successful at a very early age. I use the word seemingly because I’m not sure if I could even consider the things I learned as things that I know, and if you’re deciding the success of my education based on things that I retained and use frequently (which I think if I am learning these things, they should meet these criteria), I’m not so confident that a majority of my education was successful.

I think that Paulo Freire draws a very insightful analogy in “The Banking Concept of Education.” This analogy, being students, are a piggy bank, and the teachers simply deposit coins of knowledge to them. This analogy does a good job of explaining the current state of education: a simple “sit and let me tell you” kind of mindset. I agree with Freire that the problem-posing education concept works much better than the alternative. I find the issue with the banking concept is in the modern education system; most students have 5 or 6 teachers at any given time trying to deposit coins. These teachers then walk away to prepare for the next thing, leaving the students to make sense of everything that they were just given. Because of things like strict curriculum and fast-paced learning plans, students are given fundamental information, and then before they can even process it, they are moved on to the next topic. And not just one teacher or subject is expecting them to be able to do this, but every single class that they are in.

I have never found that this method of teaching is the best to actually help students grasp important topics. I have always found that the best teachers are the ones who take the time to ensure that their students understand what they are telling them. These teachers understand that through hands-on activities, practice, and sometimes even just reexplaining things in different ways, their students can find better and more concrete success in their learning. I have always and will always be in the mindset that educational learning is such a personal thing and requires independent goals and learning plans. I just wish we could provide better tools for students to be able to utilize their natural skills inorder to succeed instead of constantly trying to fit every student into the same box. The reality is: not everyone can be held to the same standards because not everyone will find success in the same way. I think all that a fixed success mindset does is diminish the accomplishments of people who don’t meet the standard of “what is successful.”