Post 2.2
In chapter two of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire begins by offering a strong rebuke of the current model of education used in most classrooms, especially for students at a young age. In chapter one, the concept of the oppressed’s “fear of freedom” was discussed, as a way of showing how if somebody is brought up being told nothing but negative things about themself, that person becomes rather likely to hold a negative perception about themself and come to believe that they are “deserving” of oppressive treatment.
The current teaching system, which Freire calls the “banking model”, is one where a teacher is quite literally depositing information into the minds of the students. The teacher presents him or herself as the fountain of all pertinent information for the students, and then goes about spelling out that information in a very particular way so that the students are expected to retain and spill back that information upon request. As someone who just went through twelve years of education, this was not a challenging concept for me to grasp, as I could immediately relate back to a large number of classrooms that I have experienced over the years. The amount of time I have spent, just in four years of high school, memorizing the exact contents of various Google Slides presentations so I could spit such contents back out on the essay section of my final exams is probably longer than I could fathom at this point.
The central relation that Freire identifies as a problem is the student teacher relationship. The student is the ignorant one, so he or she needs to be given this information by the knowledgable teacher. The fact that children are told from their earliest days of their education that they do not yet know anything valuable could be a strong first step in the process of depriving students of their own dignity, and forcing them to rely on others for attaining what they need.
In replacement of this sort of educational style, Freire proposes what he calls a “problem posing model”. In this model, education is less of a lecture and takes the form of an authentic conversation between teachers and their students. The two groups converse together about various situations in the world, and the teacher is supposed to see how the student’s life experiences contribute to such a conversation, instead of pretending that such experiences either do not exist or are not relevant. By having students actually contribute to such important dialogues, the students will actually develop a feeling that their ideas matter and are important.
In the banking model, it can sometimes feel in a classroom that students lie at the end of history, being told what past problems were and then how society erased such issues, and minimizing the issues that students experience at the same time. With students as a part of the conversation, honest dialogue about the very real problems of today will be placed at the forefront, and students will leave the classroom more well prepared for engaging in an active pursuit of overcoming society’s challenges and realizing humanity for all. I have also argued before that such an approach is extremely beneficial for teachers as well, as I have always believed it is a shame when teachers, or anyone else, enter more powerful positions with the belief that they know everything there is to know. I find such a belief extraordinarily misguided, because people throw away more than half their life of opportunities to learn from others and fail to continue to grow as people.
