Here’s my confession: I’ve never stayed awake in a class I’ve had. Usually at least once a week, I’ll fall asleep while listening to talks of the global culture or axons and dendrites in the brain. That may be a personal failing. Still, it’s easy to do this in the current education system, where an instructor lectures on while students frantically try to absorb what the instructor said. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), author Paulo Friere calls it the “banking system.”
Most forms of education employ this structure of learning; after all, who better to influence minds than older people with experience? However, Friere criticizes this system, arguing that both the educators and the educated need take part to free themselves. When the educated blindly follow a leader with no thoughts of their own, they can never truly be free. The banking system encourages this damaging way of thinking, as teachers are held up to be a paragon of knowledge that students ought to eagerly seek. They say that teachers mold the minds of the next generation. That’s certainly true. Rather than simply creating mouthpieces for their beliefs, teachers ought to stress the importance of students developing their own thoughts and ideas.
Maybe I had good teachers, or maybe I just figured it out on my own, but I learned how to think for myself. Sometimes, I’ve had teachers who were all out terrible, brandishing their opinions as weapons and daring anyone to challenge it. In those cases, I did my own research and came to my own conclusions, not investing in the failing bank of that instructor’s knowledge. Student contribution should be encouraged in classes for those cases where the student truly has something to contribute. The students must actively judge the veracity of the instructor’s statements, completing their education by thinking for themselves.
Much as teachers ought to encourage students to facilitate their own education, leaders ought to instruct the oppressed to seek freedom. Guidance provides aid for much of the journey to freedom; however, the final step must be taken by the seeker alone. In addition, as education should force students to critically think, political activists must truly think about the problems they are trying to solve, being active for the sake of people and not blind activism.
Most forms of education employ this structure of learning; after all, who better to influence minds than older people with experience? However, Friere criticizes this system, arguing that both the educators and the educated need take part to free themselves. When the educated blindly follow a leader with no thoughts of their own, they can never truly be free. The banking system encourages this damaging way of thinking, as teachers are held up to be a paragon of knowledge that students ought to eagerly seek. They say that teachers mold the minds of the next generation. That’s certainly true. Rather than simply creating mouthpieces for their beliefs, teachers ought to stress the importance of students developing their own thoughts and ideas.
Maybe I had good teachers, or maybe I just figured it out on my own, but I learned how to think for myself. Sometimes, I’ve had teachers who were all out terrible, brandishing their opinions as weapons and daring anyone to challenge it. In those cases, I did my own research and came to my own conclusions, not investing in the failing bank of that instructor’s knowledge. Student contribution should be encouraged in classes for those cases where the student truly has something to contribute. The students must actively judge the veracity of the instructor’s statements, completing their education by thinking for themselves.
Much as teachers ought to encourage students to facilitate their own education, leaders ought to instruct the oppressed to seek freedom. Guidance provides aid for much of the journey to freedom; however, the final step must be taken by the seeker alone. In addition, as education should force students to critically think, political activists must truly think about the problems they are trying to solve, being active for the sake of people and not blind activism.
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