I completely am in agreement with the banking concept of education. In schools these days there is so much listen and repeat and students constantly just regurgitating what they were taught without understanding or actually taking it in. It really bothers me that schools are like this. That is why I am so fond of not having tests, but instead having free-writes or summary's being written by the students. The teacher should not be the subject of the learning process. The teacher should just be a mere assistant to provide help and instructions to set the students up for success. The students are the subjects here. Yes, teachers are there to teach, but not by having the students listen and repeat. Instead, there needs to be free thinking and personal strategies that students develop on their own to find understanding and meaning in things.
The assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world is complete crap as well. We are not empty minds "open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside". We are not spectators, or at least we shouldn't be. We should show our students how to be themselves, structure their essays in their own ways, read and understand things in their own ways, find meanings for words in their own ways. We should set students up for success at being able to re-create an idea or notion. Maybe a student reads a book, but the ending was nothing like they imagined, so they re-create an ending for that book. That's exactly how fan-fiction started. That never used to be a thing until someone made it a thing. Someone stepped out there and put their ideas on top of someone else's and re-created something. It's the same thing artists all over the world do with their artwork. They re-create something. A day at the park could look one way to one person and a completely different way to another person. Our students should be encouraged to re-create and re-imagine instead of being encouraged to regurgitate.
One of the statements that stuck out to me in a "hits-you-in-the-face" kind of way was, "Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression." This statement shows that this practice of the banking concept in schools is leading our students into oppression. They are not taking anything away from what we are saying to them. Once they have repeated what we have said, it leaves their mind. There is no food for thought, there is no insight or meaning into what they have been told. There is just, "a=5", a word and definition, or a simple right or wrong.
The concept of "problem-posing" education is confusing but interesting as well. Within the explanation of this concept, there is a phrase about students and teachers that says, "They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow." I absolutely love just this phrase right here. Mainly because as teachers, we never stop learning about how to teach, what works and doesn't work, how to do an activity, what activity to do, ect., we only adapt. Each batch of students, each class, each environment is going to be different. They are going to learn differently, experience things differently, and think differently. Teachers are constantly adapting to their students' needs in the classroom, which helps the teacher grow as well. Students are growing in their education and in their personalities, while a teacher is growing in their teaching, their style, their deliverance of material, and in their connections with the students. We will constantly be growing. We grew as students once, and now we are growing as teachers, but we are still learning from our students as our students learn from us.
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