He wouldn't be my first academic love (an odd and eclectic category that includes C.S. Lewis, Cicero, and--perhaps most embarrassingly--James Paul Gee). While I would never claim that Freire's style in any way resembles theirs (or that theirs resemble each other's), one thing they do all have in common is their ability to craft beautiful, and elegantly simple prose. They take things I hold dear, and they illuminate them with language that is engaging--sometimes even stunning--and yet still easy to understand. With Lewis, it's Christianity. With Cicero, it's the nature of discourse itself. And with Gee and Freire....it's students.
Freire's exploration of the banking model of education (where students are simply vessels where instructors "deposit" knowledge until they are full) strikes to the core of a lesson I've been slowly learning the more that I teach. The traditional education system is a top-down affair. The teacher is the authority. The students are subjects. As I have told students time and again, the classroom is not a democracy.
But what Freire points out--and what I'm realizing I really believe--is that, however true that is, it's not okay. Or, at the very least, it's a system that needs to be made visible.
So often, instructors of college freshmen lament their "inability" to exercise critical thought. They rail against students caught in the nets of five paragraph essays, stringent page requirements, and the ever cliched transitions of "First....secondly....and in conclusion..." Yet what they don't acknowledge is that, given our current system of education, to expect anything else is ludicrous. As Freire points out:
The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (73)In other words, our students spend years learning how to memorize and regurgitate "knowledge" on command. They learn to adapt to a system. And it's especially evident in our "good" students (which, of course, we find en mass in college settings)...because these are the ones who learned how to play the game without making waves. They don't challenge the system, because they've learned that this is something that's frowned upon. They don't question the teacher, because that way leads to danger and stress and bad grades. They have learned to be vessels.
It's a system that I hate, and yet I know I have also done my time as one of of the "well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are only serving to dehumanize" (75). I generally am an open book. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I'm quick to share my opinions....and when I occupy a position of authority (as I do every day in the classroom), those seemingly harmless opinions become law. And this remains just as true when I walk in with naive ideas of instilling a social justice-esque curriculum, if my means of doing so follows the banking method. Well-intentioned or not, if I simply inform my students of "how the world is," I am part of the problem. "[true humanists] cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society" (78).
I share my opinions with my class. I feel that, risky as it is, it's more dishonest to pretend to be utterly objective. But I try to remember that "liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals [sic] of information" (79). My job is not to inform my students how they should view the world. My job is to get them to start thinking about it...to start questioning the systems that have been invisible to them and which they've taken for granted.
I might not like the conclusions they come to. But that's the point. Their agreement with me means nothing if I never give them a chance to not.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
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