Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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Before reading this, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would grasp all that Paulo Freire was saying. This stuff is dense, but it’s not impossible to understand; after reading, processing, and thinking it over I found that what Freire is saying hit me kind of hard. I don’t think that I think about our system of education and how it is impacting our students as much as I should; I think this may because I am a product of the “banking” concept of education. I mostly remember the act of collecting, memorizing, and repeating in many of my classes in middle school and high school; and although I had teachers who worked to engage us cognitively and get us to facilitate our critical thinking, I believe that I was faced with more teachers who acted only as knowledge depositors in my education, rather than as a partner in my education.

As a teacher, I want to make a conscious effort to act as both the teacher and the student in my classroom. I do not want to be the teacher who holds all of the knowledge and inevitably turns my students “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’” solely by me. The “banking” concept of education doesn’t sound like a system I want to be a part of. As a teacher I want to work with my students to help facilitate their learning, as well as learn from them in the process; I believe that a teacher should be someone who is open and continually willing to learn more, whether through professional development or in the classroom with their students; continuing to learn just isn’t something you can do effectively in the “banking” system of education.

It is so important to understand the system of education that we will be facing as future teachers. I believe that if we understand the current system of education and how it works, we will be able to enter into the teaching field with the understanding of what we must do as teachers to change the system. We “must be revolutionary… from the outset” in order to do our future students justice and facilitate a world of creative, intelligent critical thinkers.

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