Post #6

BlogPostIt PostIt Notes annotation strategy

In reading Paulo Freire's "The Banking Concept of Education," my eyes were really opened to what education has really come to nowadays. Being a student for such a long time, I never really thought about how I was being fed information, but being on the other side, I have noticed how wrong our system really is nowadays. Reflecting back on my own student days, in more cases than not, my teachers have used the banking concept to get the information across to us students. They did not interact with us, pose questions to help us think for ourselves, or anything like that; the information was just forced into us so that we get it right on the test. This process is so wrong because as Freire describes, it turns the students into "containers" and the teachers are only aiming to stuff us with as much information as they can, which makes them look better among their peers. The problem with this is that it gives the students little opportunity to think for themselves and really comprehend what they are taught. Students are taught to just spit out facts and try to get a good grade on a test, not to become a more intelligent and thoughtful person. In the piece, Freire brings up a different method to go about education that seems a lot more valuable to the students. What he describes is called the problem-posing method, and it is just that. A teacher will educate their kids by making them critically think about the material. It causes the students to really use their brains and to take risks they otherwise wouldn't in a different learning environment. A lot of my Post-It notes were about these two different methods and the feelings I explained in my writing about them. It is clear that problem-posing seems like the better option and I hope that when the day comes that I am in front of a classroom, that I am able to teach in that way and make my students the best that they can be.