Paulo Freire and Solutions to Educational Problems
Paulo Freire and Solutions to Educational Problems
Paulo Freire has clearly shown that he feels the only way to help education is to begin using problem-posing. He completely dismisses the banking concept of having any good qualities and also shows problem-posing as flawless. In my own experiences, I have found that the banking concept does have good qualities and problem-posing is far from flawless. I better solution for education at the high school level would be to find a median between these two concepts.
Before a solution can be made, we first need to see what parts of Freire’s concepts do not work in high schools. With the banking concept, the teacher seems to be far superior and more intellectual than his students. He intimidates students with his pious attitude, sometimes making the students seem unworthy of his knowledge. The intimidated students may then refrain from asking questions, therefore, causing them to not fully understand the subject matter. Students have absolutely no say in what they learn and how they receive the information that is taught. Since the topic isn’t chosen by the students, they are more likely to be uninterested and their creativeness would suffer. As Freire states, “The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons-the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.” (351). This is saying that the students will become robot-like and are forced to adapt to the teacher’s style. The students aren’t able to personally relate to what the teacher teaches and the information seems separated from reality. The teacher teaches only so that receive positive recognition, which causes the students to only get enough information to just survive in the real world.
I have had a lot of experience with the banking concept. These teachers had a very cocky attitude and seemed as if coming to that class was a waste of their time. For example, my pre-calculus teacher was always looking down at us and would say we wasted his time with dumb questions. He didn’t like explaining things more than once and got very impatient with us. All the teachers like this had similar styles of teaching. Class was mostly just notes on the board, homework, and lots of quizzes and tests. We were forced to take in...