Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" Chapter 2

            I thought it was interesting how this article compared the most common teacher-student relationship, one where the teacher is the narrator and the students are just passive receptacles of information that they just memorize and repeat, to depositing information into the garbage.  There is no creativity, no back and forth conversation, no opinions, and no building knowledge because students take in the information and store them in their minds for a short period of time and then let it go.  This ‘banking’ concept of education I was reading about in this article became eerily familiar to me with each and every word, and I realized why.  This is the most common practice of teaching in schools today.  For so many years, I have been the receptacle of thousands of facts, phrases, and just information I’m supposed to know (sometimes I was never told why I needed to know it- I just did).  Most of the time I would store this information in the back of my mind for a little while and then I would just forget it.  There was no meaningful conversation or inquiry happening in class, so the knowledge never stuck with me.  So many of my classes in high school and even in college were the type of classes where the teacher would stand up at the front of the classroom and spout off a bunch of facts and tell us to write them down.  Then we would have a test on those facts (I would memorize them the night before) and after that those things would never be talked about again.  It really is like filling up a trashcan, and once it gets too full you have to dump it out.  I definitely think that the ‘banking’ concept of education needs to stop and teachers need to think of ways that they can get their students involved creatively in lessons and still learn the material that they want their students to learn.