June 29, 2013
Freirean Interpretation of My Partner’s Story
In the essay “The “Banking” Concept of Education”, Paulo Freire reviews the dominant and popular concept of education, the “banking” model of education. In this approach to education, students are only able to listen to the teacher and memorize what teacher says, including facts, formulas, disciplines, etc. They do what the teacher requires, without question. In this relationship, students and teachers are not equal. The teacher is the person who dominates the entire class and has absolute authority. The students are the audience – they cannot have their own opinions but recenive their teachers’ “narration.” It is not difficult to imagine the scene: students like bank accounts
What character can they play in this society? Do they have the spirit of innovation? A possible answer to these questions is that they can solve the problems on paper, but they cannot apply the method to a practical problem. They are incapable of creative thought – just like computers. Yet the real situation is that computers have better performance than human beings at calculating and other repetitive work. Also, because of the lack of innovation and creation, science research may be stagnant. This can lead to the stagnancy of social evolution over time.
Freire has his own philosophy to deal with this serious problem. In contrast to the “banking” model of education, Freire put forward the concept of “problem posing” education. In such educational mode, students and teachers should set up a new relationship: they are not unequal anymore; students can express their thoughts freely and discuss their thoughts with the teachers. Just like what Freire wrote in his article, “… The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (Freire 324).
It’s not difficult to imagine that the teachers and the students do not have to separate from each other clearly, because in this new relationship the teacher can also learn a lot from the students. There is no explicit limit of who is the teacher and who is the student. Therefore,