Ryan Preziosi Freire Response Paper

Education has always been a highly discussed topic throughout the world. Many people have different views on education, as well as different ways to approach it. Paulo Freire explains in “The Banking Concept of Education” how education has become an act of depositing, in which the students are depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Honestly, before I had read this article I never once looked at education like that. I can now see how that can partially be true in certain circumstances. However, in today’s society Frere’s idea of a perfect classroom is not realistic. Freire believes that the solution to the banking concept must begin with the teacher-student contradiction where the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing. He wants to reconcile the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. Now in theory this idea sounds good, but only to a certain extent. It is obvious that for the most part teachers do in fact have more knowledge than the students. This is due to the schooling he or she went through to earn a degree and eventually find a job to teach. The students go to school to learn from these teachers who obviously know more than the students. So of course it is the teacher’s job to teach them what he or she may know and to do their best to prepare them for the real world. Freire believes that a more question opposing classroom is the key, but in reality, how much can a student question? I am not saying that students should never ask questions but they can’t really question the structure of the class or the content covered because that is how the teacher wants it to be. Also, most classes are required to cover certain content. It is understandable for a student to not like a certain teacher or class. But, in college for example, even though students are required to take certain courses, they are still able to choose their professor. In conclusion, a student only has a certain level of control over the classroom situation. I understand when Freire talks about how teachers are just depositing a ton of information to the students or the “depositories” and they have to memorize everything and I also understand his views on that. Teaching should not only be a bunch of memorization because that can only get you so far in life. I also believe that a class of students could in fact show their teachers something that they did not know before. So I do agree with what Paulo Freire is arguing, but only to a certain point. I once had a class in high school called Participation in Government. There was zero work that was given to us throughout the semester. Instead, we would just talk, discuss, and argue about what was presently going on in the world. The teacher and students both freely shared their views and opinions on these topics. You would expect that we would learn quite a bit of stuff due to listening to everyone in the class speak and voice their