Education Reform

Have you ever had a teacher you really enjoyed? Why did you enjoy him? For most people it is because the teacher interacted with the student and made them feel involved in the learning process. As Carl Jung puts it: “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” (para. 249).

This situation has proved true in my educational experiences, with the most positive experience stemming from a Public Policy professor that I really enjoyed. I learned more knowledge in a few weeks than I had in all the previous classes on similar topics I had taken over the years because we worked together at a common level to solve a problem. This is contrary to the action taken by most teachers who instead dictate words to the students like they were "depositories." (Freire 213). These students then learn have learned the cold hard facts but not the greater context within which those facts lie, or as E.M. Forster put it : “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” (Columbia Dictionary of Quotations).

Freire in his essay "The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education" confronts this situation. He calls this one sided way of teaching the "banking method of education." Also, he proposes a "problem posing method" as a solution to the unfavorable "banking method." In the "problem posing method" the students and teacher work together at a common level and learn from each other. His analysis of the "banking method of education" and its antithesis, the "problem posing method," has many parallels to my educational experiences. These similarities make me agree that Freire’s "problem posing method" is more advantageous than the common "banking method."

Our views on the "essence" of human beings and how they learn is related to our views on whether, why and how, humans acquire or develop knowledge. If we believe in "born criminals" the amount and kind of knowledge that we will grant to that particular human being will be the ...

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...rough the problem posing method and create their own unique solutions. Contrarily, students of the banking method become "depositories" for information, and they never really gain any understanding of the information in a larger context. As Freire says, "knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." (Freire 349).

WORKS CITED

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. Columbia University Press. 1998.

Freire, Paulo, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (1972). Rpt. in Ways of Reading, eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 1999. 347-359.

Jung, Carl, “The Gifted Child,” (1943). Rpt. in Collected Works, ed. William McGuire. 1954.

vol. 17, para. 249.

Mathews, Michael, “Knowledge, Action and Power," Literacy and Revolution: The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Robert Mackie. New York: Continuum. 1991. 82-92.

University of Vermont. “Literacy and Social Change Conference: Blue Series and Green Series”, Burlington: University of Vermont, 1981. 1-115.