Age Gap Analysis

When I asked my five year old niece what she wants to be when she grows up, she said she wants to be Elsa from Frozen. When I asked my fifteen year old cousin the same question, she said she wanted to become a specialist in hotel management. Why is there such a significant contrast in their goals when the age gap is only the span of ten years? I thought “obviously it was the age gap that signified their difference,” but what happened in the age gap that made their answers so distant? The difference was their education and the time they have allotted for self-discovery. In the ten years, my cousin had the time and education to shape her ideas and explore the realistic possibilities of her future, while my niece is just beginning to grasp common

concepts. The learning process changed my cousin and just like it will change my niece, the same way it molded nearly all individuals around the world. Education is a vital tool that guides individuals to connect with their identities.
Paulo Freire explains how the banking concept of education oppresses and strays people away from their full potential. Richard Rodriguez exemplifies the result of the banking concept through his own experience as the scholarship boy. As Freire predicted, alienation is a false pretense of liberation; this is something that Rodriguez discovers on his own in the future. Rodriguez alienated himself in order to achieve a false pretense of liberation exactly as Freire describes in his “Banking Concept of Education.” Freire is entirely against the banking concept, while Rodriguez believes that everyone begins with imitation. Despite their differences, both can agree that self-discovery is vital to the learning process.
According to Freire, the humanism that the banking approach advertises, “masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons-- the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (Freire 320). In his childhood, Rodriguez was convinced that liberation could be found through imitating his teachers and trusting in his books. As Freire predicted by saying “…those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power,” Rodriguez could not perceive the banking concept’s oppressive potential (Freire 323). The scholarship boy defined himself as a “collector of thoughts” and as a mimic that was unable to form his own opinions; he lacked personality and motivation to self-inquire in his thought process (Rodriguez 529). Rodriguez’s desire of achievement lead him to resemble the societal automaton that Freire described earlier. Because Rodriguez was so heavily influenced by his teachers, he rejected his parents and blamed it on their “lack of education,” or rather, a separate set of skills unlike the material taught by the nuns. This step towards “academic success” was also a step away from his family.
When he was young, Rodriguez had difficulty with self-discovery and searched for himself in his education. He found the scholarship boy and adopted this identity, beginning the pursuit of a misguided education. As the scholarship boy, he is caught between two opposed cultures and has difficulty maintaining a balance between the classroom and home; eventually the equilibrium would be lost. Rodriguez adjusted by blocking out his family and moving towards academics. In many situations, Rodriguez escaped his family to study. The strain between the two cultures emotionally distressed Rodriguez; it is possible he was upset with his family because they could not adopt American education and merge the two cultures for him. For example, when Rodriguez found his mother’s unread book by her bed stand, he ran out crying because she could not understand how important it was to see her connecting the opposing culture.
Freire said “Paradoxically, then they utilize this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate” (Freire 323).

In rejecting his family, Rodriguez “abstracted from immediate experiences” and often isolated himself to focus on his studies trusting that it would pay off in the future (Rodriguez 532). As he approached the age of thirty as a graduate, he wondered about the reasons for his academic success and came to this epiphany: “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student,” (Rodriguez 516). As Freire suggests in his theory, Rodriguez was aware he was distancing himself from his family and accepted that it was essential to repress his “embarrassing” family as a part of the effort to free and find himself. In his mistake, he fled his family to pursue a false education that Freire maimed as the “banking concept.” Instead of properly educating himself, he only did what was necessary to appear as a good student. For example, Rodriguez read to earn extra credit and to be praised by his teachers, but never stopped to comprehend the text. In his case, he sacrificed the connection with his family only to pursue an education that would not educate him or help him discover

himself.
Sitting in the British museum far in the future, Rodriguez stopped to ask himself “Was my dissertation much more than an act of social withdrawal?” (Rodriguez 531). He was coming to the revelation that he has lived a bleak life of isolation to end up in a lonely community filled with people who were reflections of himself. He realized that often, he can summarize but lacked passion and could not write his own piece. Rodriguez finally allowed himself to accept the fact he craved for more experiences in life and passion life entailed. The only way to recover what he neglected and lost is to abandon education and to move backwards. Rodriguez’s entire epiphany is similar to Freire’s theory of self-discovery; Rodriguez needed to move away from the banking concept and his robotic life in order to free himself from the imaginary oppressors (in this case, Rodriguez was his own oppressor).