Comparing Banking Concept Of Education By Paulo Freire And Richard Rodriguez

I chose to compare the essays of Paulo Freire and Richard Rodriguez. Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking concept of Education” talks of how education is mostly one sided and oppressive. He sees this as something that is detrimental to society’s future as a whole, and in his essay describes in detail how the “banking” concept is faltered. However, in Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire” he is the model student that thrives in the kind of system that Freire was describing in “The Banking concept of Education”. Richard Rodriguez describes in “The Achievement of Desire” how his educational experience is a point of separation from the rest of the people and relationships around him. Though, this makes Rodriguez more connected and dependent

Freire talks of his home country of Brazil, and the primary method of education used there as being one in which students are treated as objects that need filling with information instead human beings with varying opinions and experiences. There was a belief that essentially all students learn best this way. However, Freiere saw it as more than that and tied the method to socioeconomic and political oppression. His view was that those in charge wanted to stay in charge, and that the best way to do so was to keep the people truly uneducated, or as Freire refers to them as becoming automatons, and disenfranchised. He saw the teachers as oppressors due to his experiences in his own educational career. The “banking” concept is one that is completely dependent upon the educational background and experiences of the teacher, and does not allow for feedback and open communication from the students that might vary from the already specified views of the society of the nation which the classroom is held in. Basically, the societal consensus and norms of a nation will dictate the views expressed and taught in the classroom. For example, the Puritans believed that if a woman could read she must be a consort with the devil even if she had only learned so she would be able to read the

Rodriguez’s essay is about how he learned and thrived in the very instructional environment that Freire viewed as oppressive. Rodriguez discusses in his essay that he did very well in school and earned achievement after achievement. He also read a vast amount of literature, and began doing so when he was in the fourth grade with titles like Iliad and Moby Dick. Even though he enjoyed the act of reading it was the praise of the ones that taught him that mattered more than anything else. He craved the approval of the teachers so badly that “any book they told [him] to read, [he] read – then waited for them to tell [him] which books [he] enjoyed” (Rodriguez, 518-519). Two grades later he goes on to exemplify another example of the “banking” concept when he begins to discuss what it was that gave books their value were the themes and main ideas expressed throughout their pages. Rodriguez goes on to say, “[i]f that core essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learned like my teachers” (526). ). It was this way of thinking that created his dichotomy of home life versus school