Group

In what ways did reading this website enrich, complicate and or confuse your understanding about Freire’s banking concept.

This website was a way to connect us reading it, to what freire is trying to give off to the readers from his second book published Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the book he goes into great detail of what the characteristics of teachers are. He writes about the banking process of educators and “the “banking” concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings, the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness that would result from their intervention in the world.” Here is talking about how students learn to adapt to what they are learning, the teachers know everything and the students know nothing. He states that the teacher talks and the students listen.  He also writes, “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.”  The oppressors he speaks of he is talking also about the employers, the elected officials,  as well as anyone with socio-economic power over others. While the website states that, “as the illiterate person learns and is able to make such statements, his world becomes radically transformed and he is no longer willing to be a mere object responding to changes occurring around him. The educated are more likely to decide to take upon themselves the struggle to change the structures of society that until now have served to oppress them.”  He wants us to understand that we need to have an education where the students shouldn’t be afraid to speak out and to constructively criticize the teachers. They need to not let boredom overpower them in education being that the “educated man is the adapted man, because he is better “fit” for the world.” “The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes)”

Gatto's claims about high school

"School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can."- Gatto

I feel as if my high school experience was along the exact same lines as what gatto was explaining about education now days. we do need to teach our kids to think critically and independently, i feel as if i didn't learn to think that way in high school but i was more taught to think that way by my parents. high school is more about  the social aspect and learning how to interact with your peers, to be an employee and consumer, i wasn't taught to be a leader by the high school educators. we had a high boredom threshold, lack of motivation, some of the high school teachers didn't get an education for what they were teaching, they didn't teach us to take on "serious material" we didn't learn to be serious in what we were learning, i feel that public schools aren't the way to go. my parents were better teachers than my actual teachers were in high school. high school is there to give us a little insight on what we will be learning when we grow up and get into college where education is actually serious and you are going to school to obtain an education for your future careers, i feel as if it is there for us to figure out what we want go be when we grow up. Gatto explains a lot of serious points that are very true about high schools and their way of teaching education.