Blog 2

Friere and I seem to come from very different places, but I need to address his arguement, so I began with the Strong lines activity.

Line 1: The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.

Impact 1: Friere seems to believe that telling a student one thing means they cannot learn something contradictory and decide which answer to believe. He feels that if a student happily memorizes their vocabulary words they cannot also go out into the world learn the separate unrelated skill of fishing or picking watermelon.

Line 2: From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization.

Impact 2: Any good teacher will try to ensure that the students are on the same page as the teacher. Both educator and student benefit from a mutual understanding and feeling of equality.

Line 3: 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), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe.

Impact 3: I have read this line several times but have yet understand Friere full meaning. The minority controls the majority but for what purpose remains unclear. It’s as though the minority have political goals or the power to prescribe simply make the minorities’ lives easier.

Questions: What is the goal of the minority in prescribing to the majority? Is there a solution? If there so, why doesn’t Friere who regards himself as an expert present it? Is finding the solution our task as a critical thinking exercise?

The flaw to Friere's argument lays in the fact that he presents only two ways, the banking system or a democracy styled learning. This is an either-or fallacy; teachers do not simply fall into one of two categories. This idea that all teaching can be boiled down to being oppressing or enlightening is ridiculous. A banking system is not necessarily oppressive and democracy styled learning is not always freeing. The banking system provides structure some students may need or crave; a democratic classroom may move at a slower rate to accommodate more individuals. Schools have a finite amount of time to teach and an almost infinite number of things they are responsible for teaching.

The “Banking Concept” of education in certain places is not only appropriate but necessary. The basics must be taught in order for the student to recall and use them to reason or create comprehensive ideas. Math courses build on each other, so that with out learning geometry a student cannot learn calculus. But that having been said, there comes a point when a student will branch out on their own to discover new principles and push current boundaries. This learning is individual, but it is rooted in all the basic concepts teachers spend hours trying to teach individuals.