Oppression of Students

There are many ways to teach children information so that they excel in life. It has often been wondered how to teach kids and which way is best. Paulo Freire believes that children in today's education are being oppressed and many would agree with him. What he describes is called banking. Banking is filling children like they are a bank account and expecting the information to be fed back out just the way it was fed in. This is not the most recommended way of teaching a child because it leaves so many holes in the education system. A teacher does research and learns a lot of information. The teacher then feeds the information that they learned to the child expecting the child to remember it all and be able to feed it back. The problem with this is the teacher is doing all the work and the students are expected to remember everything.

The problem with this is the responsibility is all on the teacher. The teacher does all the work and learns all the information first hand, and the student is fed what the teacher deems as important. This mentality is set up as “the teacher thinks and the students are thought about”. Not the students think. The students need to learn how to form their own thought process on learning information otherwise they will always rely on someone else to give them key points. When a child graduates into the real world they know information but not how to expand their knowledge and keep learning about the world around them. It is our jobs as educators to teach them the information, but also to teach them how to find the information for themselves and how to work through the process on their own. Students need to learn how to “perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation”.