Reading and questions for Thursday, January 10

For Wednesday, please read "The ‘Banking Concept’ of Education" by Paolo Freire from his best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (I will give you a handout in class, but you can also find the PDF here.) This book was published in 1968, and it has been widely influential (it is often read in university classes, both in schools of education and in various fields of the humanities), yet many schools still bear some of the marks of the "banking" dynamics Freire describes here. 

After you read the chapter, write a two- or three-paragraph response to Freire's ideas in your journal. Does his description of "banking" education (summed up in the lettered list on page 2 of our handout) sound familiar, or do you feel like your education has been more of what he calls the "problem-posing" variety? In what ways have you been the recipient of the "student as receptacle" strategies from schools and teachers, and how has that affected your learning? What experiences have you had that are not like the "filling the student" narrative Freire describes, but more active, collaborative, and "problem-posing," and how have those affected your learning? Does this "banking" narrative seem to be at work in public schools in the US in general, based on what you know? (And if so, what evidence do you see of this?) What changes in direction for our nation's education practices does Freire's chapters seem to you to point to?

At various points in this chapter, Freire speaks of “the oppressors.” This phrase had a particular institutional/authoritarian meaning in his world (as evidenced by the fact that this work was written during his 16 years of political exile from Brazil's military dictatorship), but Freire's analysis of the dynamics between "the oppressed" and "the oppressors" may also seem relevant to our time in any number of ways and in a variety of locations. Feel free to consider Freire's discussion of oppressor/oppressed as part of your response. How does Freire's discussion of the relationship between these groups strike you, reading it 2019 in the context in which you live? Which passages seemed especially to describe political dynamics at work in our time, or not? Do you think of your world as having “oppressors” and "oppressed," do you identify with either of these groups (and if not, who do you see them as representing), and how does that affect they way you respond to Freire’s ideas?