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Oppressed By Freire

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In chapter two of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the author, Paulo Freire contrasts the style of education society currently uses, the banking system, and the one it should use, the problem-posing system. Freire claims that in modern day education, teachers are the narrating objects and students are the listening objects. In this relationship, the students are storage containers and the teachers are filling them up with mechanical information about the world. The author believes that in this system, the teachers are acting as oppressors while the students assumed the role of oppressed. This is because the students’ creativity is suppressed in this process. In order to correct this, the author maintains that education be switched to a problem-posing system. Through this alternative methodology, the pupils …show more content…
In Freire’s first part of the chapter, he goes into depth about his disdain for the banking system and what the system entailed for society as a whole. In essence, Paulo’s banking system outlines the way in which he believes the current education system is functioning. He believes that in our modern system, teachers systematically fill the pupils with knowledge without any input from the students. He starts describing the banking system by saying that “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whose they consider to know nothing” (Freire p.72). What the author is saying through this statement is that in our current system, educators see themselves as privileged, while they see students as lesser beings. As the privileged group, educators can bestow their grace upon the students by teaching them information. The problem with this thinking that Freire brings up is that, by seeing the students as blank slates, teachers fail to allow students to use their creativity and their academic skills to interpret and question the knowledge at hand.

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