What It Means to Be Educated

What it means to be Educated

To be educated is to be taught in a way that I believe will help you to succeed in the real world. Education is the idea that is supposed to be taught in schools all across the World, but is it really being taught? Education means something and is defined differently by many different people. A few people who have different views on what the meaning of education is are Paolo Friere, Bell Hooks, and Theodore Sizer.
In the words of Paolo Friere, professor at Harvard University, in “The Banking Concept”, “education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”(Friere 74) Education is nothing more than the act of spitting out information by the teacher for the student to be able to “patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.”(Friere 75) Friere believes that education should be the act of working together between the teacher and the student to give out and obtain knowledge. But really he sees that education is nothing like that. He sees only one solution to fix this “banking concept” problem and that is to find a “solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”(Friere 75) Friere sees here a solution for the education problem in schools.
In the eyes of Friere we see that he believes education to be the act of a bank like process. Unlike Friere’s view of education, bell hooks, a teacher, writer, and scholar, sees education to have a different meaning. In Hooks’ passage, “Engaged Pedagogy”, she sees “to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn.”(Hooks 67) Hooks believes that teachers should not just preach their teachings but also believe what they are teaching to be true. She believes that education should be to “not merely share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.” (Hooks 67-68) She goes on in her passage to explain that she learned and was shown what the meaning of education should be through the teachings of Paolo Friere. She began to see that she should be an “active participant, not a passive consumer” of the teaching being done in the classroom. She took a look at the works of Paolo Friere and a man named Thich Nhat Hanh, and began to see that education should be pedagogy and “a union of mind, body, and spirit.”(Hooks 68) She believed that education should be more than just taking in the knowledge and things being taught and should be more a way for students to become more intellectual and spirited grown from their teachings.
So far we have seen the meaning of education to be metaphorically a banking process and as pedagogy, but in the eyes of Theodore Sizer, a Professor of Education at Brown University, in his passage “What High School Is” we see the problems with the public education. Sizer argues the problems in the way education is being taught in the school systems. He sees a major problem with the system to be that “the clock is king”. (Sizer 91) Teachers see how much time they have and try to force as much information in that allotted time as they can and that just allows the students to return to Friere’s way of just memorizing and repeating it on tests and quizzes. Sizer goes on to explain that students like Mark Rose in this passage are thrown a whole lot of different subjects; “algebraic formulae to poetry to French verbs to Ping-Pong to the War of the Spanish Succession, all before lunch.”(Sizer 92) Students are not able to take all of that information in so they just take in what the teacher tells them will be in on the test and not what is important to them. Sizer is true in the way that he believes education to be in a wrong structure. “”Taking subjects” in a systematized, conveyor-belt way is what one does in high school.”(Sizer 94) Sizer believes that this is the way education is and believes that is the acceptable way of education by most people’s standards. People neither care nor believe schools are able to achieve their true goals of actually giving true education to the students.
After reading all of these passages, from “The Banking Concept” to “Engaged Pedagogy” to “What High School Is”, my belief in the true meaning of education has totally changed. Before I believed education to be what is being taught in schools all over the world, but these authors broadened my horizons and opened my eyes to the true and more in-depth meaning of what education should be. Education should be more than teachers throwing out information and the students memorizing and repeating it on tests and quizzes. Education should be information that means something to the students and what is important information for the students. The education should be what students obtain in schools that will help them believe in things and help to make then successful in life. Education should be as it is defined by California high school’s goal, “to acquire knowledge and share traditionally accepted academic fundamentals… to develop the ability to make decisions, to solve problems, to reason independently, and to accept responsibility for self-evaluation and continuing self-improvement.” Student won’t be able “to make decision, to solve problems” by taking in only information to pass a test and most likely forget most if not all of it by the end of that semester. Friere said it right when he made the point about how the students and teachers need to work together in order to accomplish a good and formal education. Work Cited
Freire, Paolo. “The Banking Concept of Education”. Considering Literacy. Ed. Linda Adler-Kassner. Boston. Pearson. 2006. 74-84.
Hooks, Bell. “Engaged Pedagogy”. Considering Literacy. Ed. Linda Adler-Kassner. Boston. Pearson. 2006. 67-73.
Sizer, Theodore. “What High School Is”. Considering Literacy. Ed. Linda Adler-Kassner. Boston. Pearson. 2006. 85-94.