Oppressed Discussion Questions

Pedagogy of the Oppressed Discussion Questions
English 4 CAS & AP
The banking approach is a one-sided way of teaching where the professor "deposits" knowledge into the students. It's based on the idea that the students are completely ignorant and without anything meaningful to contribute-that the teacher is the only one who can bring insight and knowledge to the subject. Also, it discounts inquiry and mutual discovery as valid ways of learning. I have experienced this in several classes based on the model of lecturing, including a class where definitions for vocabulary words had to learned verbatim as they were given to us, down to the punctuation.

The goals of libertarian education are to make learning a joint venture where both the students and the teacher contribute, take part in a dialogue and think for themselves, with students ultimately becoming "beings for themselves". This differs from a classical approach in that it is based on inquiry and engagement rather that lecturing and dictation
I think he means that it works against independent thought/ creativity and disposes a person more towards blind belief of authority.
I think he's probably right, because if everyone who is supposed to know more than you is giving you the message that you're incapable of making meaningful contributions for yourself, you're probably going to believe them, doubt your own abilities and ideas, etc.

I think elementary and middle schools facilitate indoctrination into "playing the game"-following arbitrary rules, etc. Especially with mandatory schooling beginning so young, kids get in the habit of obedience before they can question it. So by the time they get to be old enough to have those sort of mental processes, they don't question it anyway, because it's ingrained-they're indoctrinated. And the co-occurring atmosphere/ indoctrination of competition keeps students "playing the game" past the point where they might otherwise realize its
oppressiveness.

If Freire was trying to say that if a teacher's teaching doesn't produce authentic thinking and learning in his students, then he didn't really teach, I think that I agree. Just like the measure of work in physics can be zero- even if force was applied- based only on the displacement of the object, I think that the measure of someone's teaching is the listeners understanding. If someone speaks but I don't understand, no communication actually happened. I think acknowledgement of that would require the teacher to be more willing to accept feedback and interaction, and base the content of their class not on the time it would take them to recite information, but on the actual results they produce in the students in terms of understanding of the material.

Problem-based education involves a "constant unveiling of reality" by making the student more a part of their reality by expanding their consciousness and giving them more insight on and lenses through which to understand the world. The dialogical and problem-based approaches to education seem to be fairly similar, since they both value independent thought and questioning above.

I think that means that problem-posing education serves the higher purpose of informing and bettering your life and self within the context of the world instead of just your score on a test or ability to recite facts for their own sake.