What first comes to mind when reading this article is Paulo Freire's work on the Banking concept. He describes the relationship between the teacher and student as the following:
"A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness" (Chapter 2).In other words, our current pedagogy is set up so that students become docile individuals without any notion of agency to create change for themselves or community. The way the current school system is set up is that passivity and obedience is always being rewarded. Our students are becoming gears in the machine.
The relationship that is being between the student and teacher is one of power. The teachers are the givers of knowledge and the students can be seen as receptacles of that given information:
"Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are" (Chapter 2).
2 comments:
The second quote of Freire's you noted reminds me of something in Haberman's article. He describes a sign that was posted in an urban high school that read: "We dispense knowledge. Bring your own container." Haberman, like Freire, agrees that this mentality is the "opposite of good teaching."
I just have to agree with what you said in your post - it's something that I brought up as well in my first post. Unfortunately, many teachers stifle their students' learning by enforcing the outdated notion that a "good" student is a quiet, docile, passive student and that a "bad" student is active and vocal.
It's weird, and I remember this from my own schooling - the students end up acting like automatons in a way.
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