Pedagogy of the Oppressed

The article “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” was quite interesting and gave teachers a lot of ideas to think about. The one idea that I thought was rather interesting was the teacher-student relationship, which gives teachers ideas on how to have a teacher-student relationship. One of the ideas was that these relationships, “involves a narrating subject and patient listening objects,” there the student would get to understand the content and empirical views of reality better from the views that the teacher gives to his students (1). However, the idea is that narrative education comes from students record of memorizing and repeating phrases. In belief that the idea of narration, “leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by teachers,” which it is our job as teachers to help fill our students with knowledge and ideas to help them succeed with schooling (1). From there the students will understand your approach and be more willing to permit themselves to be filled with knowledge, which will allow them to be better students in the long run. Yet, the idea of education becomes an act of “depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat,” there the teachers becomes like a bank (1). The idea of teachers being like banks are the concept of education, “in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system” (1). Lastly, another idea that I thought was important to think about is the idea of banking education is to, “minimize or annul the student’s creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who cares neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed,” there teachers get the idea that it is our job to better educate these students and to take some of these ideas to help our own teaching in the future (2).