Reviewing the author's lens:
In "Pedagogy of Oppressed"
Paulo Freire focusses on educational programmes and presents a marxist theory
of education in the context of the revolutionary context of the oppressed and
the oppressors, in which the method of education favoured by the oppressors,
which he calls the banking concept of education, and counters with his
theory of a problem-posing education.
Friere
called the narrative character of relationship between teacher and student (depositories
and depositor) as Banking System of Education, where the content –the values or
the empirical dimensions of reality are just narrated. Filling the containers,
the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. The teacher here always has
knowledge and that knowledge is absolute and thus exercises authority/social
control and the students follow them passively and meekly. It assumes that the
students "know nothing" and indeed projects in "absolute
ignorance".
It
alienates the students from a living, critical engagement with the
present political and social conditions and also excludes them from
"restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry" – which men pursue in the world, with the
world, and with each other and then only the knowledge emerges. It is
thus programming students and ensuring the compliance of existing status-quo.
It trains the students to accept things as given by others rather than
trusting their own instinct to learn and grow. The thought is only authentic when it is
generated by action upon the world but the students are given the thoughts of
others and then their educational success is measured by their ability to
regurgitate these thoughts.
In
Problem-posing education approach to education teacher and student approach a
problem together where the teacher does not claim to either own, nor know the
world. Here the teacher and student approach the problem together. There is a real
critical engagement with reality and is politically liberating because it just
not ‘Fills them away’ like containers or depositories and treats them as
persons as thinking beings. The Humanity is not denied here. It argues that the
present is not "well-behaved" and the future is not pre-determined
and thus, the students are involved in reality which they inquire critically
and thus are able to transform it.
It is an approach to education which helps
in discovering truths not merely absorbing the other people's version of
reality through the second-hand truths disseminated to them. Whereas, the Banking system unable
the pupils to develop the critical consciousness which would result from their
intervention in the world as transformers of that world, thus they simply adapt
to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality.
Freire
writes: "Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and
stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the
vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry
and creative transformation".
The need is to recognize the child
in every individual and empathetically enter their world without hiding behind
a spurious authority which is maintained only by violence or authority over them !!!
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