Freire: There were many moments in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed that stopped me dead in my tracks. One quote that made my brain come to a full stop was “the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”;1 for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” (Freire 74). I think the reason this shook me so hard was because of how deceptive and malicious the intent is and that it is still very present in the world today. This is an obvious issue we are continuing to run into, but I have to admit reading it in those terms and that phrasing was chilling to me. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed felt like someone dumped cold water on me. The way Freire views teaching and coined the term “banking concept” is that teachers are the only one who knows how to think and that teachers know all there is to know. Where the students are responsible for basically just memorizing information. It is never enough to just know information but also to be able to apply it. There is such a large distance between student and teacher but there really shouldn’t be. Additionally, “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (Freire 81). The saying “knowledge is power” is true but if the knowledge we are absorbing is controlled then we are only as powerful as the system allows.
bell hooks: hooks uses the phrasing “unquestioning, passive student” to describe how some students are present in class. Many times, in college level courses students are just bodies in seats. There is little to no genuine participation in classrooms anymore because many students are just there to get the grade and go home. I think in my undergraduate experience my mindset was similar. I didn’t care much about the content of what I was learning, frankly I just wanted an A and to resume to my life after the certain amount of hours dedicated to the course each week. hooks also points out that teachers are not being viewed as humans and students do not view them as such. This is detrimental because if we all recognized that we are all human, there would be such a breakthrough in connection and communication from teacher to student. I found that once I pierced the veil and saw my professors as humans, I learned better from them.
Watters: Before reading this piece, I never realized that I don’t have access to my papers I previously written in my undergrad. I think because frankly I didn’t really care about the work I was producing like I mentioned earlier in this post. I am aware I could have saved it to my own computer and to my own archive, but I never thought to do that because I didn’t care about the work I was doing. As an adult with a fully formed brain, I feel myself questioning why I wouldn’t have saved my work to my computer.
Freire: There were many moments in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed that stopped me dead in my tracks. One quote that made my brain come to a full stop was “the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”;1 for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” (Freire 74). I think the reason this shook me so hard was because of how deceptive and malicious the intent is and that it is still very present in the world today. This is an obvious issue we are continuing to run into, but I have to admit reading it in those terms and that phrasing was chilling to me. Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed felt like someone dumped cold water on me. The way Freire views teaching and coined the term “banking concept” is that teachers are the only one who knows how to think and that teachers know all there is to know. Where the students are responsible for basically just memorizing information. It is never enough to just know information but also to be able to apply it. There is such a large distance between student and teacher but there really shouldn’t be. Additionally, “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people” (Freire 81). The saying “knowledge is power” is true but if the knowledge we are absorbing is controlled then we are only as powerful as the system allows.
bell hooks: hooks uses the phrasing “unquestioning, passive student” to describe how some students are present in class. Many times, in college level courses students are just bodies in seats. There is little to no genuine participation in classrooms anymore because many students are just there to get the grade and go home. I think in my undergraduate experience my mindset was similar. I didn’t care much about the content of what I was learning, frankly I just wanted an A and to resume to my life after the certain amount of hours dedicated to the course each week. hooks also points out that teachers are not being viewed as humans and students do not view them as such. This is detrimental because if we all recognized that we are all human, there would be such a breakthrough in connection and communication from teacher to student. I found that once the veil was lifted and saw my professors as humans instead of robots or just teachers, I learned better from them.
Watters: Before reading this piece, I never realized that I don’t have access to my papers I had previously written in my undergrad. I think because frankly I didn’t really care about the work I was producing, like I mentioned earlier in this post. I am aware I could have saved it to my own computer and to my own archive, but I never thought to do that because I didn’t care about the work I was doing. As an adult with a fully formed brain, I feel myself questioning why I wouldn’t have saved my work to my computer.
Cormier: After reading Learning in the Time of Abundance and Rhizomatic Education, I find myself thinking that our world is so abundant and there is so much information, yet our education system is not mirroring that. Cormier writes “Thus the foundations upon which we are working are changing as well as the speed at which new information must be integrated into those foundations” (4). The one resource we are lacking is time. Time is not on our side as it is difficult to keep up with all of the information we have as a society and by the time we check it and understand it, there is something new that arises.
Leave a Reply