Thoughts: "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

             Paulo Freire, the author of this chapter begins with a very philosophical view of teacher ego within the classroom. Viewing students as containers for information: Objects. This dynamic of student teacher relationship has never been so magnified as it is within this chapter. By viewing students as receptacles only waiting to be filled by the teacher, we begin this ugly system where the students simply reapply old information; replica minions.

             Students who live in this type of system experience things in a flawed or imitated way. Paulo says, "His task is to fill the students with contents of his narration-contents which are detached from reality". When the teacher is self invested for a specific set of outcomes, causing the students to become master imitators: hollow of any real knowledge.

             This type of classroom is what Freire calls, " The banking concept of Education: knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing". This process is a unproductive form of crippling the human mind from recreating, inventing, or hypothesizing. Classrooms should never become justified through monotone repeats. We as educators should always be moving in a forward motion of learning by resisting this repetitive motionless activity.

           Freire says we can avoid this type of motionless slump through reconciling the poles of contradiction, through teacher-student relationship. The many characteristics described by Freire as the oppressor behavior ALWAYS beginning with the teacher's actions where the teacher is the "subject" while the students are "objects". This concept is very interesting to me because it does rekindle allot of feelings about my high school experience. The teacher knows EVERYTHING and I know NOTHING.

          This type of classroom atmosphere is not at all what I would want in my classroom. It minimizes student "creative power". We must always become aware of our students needs and create a thinking free zone, where students are considered "conscious beings". Freire replaces the oppressor mentality with a system in where education becomes "problem posing" through the process of communication. I believe this is a productive way to experience authentic reality. By allowing students to participate their own solutions, we can then begin a process for collaboration. A real experience of individual voice is a process by which no other person can process for you. The students should always be exposed a free environment for learning through a healthy student-teacher collaboration.