I found the piece by Paulo Freire quite interesting. I had never thought of teacher-student relationships as one that could be oppressive. According to Freire, there is a teaching method called banking education that is an oppressor (teacher)-oppressee (student) relationship. Under this system, creativity and free thinking are discouraged and by minimizing this thinking, the oppressors gain more power over the oppressed. Teachers gain from this by having their egos stroked, as they feel they are above the students, who “they consider to know nothing.” Furthermore, the teachers perpetuate this relationship, as they concentrate on “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them.”
Freire states that education should be a mutual learning relationship in which both sides learn from the other; I agree with this method of education. I feel as though I have the potential to learn from my students and teachers should be open to this. Dialogue and open communication is imperative and the relationship of “teacher-of-the-students and students-of-the-teacher [should] cease to exist.” The students should be taught by the teacher and the teacher should be taught by the students, making them “become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.”
The Freire article does raise some interesting points on the potential for a mutually beneficial learning experience, which makes sense through a Marxist lens. I do think the theory runs away on him, though. Like many proponents of -ists and -isms, Freire almost entirely discounts the individual subject in lieu of the larger ideological implications.
“Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.”
Eek. Is there really no room for the selfish intellectual, the solitary genius, the introverted artist without global intent? Does the classroom not have a place for such thinkers? Does the world?