To begin, I feel I must admit that I am highly biased in favor of Paulo Freire. The introduction, where readers are told both that Freire worked for the pre-coup Chilean government of Salvador Allende and that he went into exile following Augusto Pinochet’s coup, created a sense of sympathy within me that probably made me immediately more supportive of the ideas presented within “The “Banking” Concept of Education”. Additionally, this idea of an “authoritarian” (Freire 7) style of teaching, that Freire labels as being “reactionary” (7), versus a “libertarian” (Freire 2) style of teaching (think more Joseph Dejacque and less Rand/Ron Paul with this term), which Freire defines as “revolutionary” (4), made me imagine a fictional world filled with desk-barricades. Needless to say, I am highly biased.
However, I feel that, in certain areas of teaching, a certain amount of “authoritarianism” (Freire 7) is necessary. For example, when teachers are discussing in-text citations. While there are multiple ways in which a student can acknowledge an author within the sentence itself, the author must but acknowledged. Additionally, there is only one acceptable location for a page/line number (seriously, this is bolded for emphasis). There can be no argument here, as it is either right, and the student is fine, or wrong, and we are forced to send the student to the Grammar Gu… I probably shouldn’t go there.