Thoughts and Quotes from Freire's "The Banking Concept of Education"

Let me start off by saying I enjoyed reading this essay, although it felt as if it jumped around bit or maybe that i could not follow everything mentioned.

The following quotes from the essay are just bits in which i found some interest in their meaning.

The first

" Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry..."

Nothing really to say about that quote except that it is true.

The next is something which i personally believe to be true.

"The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialect, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence..."

The entire quote is something I believe to be true. The part in which I labeled red, is something in which i feel I've had experience with. In high school, I felt that some of the teachers purposely taught in such a manner to try and keep students from understanding concepts and formulas. I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but i believe that the reasoning behind it was the same...for the justification of his title and position.

Another instance of this would be during the one of the occasionally held "Rubik Cube Club Meetings" My friend knew how to solve the dreaded cube, and passed the knowledge onto me. Along the road, he decided to found a club in school dedicated to teaching other people how to solve the cube. However, actually witnessing him teach fellow students how to solve the cube, I saw that he'd use harder terminology and analogies to reach students. I arrived at the conclusion that he had been doing it that way to promote and establish the idea of his own intelligence, and to have others believe it to be true. ( some might disagree with me, but you'd have to know the person to understand why i arrived at that conclusion.)

Aside from those two experiences, when reading the part of the quote which states, "... accept their ignorance..." (referring to the students) I can't help remember the self-fulfilling prophecy, which i learned in psychology. The way i took that part of the quote was that the teacher treats the students as if they truly cannot understand or begin to know anything about the subject, with this, the students believe too themselves.