EDUCATION AS THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

This start of this chapter is a perfect way to sum up all of the opinions I don’t have about education. The beginning of the chapter actually made me mad when I first started reading it, a type of anger that I haven’t felt since the last time I had to justify to one of my mom’s co-workers why I was majoring in education. This chapter referred to students as vessels to which it is the teachers job to ““fill” the students with the contents of his narration.” These contents are detached from reality, as the chapter continues, telling us that the students are “disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.” According to this chapter, the students are spectators, at a game that they need to be playing. I am not okay with the concept of educating, mute, behaved robots if it means that they are disengaged and existing in a different reality than that of my lesson. Education is never about the teacher, it is always about the students, how to engage them, adapt to them, and create an environment for learning … for them.

 Everything is about them, they are the reason why we as teachers wake up in the morning, they give our job purpose and help bring our creative lessons to life. Being an effective, and good teacher is not measured by your ability to turn students into “receptacles to be filled” or for that matter it is not measured by how completely you “fill the receptacles.” Being a good teacher does mean that you educate your students, but it is how you educate them and more importantly why you educate them that determines your greatness at this profession. Being is a teacher is no easy task, the saying those who can’t do teach, could not be further from the truth. Being a teacher means showing up early, and staying late, it means adapting your lessons 15 different ways if that’s what it takes for students to understand it, it means being a resource, it means always being kind and showing students what a role model looks like, it means not always being the smartest one in the room, it means reflection, and most importantly it means love. Love of education, love of your students, love of learning, and love of growth.

              Education has the ability to change lives, and change the world, but only if we let it. We cannot continue educating with the perspective that we have the answers to the problems that our students are solving. That is why I appreciated the problem posing perspective that is different from the banking education perspective. This method uses dialogue as the teacher-student and student-teacher. This strips away the ideas that students are purely being educated by the teacher, and the teacher is only one educating, now this perspective tells us that “They [the students and teacher] become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.” This begins to align with my perspective on education that “Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher.” This chapter had a lot of really great, eye opening things to say about education, I appreciated the different perspectives that it included along with many powerful quotes, most of which I chose to include in my response. I still believe now more than ever that Our job is to educate and be educated, every day, to teach our students so that one day we can learn from them.