Paulo Friere's Banking Concept of Education

1.  Paulo Freire used the concept of "narration sickness" to describe how education is suffering most, referring to the relationship between the teacher and the students.  Narration sickness is defined as to the traditional mode of education in the classroom where the teacher simply talks on and on and the students must sit patiently and listen like little receptacles of knowledge.


2.  Narration sickness mimics/mirrors the current No Child Left Behind Act standardized testing practices in today societies in many ways.  The first way is they are both making the work we learn hollow and empty.  Also it turns learning into memorization and predictable.  Lastly they both turn students into "containers" just waiting to simply be filled.


3.  There are two different types or teachers out there, those who use the banking concept of education and those who use problem-posing education.  My high school history teacher from both 9th and 10th grade, Mr. Olson, preferred to use the banking concept in his teaching method.  Almost every day of class was filled with constant note taking.  They have have been notes we had to copy off the board or overhead, sometimes they were note we had to free hand while he lectured, and sometimes they were notes we took by outlining the chapter in our textbook.  He was the only one in the room that got to make decisions, he taught us the content he wanted to teach, not necessarily what we needed more help learning about.  Not to mention he pretty much thought that he knew everything that the was to possibly know about anything!
     I personally did not care of this style of teaching at all.  To this very day I have a very negative attitude about any type of history class room.  I can honestly say that I can't recite three things that I learned in any of his classes off the top of my head.  It was just a matter of remembering enough of the information to get through the test, then let it all go to make room for the new information.  I feel like if there would have been more discussion and exploration of the information it would have embedded itself into my brain more, but it was almost like he was in a race.  Trying to see how much information he could get through in that one semester. His prize: confused and upset students.


4.  Through out all of my years of school my life has been touched by a number of amazing teachers. There are truly been some that have helped to shape my life and who I am so much that it is hard to just pick one.  If it hadn't been for these educators influence in my life I would not be majoring in education myself!  One of the teachers that stands out in my mind as an excellent educator is my high school senior English teacher Mr. Ganci.  He almost always lead the class as one big group discussion.  There were very few days where all we did was sit and listen to him lecture.  That doesn't mean he didn't, he just did it in a way that kept us, as students, involved and responsible for our own education.
      Some of my greatest memories for his teaching methods is the way that he made everything fun and related to us.  This English class was focused around literature.  Let's be honest, what room of high school seniors want to spend their nights and weekends reading assigned books we would probably never read with out this class.  But Mr. Ganci kept it fun!  Rather than giving on tests on the novels or having us answer questions and write essays, he based our tests off of popular music.  I can recall that for at least three of the books we read that year he would play a song by Coldplay, then they next book a song by The Killers and he would hand us the lyrics to the song.  We would then write about how we thought the lyrics in the song followed the story we had just read and how the characters related.  He made testing of books like "Frankenstein" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" fun for the whole class.  Even with the outbreak of 'senior-itous' in the room.


5.  Based on Neil Postman's "My Graduation Speech" and my knowledge of the Athenians and the Visigoths I see that one of them would embrace the banking concept while the other would embrace problem-posting education.  I think that the Athenians would most likely embrace the concept of liberated or problem-posing because of their desire to learn and communicate.  That leaves the Visigoths, who I think would be the most likely to embrace the banking concept because of their crude, stubborn, and selfish ways.  
   I can honestly say that every course I am currently taking this semester is based mostly on dialogue.  I really enjoy that all of my teachers are practicing problem-posing education, at least most of the time!