book

Teachers as Oppressors

21 Pages 1529 Words 1557 Views

To be honest, I have asked myself couple of times while I was sitting on the same chair in the same class but on difference days, “What am I doing now? What is the professor talking about? What am I supposed to ask while he keeps talking in his own thinking? Is he going to stop and start discussing with us?” After that, I felt like other students and I are like silent robotic people who are able to listen but unable to speak up. Unfortunately, that situation will be happening to my life for next few years. That’s reason why I literally want to change and share my opinion with teachers and professors that I am experience a lack of confidence to express my words to them, to let them know that I’m not the one who is sitting but doing nothing. After reading two articles, “Banking Concept of Education” of Paolo Freire and “Engaged Pedagogy” of bell hooks, I clearly understand what is happening to our current educational systems of our country, in which the teachers are teaching us by their meaningless concepts, which are lacking reality and disconnected or go further from students’ experiences. However, the authors of two articles have shown me that the problems can be solved which is actually a timely help for fixing our current school systems up. That’s what I will argue for in this essay. In “Banking Concept of Education,” Freire stated, “teachers and students should work together to develop the knowledge and consciousness necessary to overcome oppression” (74). Why did he mention the word “oppression” in this sentence? One reason why he emphasized that word is because he believed that our current school system is afflicted by how terribly teacher-student relationships work together. Sadly, teachers are now becoming “a narrating subject” (74) who constantly talk about unknown and inactive topics, those that are totally in disjunction to students’ knowledge. Therefore, teachers are like the oppressors while students are described as the oppressed who are listening objects, or containers. According to Freire's words, “Narration (with the teacher as a narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content” (74). We can imagine how teachers look at students as they are like containers. In fact, they could have been better, unless their brains are filled by their teachers’ pointless work every day, and we become a group of pointless people sitting in the class. If we, humans, are tired of consuming the same meal every single day, let’s think of our children when they are at school with a narrative teacher who likely fills them up with narrated content. They keep receiving, memorizing and repeating the

Read Full Essay