Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Me? A "Liberated" Student?

After hours of pouring over the sections of text and hundreds of google searches of "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"--
I'm happy to say I ~finally~ grasp the "banking model" of education.
I ~finally~ know why I always sucked at school.

School treated the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, like a piggybank. The students become objectified and dehumanized because they are treated as containers to be filled. The student is "oppressed" by the teacher, because the teacher expects nothing more than route memorization of facts (okay... guilty of this in every science lesson in my life). Ideally, the application of knowledge is a more ideal end to education than regurgitating expendable facts (Kingdom, Phylum, Class...).

However, the arguments for pedagogy are to treat the learner and the teacher as co-creators of knowledge. It argues that students can learn when the student and teacher are working together, and learning from each other. It gives  the "liberated" student power to learn and grow.
I'm listening.

Our first assignment is to make our own syllabus, and I'm really looking forward to my homework.

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