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Essay / Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire: How the educational structure has taken away true humanity
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire explores the deeply rooted structure of education, that of bank employees, and the way it deprives people of true humanity. While promoting the main idea that our education system follows an oppressive "banking method", Freire discusses what it means to be human and have full consciousness, neither of which can be achieved through systems educational in place. In Freire's view, education is not simply about learning in the classroom, but rather about an “authentic liberation – the [true] process of humanization” (79) that students bring into the world. In the system currently in place, students are constantly dehumanized in education, causing them to become more terrible and more robotic than successful. What appears to be a flaw in the way education is given and received actually relates to a broader idea of wholesomeness, creativity and the pursuit of the "historical vocation of the people" (85), namely humanization and the barriers that students face and that prevent them from ever realizing this vocation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Freire's main points revolve around the idea that our educational model has adopted a system in which teachers give bails and students simply receive them without any critical analysis or thinking, thus never allowing them to evolve and grow as individuals. He maintains that “the more the receptacles allow themselves to be filled obediently, the better the students become” (71) in the eyes of teachers and society. In a sense, students are trained to become robots, completely deprived of their humanity, but without ever realizing it as this very robotic phenomenon is glorified in our society. The more empty the students are, the better they are able to be “filled” with the information “deposited” in them by their teachers. This very notion prohibits students from thinking for themselves, because if they already have individual ideas, they will no longer be able to retain the information given to them. So the only way to thrive in such a society is to be empty, to lack individuality and, worst of all, to pander to their dehumanization. From Freire's perspective, education is meant to create. Whether it is the creation of new ideas, individual perspectives, or a new world, the knowledge gained through education aims to enable people to think critically and integrate into the world around them. surrounded. The goal of such education is to help people see and understand the world "not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation" (83), which is simply not the case in the bank employee method. The aforementioned terrible process of "filing and ranking" has a simultaneous effect on the personality of the students, because "it is the people themselves who are classified because of the lack of creativity, transformation and knowledge" (72) as that they receive more external information. of their education, or of the oppressors. Before entering this educational system, students have desires, curiosity, and critical thinking skills. However, the horrible structure of education rids them of this as they become more familiar with the classroom material and the methods by which they are expected to demonstrate their understanding of that material. Information is sent to them automatically, and their job is to eventually send it back, butthis time, in the form of tests or quizzes. Instead of evolving and growing as human beings through education, they face the opposite effect. Besides the inherent conditioning of students that occurs in our education system, Freire also argues that there is economic exploitation of students by their oppressors. The dehumanization he speaks of comes from a power complex of oppressors who "use their 'humanitarianism' to preserve a profitable situation" (74) of students who will never see a creative world because they will not have enough of productive knowledge to create one. The "profitable situation" in this case is the powerful role that the oppressors play, a role through which they can constantly condition students to become more and more lifeless, and never allow them to truly pursue their true calling. Moreover, by locking students' personality and creative potential into a constant cycle of "filling" and "dropping off", oppressors can guarantee a world where they will always be at the forefront of the education system and, in return, as economically as possible. compensated in their areas without allowing new generations to leave the cycle of oppression to become one of the oppressors. The way students are conditioned and taught creates an atmosphere not unlike that of a slaughterhouse. Students are trained, taught to do things in a certain way that benefits their oppressor, without any individuality. Freire uses the term “domestication” (75) to describe the style of education imposed on students. They are considered pets, or animals, who are trained for their inevitable failure in the pursuit of their true calling: humanization. By the juxtaposition of “biophilia”, the connection that human beings unconsciously seek with the rest of life as opposed to “necrophilia”. ”, the desire for death, Freire further reveals the implicit desires that educators inherently maintain to condition students to “become lifeless and petrified” (71). The obvious need for power and control among teachers is evident in their necrophilic desires which, over time, remove any possibility of biophilia developing in students. The way of teaching is clearly oppressive and “oppression – overwhelming control – is necrophilic; he feeds on the love of death and not of life (75). This very love of death testifies to the reasons behind the method adopted by the oppressors where, slowly, they deprive their students of life, creativity and the potential for transformation. The constant domestication that students face eventually causes them to lose their individuality, and because it is the educators who facilitate this process, they maintain this necrophilic desire. Even if it doesn't literally kill, they take so much away from their students that they end up losing all life. The list of practices of a teacher-student dynamic implicitly enumerated by Freire serves as a primary example of such a circumstance. (73)All the characteristics implied by the list of teachers show great power. Everything that happens in a classroom is transmitted from the teacher to the student. The student is only the receiver of the action and has no say in what happens. In this way, they are dead inside and unable to think for themselves or make conscious decisions, and their passive nature in such situations allows them to thrive in this world with a "fragmented view of reality deposited within them" (73). Students will only know what the teacher tells them and are therefore slowly stripped of their identity and.