True Education
The chapter 2 from “Pedagogy Of The Oppressed” attracts me a lot. The author,
Paulo Freire, talks about a relationship between students and teachers; he mentions that
“this relationship involves a narrating subject（the teacher） and patient listening
objects(the students).” The task of teachers is to “fill” the students with anything, and
the task of student is to accept. So, students become the “receptacles” to be “filled” by
their teachers. Freire calls it “the banking concept of education”, as he says, “Education
thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the
teacher is the depositor.” Next, he analyses disadvantage of banking model. And then,
he explains why people use this model. At last, Freire gives a better model called
problem-posing education. However, in another article “What True Education Should
Do”, some people think student as sausage casing and teachers are expected to stuff
“education” into this casing. Whereas, the true education doesn’t insert knowledge to
students. The author, Sydney.J.Harris, gives many examples about famous person’s
words to show what true education is. The author thinks that true education is: “The job
of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up, but to help them open and reveal
the riches within.”
After I read the two articles, I disagree with banking education because it can
minimize student’s creativity. I think true education is the education that makes you
want to study, not teachers or parents ask you to study.
First, I think hobby is the best teacher for a person in education. Schools should try
to find student’s hobbies and develop them. Hobby is an activity that we are interested
in, and we love to do it, hobby is likely to be one’s talent. The task of education is to
find what talent students have. As Harris says, “It is drawing out of what is in the mind.”
I think a hobby is our favorite event in our minds; we like it and we are willing to do it.
When I was in junior high school, table tennis was my favorite hobby; I wanted to play
it every day. In the weekend, I joined a table tennis club and practiced it. Sometimes I
spent many hours: from 2pm to 6pm playing it, but I didn’t feel tired or bored. My mum
said to me, “You think about table tennis every day. You are crazy about it.” I know that
is my hobby; I just want to play it, and my skills for table tennis improved quickly. If
you love one thing, you are willing to do it, and you can’t help practicing it without
feeling tired. That is the magic power of hobby, which makes you want to do it. It is
important for education，maybe the student will be a leader in his area of hobby.
Second, creating equal relationship between students and teachers. I agree with
Freire’s ideas of education, and I the hate banking model of education. I am a victim of
banking education, in China, our education is banking education. The teacher teaches
us a lot of knowledge every day and the only thing we need to do is to listen and accept,
as Paulo mentions “the teacher talks and student listens – meekly” Students don’t ask
teachers and teachers don’t ask students either. The more completely teacher fills
students, a better teacher she is; the more meekly the students to accept, the better
students they are. So we have to accept so much information every day that we have no
time to digest it, as Harris mentions “He was being so stuffed with miscellaneous facts,
with such an indigestible mass of material, that he had no time to draw his own
resources.” We are forced to receive mass of material by our teachers, and we even
don’t know the real meaning of that material; we don’t have time and our own ideas to
analyze. That is why we feel that we spend a lot of time studying and we don’t have a
chance to learn anything. It is not an equal relationship between the teacher and the
student; no matter what the teacher requires, we must to do it. So in China, we have a
bad relationship between students and teachers. It is necessary to create an equal
relationship for education.
Only if we want to study, we can really get knowledge, and we are willing to learn
everything, and that is the true education should do. Obviously, hobbies and equal
relationships are the basics of this education model.