if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. ... He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.
Control is hard to not crave in the classroom as educators are programmed to "control" their students behaviors and learning. Yet, control suppresses creativity, so with this we must begin to take a different approach.
To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.
Traditional teaching does not encourage this, but as I have seen in the classroom, the more you are working alongside the students rather than dumping information and expecting them to understand and demonstrate understanding based on the belief that we must "fill" them with specific knowledge prior to testing, students thrive and their creativity and individualism begins to flourish.
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
Friere speaks truth here. Education crosses its fingers and hopes that students will be complacent and simply follow the rules they are given. They want them to be vessels for their own words, as teachers are the deliverymen and the students are the recipients. Oh, and if they went against the role given to them and decided to not be passive? Then they are viewed as outsiders, going against the so-called "social norms".
The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation.
I found this statement to be so true within my own experience in education. Those who are enforcing this banking concept of education are the ones who claim they know what is best for the kids. Yet, many of us in education can see right through this facade and understand it for what it truly is; greed.
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
Students can reenact teacher behavior (simply copying), and those who make the big decisions in education would be jumping up and down, yelling, "Yes! Great job! You are learning!". Copying and learning are not the same, yet this form of "educating" is highly celebrated.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher.
Unfortunately, I feel this way sometimes with my elementary students. The curriculum can be horribly boring, but we must teach it as it is what is "designed to work", (just to be clear- I am currently rolling my eyes at that statement). We unload all of this content on them to ensure they are "filled" enough to be able to prove their competence during a state test that was probably created by someone who has never stepped foot in the classroom.
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem."
These words are just that, words. Students cannot put meaning behind it if they are not given a way to actually CARE about the content, rather than just be listening to someone speak AT them.
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration— contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.
Often, teaching is done through the curriculum given to through companies whom profit off of the education of students. The curriculum is based on standards that must be met in order to successfully meet the goal of the grade level or year for that student. Yet, the teachings can be so dry (literally drier than the Sahara Desert), to the point where students often find themselves in a process of "hearing" the words, but not truly developing a conceptual understanding. This is often due to the lifelessness of the words, they have no meaning other than "You must know this!", to the students.