Freire (Recife, Brazil September 19, 1921 - Sao Paulo, Brazil May 2, 1997) is best-known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. The basic critique was not new — Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
More challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher - that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches - as the basic roles of classroom participation.
~ From Wikipedia
1 comment:
This seems to me to be a good concept of teacher and teaching, because it is interactive and as it shows the teacher can always learn, including from and about the people they teach. Also, the student is not some sort of raw material to be turned into a finished product, they are an interacting human being. I taught for 25 years in Australia and hated the attitude that a school was supposed to be some sort of processing plant which 'turned out' a certain sort of product.
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