Eth & Ped: Critical Pedagogy Dissected

When I started reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Chapter 1" I honestly felt I was in a history class. The oppressor-oppressed dialectic is what most of the South East Asian history and liberation and Partition of the Indian Subcontinent is all about. It was even more poignant as this history is still in living memory back home. My grandparents were born before the Partition of 1947, and my parents before the Fall of Dhaka which separated Bangladesh from Pakistan.

I questioned why we were reading text so clearly historical and pertaining to socialism etc.

Then I started Chapter 2, and things became clearer. The Banking Concept of Education perfectly encapsulates the ideology of chapter 1.

"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 banking view cares not for the students to become creative, and "thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another."

However, a problem I run into here is that Freire talks about the process of imparting knowledge to students as a bad thing. That the teacher is a necrophilic. What is the right way then? A student who was taught in this manner may well grow up to be a teacher who teaches in this manner. 

This system of education does, however, runs true when you talk of students misbehaving in class, as the subject matter doesn't interest them. How will it, when its imparted as soporific and not as inclusive. 

My question is answered in part by the latter half of the text discussing the Problem-posing education: "The students-no longer docile listeners--are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own."

The emergence of consciousness and opposed to its submersion is not only an interesting concept, but I feel like in can be visualized.

"Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity." I don't entirely agree with this proposition, and would like to expand upon it in class.

The third reading, "What is Cultural Pedagogy" ties in the thoughts from the Freire readings, and I like the direction it takes in terms of thought process. What I would like to see more of is the global context. As an international student, I would like to see how I can relate these learnings to a developing schooling environment. Where I come from, illiteracy is still a problem, so what stage at which to incorporate these ideas would be a nice tie-in. How can we go about this?