“The Banking Concept of Education” by Paolo Freire was full of big words, accusations towards educators and their teaching methods, but also a few facts as well. The student teacher relationship is almost the same in every case as Freire notices, "this relationship involves a narrating subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)."
As far as what Freire thinks concerning standardized testing… I cannot really say that I have one answer for that. On one hand I think he’d be all for it, as a method to test teachers who seem to not really give a care about what their students actually learn. He states that, "Education this becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." A method in which the students memorize information, and yet have no idea what it really means or it’s significance. He also notes that, “The student records, memorizes and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means.”
On the other hand I think he’s find standardized testing ridiculous. Seeing as his view to me seems as though he thinks it's a good idea for everyone to recieve the same information, but be allowed to process and intrepret it in their unique, individual ways. Maybe he would argue that not all students are created equal and thus testing them against each other is a stupid idea. I actually side with this hand… I have always thought of standardized testing as embarrassing, stressful, and the only part of it I really enjoyed was the lack of lectures by teachers, and the snacks that they gave us between tests.
We’ve certainly heard from a lot of opinionated people throughout these past few weeks… Freire is no exception.
Very insightful!
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