I came across this quote excerpted from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He calls it the ‘banking’ method, in which teachers just treat the students like empty vessels and dump the information into them. As Freire said himself, “Narration leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher.” This not only restricts the students’ ability to express themselves, but this project “an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negate[ing] education and knowledge as a process of inquiry.”

I’m pretty sure the last thing the government wants is a population of mindless drones that are only focused on their own country, but never venture outwards and beyond. They way to create a flourishing society is not just through its students. It’s through its teachers too, because they are the ones that hold the key to unlocking the students’ potentials. And in turn, it’s the people who authorize these teachers to teach, who are the ones that determine the system to teach the students with.

If we cannot tell our current government to change the way they raise the next generation, then the few of us who are aware of the problem should no longer ignore the issue at hand. We should be striving to improve the society we live in. We should be striving to create an environment in which the younger generation and grow, flourish, inquire, and express themselves in association with the world around them. Only then knowledge can grow.

It must be taught how to think, to have a critical analysis built through knowledge. As a journalist and educator through some educational projects, I base on critical analysis of the news, because we all know that every media is manipulated by power agents, and how to teach it to children and young people? Through critical thinking. This is my point of view…  😉

“Knowledge emerges only through invention, re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”
— Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)