I am a frustrated and dissatisfied product of the banking system of education. As I fought diligently to learn Spanish in my junior Spanish class, I learned the devastatingly oppressive result of being taught through the “banking system†of education. After drudging through two years in the program, I left this Spanish class frustrated, discouraged and speaking very little of the still “foreign†language. But not until now did I realize my hard work may not have been purely ineffective, and instead, I may be a victim of educational oppression.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire accounts of the devastating nature of the banking system of education. The students are merely ...view middle of the document...
In his writing Freire explains, “Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education†(81). If students are taught as solely receptacles, with no interpretive reasoning through a student teacher dialogue, conclusively, no knowledge can be produced.
I remember my Spanish class to be both difficult to do well in, by grading standards, as well as not helpful in my actual learning to speak the language. In a smaller than average corner classroom on the top floor of the primary building of my high school we concentrated on grammar, conjugating, writing and even watching Disney movies in Spanish, while very seldom actually speaking and applying what we were supposedly learning. Every Friday during the 7th period class, final class of the day, I dreaded yet another exam. We had an examination, a test, every Friday the entire year. We were handed a piece of paper with eight to twelve sentences, some in English, and were required to translate the text to Spanish. Again, I remember only rarely personally speaking Spanish within the walls of that classroom. Again, I heard an abundance of Spanish gibberish from the teacher, however, rarely from my own lips. Hearing from friends at different schools who were actually learning to speak Spanish really frustrated me. It also caused me to lose hope in the teacher because of how different our classes were. Apparently theirs was working and ours wasn’t.
My regrettable failure of learning to speak Spanish at all became quite clear two years after the class during a...
