Oppressed Students

Unoriginal and void, this is how much of the world looks at children going into school and this is people look at kids when it comes to the banking method. The banking method is where children are empty pots waiting for knowledge to be dropped into them. This severely suppresses creativity in children. At the age of a child’s first days of school a child is extremely imaginative and creative, they are also not held back by bias and polluted thoughts that society could cast upon them. It is once children are brought into school and forced to think and do things that schools want them to, is when they start to lose all of their magic and creativity. It is so uncommon to see people overflowing creativity today’s society because we are all pre-set and continuously taught to think the same way.

With this banking method we are oppressing our children and creating real life robots.  Not allowing children to have a mind of their own or even think that at this age kids can have a mind of their own is absolute foolishness. The childhood years in someone’s life is a vital time for them; this is the time where they start becoming their own person. We take a lot of this growing and soul searching experience away from them when we put them in a classroom where everyone is treated as if they have the same mind and learn just the same. Everyone is different and that is a known fact, but yet we don’t treat children like they are when they are in the classroom. Not everyone learns at the same speed or learns the same way, or even likes the same topics.  

As a society we need to get together and find out the best ways to teach our students and this can even be done in different learning plans. A good example of different learning plans in school would be the individual learning plans that we have in class; it gives students a chance to be creative with blogs, podcasts, or photo essays, or to stick to a classic writing plan with reflections and an essay. Another great way of educating is the problem solving method that Paulo Friere has proposed; it gives students a chance to be different. Students need to be encouraged to showcase their originality and be taught how to use it in everyday life.

 How the school curriculum is currently teaching students is only helpful to some of them, not all and many students it greatly weakens their likelihoods to stand out in the world. So often the media will tell you how to feel or how you should act in a certain situation, I think that as long as it you are doing nothing wrong you should be able to act and do as you please, and most importantly think how you want.  Education is not actually educating like one would think, it is actually dictating, it is oppressing people into being something that they are not. Everyone is now being forced to be the same, stripped clean of creativity.