Response to Pedagogy of the Oppressed Chapter 2

This chapter for me was a little bit easier to understand because it applied to elements of oppression to education, instead of being abstract like the first chapter. However, the chapter seemed to lump the banking concept and problem-solving teaching too close together for me to distinguish the two. Under careful examination though, I think I can see the difference between the two different roles of teaching and how they apply to oppression.

To start, I think that the banking concept really was a part of everyday classrooms for many years, and in some classrooms, it is still present. How I remember the banking concept is "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing." This quote applies to education because the teacher is always looked at as the beholder of knowledge and the students are the receptors of that knowledge. This can be problematic though because the students are never given the opportunities to apply the knowledge they are suppose to have received, in order to really make the content concrete. The quote also applies to oppression because the oppressors often see their victims as things who know nothing and need someone to feed them the necessary information. In this sense, oppression and education are the same thing because there is always an authority figure who throws information at listeners without making sure that the information is tangible and can be applied to the listeners' lives and knowledge. Also, in this sense the teacher or oppressor can dominate the audience and sway them to think or feel a certain way about issues.

For the problem-solving concept however, it embodies the essence of consciousness and communication. In this concept, the teacher's role is to create dialogue in which the students and the teacher learn together and are jointly responsible for their growth. This is an important factor of problem-solving because it stimulates true reflection and action upon reality. This idea is really important for decreasing oppressio in education because through problem-solving education, people develope a power to critically look at the way they exist in the world and that the world is in transformation. Being able to think like this, allows individuals to not beecome victims of oppression because they are able to think for themselves and realize that they are not "things" of the world, but active parts in it.