The Revolution Revisited
Feedback from the Mr. Sweet rejection traveled fast. Moore coined a new nickname for the embittered bastard (Stefano Sucre, step right up) whereas Josh added, "For your emotional sake, might've been better if you found out he was dead. ... Wish I could find my old AP English essays though. Still remember your passionate Ayn Rand diatribe. Or was it a screed? Or a jeremiad? I'd love to read your old stuff."
"I've thought many times about posting one essay," I replied. "Perhaps now I will. Just looked at them and he actually did give me an A+ on something."
That piece is submitted here without a single edit. Enjoy while I cower.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Adam Harrison-Friday
Mr. Sweet
UConn 105/AP English
26 October 2000
Start the Revolution Without Me
It was last June, on the second to last day of school, that I walked nervously from one end of the hall, my heart about to explode, with Mrs. Hare approaching from the other end. The door to her room, A212, would be where my fate would be decided: Had I passed Precalculus? I met her there and simply asked, “Did I pass?” And thank the Lord himself, her answer was affirmative. But it had been a tumultuous year, one that involved me being in a class that I clearly wasn’t made for, and staying after school quite often to guarantee that my Wednesdays in July wouldn’t be spent with some grumpy summer school community college professor who felt that his pension wasn’t enough to support his already inflated retirement fund.
It wasn’t that Mrs. Hare was a terrible teacher—she was bad but folksy—but she followed the “banking” concept of education very religiously, putting the formulas on the board and telling us to memorize them. It was the same thing every single day. Did she really have to ask me why after a month or so of me not comprehending anything that I chose to spend all of class joking around with Bryan Moore? Her class embodied the idea of Teacher vs. Student because I had to accept everything that I was told. There was another slightly less enticing option: failure. It could be no other way. Mrs. Hare even decided that a lesson the day before Christmas would be educational.
I did all the homework assignments because I knew that every point mattered, and each time she checked homework—which was sporadic, and that’s a generous statement—I would tally up my average by looking in her grade book, magically hoping that I somehow had a C-minus. Homework was given every night except before quizzes (one per week) and tests (one every three weeks). Mrs. Hare never let up; if you thought the training sequences in Full Metal Jacket looked brutal, then you didn’t endure her Precalculus class. I didn’t understand anything, so once per week I sat down next to her after school and attempted to solve some problems that were more difficult to comprehend than Bob Dylan’s lyrics. But good ole Mrs. Hare would pull out her trusty number two pencil and finish a problem that had dumbfounded me through a process that looked deceptively simple. I would try the same problem and . . . nothing. She would once again show me how things were done; she solved more problems for me in one day after school than Mr. Shea [my guidance counselor] has during his entire career. I justified the existence of the book Math for Dummies.
It was the same thing every week. Do a lesson in class, try to do the homework (though usually just make things up), and stay after school before a test or quiz to try and pass the next day. I failed at least half the exams during the year, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to get 40s. During the fourth quarter, with failure a very real possibility, my mom had to come in and talk to Mr. Bassett about summer school because a certain guidance counselor of mine couldn’t find out where I would need to go, even though others had been told weeks prior. As bad as Mrs. Hare was, she looked positively saintly in comparison to the “help” I got from the guidance office. On the final exam I amazingly got a 63 (a 60 would’ve meant a year’s worth of misery all for nothing). It was divine intervention.
I was the stupid but committed student; she was the helpful and halfheartedly nice, though strict and dominating teacher. She told me to re-take Algebra 2 (which I adamantly opposed, since I didn’t want to re-take a class that I’d already earned credit for) or to drop the class. I proved that I could pass, but I didn’t learn anything. She only cared about meeting the curriculum and her attitude was depressing, her lectures preachy. She needed to worry about the kids who were moving on to Calculus (explaining the constant quizzes and homework), though she never told us why it was so important. Yes, we were the students with that one eternal question: Why should we care about this class? She taught and I learned. Rather than be serious about my near failure, Mrs. Hare could only joke prophetically that I shouldn’t consider a career that involved math, which basically meant blaming me for the D on my final report card. I take most of the credit, but did she ever think to look in the mirror?
And it is with that that I mention Paulo Freire’s essay “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” an argument for the practice of what he calls either a problem-posing or liberation education. Mr. Freire’s thesis is that “education is suffering from narration sickness.” He believes that the teacher is a dictator who fills students like receptacles, stifling creativity, and even worse, those students can’t be truly human under this “banking” concept. To prove his point, he equates students with slaves, since students and teachers are polar opposites: one possesses all of the knowledge, while the others giddily wait for answers.
Mr. Freire says that “he,” the teacher, “must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.” Man must be connected to consciousness, and so with that, in problem-posing education, “[t]he teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them.” The “banking” concept must be rejected so that problem-posing education is introduced with the teacher and the students on an equal plane, meaning that no-one is taught or self-taught. Students must influence the teacher according to Mr. Freire, and a critical comprehension must be introduced. He ultimately believes that “[p]roblem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates the reflection and action upon reality.” Men must be connected to the world, and thus one another, through a thinking process that allows “teachers and students to become subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism.”
On a basic level his ideas make perfect sense: the students and teachers work in utopian harmony, both able to learn from one another by sharing the wealth of ideas. Mathematics and science would be taught so that teaching involved no dictating whatsoever. No student would be “another brick in the wall” as the Pink Floyd song goes, but right from the beginning they would be welcomed into a sympathetic approach where everyone’s ideas merited equal importance. Students would no longer feel stupid because this kind of education encourages them to say what they think and not be afraid of a critical backlash. Students wouldn’t be treated like prisoners, but instead a harmonic coexistence would persevere. If you think that that’s a lot of “horse malarkey,” as the eminently quotable Mr. Fairwood would say, then you would be right.
Should I have to sacrifice all my knowledge for the sake of some lesser student in the name of humanitarianism, the same humanitarianism that Mr. Freire deems worthless when practiced in “banking” education? Certainly, the kids in my Precalculus class wouldn’t have wanted to wait while I attempted to keep up. Paulo, you hypocrite. Would his method work in kindergarten? Would such political reform even be possible in a society centered on the conditioning that he so vehemently deplores? This way of thinking is far too radical for our modern American society to endorse. And this phony “liberation,” so we are told, lets everyone be slaves in their own special way: to Education. In “banking” education students’ only form of idolatry is the teacher, but in problem-posing education it is the entire system that they must worship. If that’s not an even worse form of slavery than what he condemns then nothing is. If a teacher doesn’t impose his thought—impose being Mr. Freire’s objectionable verb—then how are students ever going to learn? It is when the teacher gives us his knowledge that we can be given pieces of everything that he has learned throughout his lifetime, applying it to our own.
It is through the “banking” concept that we all learn the essential educational ideas as we are given knowledge that we can think about for ourselves. Without that essential knowledge we would be lost. It’s easy to look back and wish that every grade had been free from this dictating that seems so repulsive, but at age seven we don’t care why one plus one equals two; we care only that it does. Most of us admit that three years ago we weren’t half the thinkers that we are today, and even in this class the usual suspects are always asking questions like how long journal responses should be. We all plan on going on to college, education’s Federal Reserve, whose motto should be “Get ‘banked’ or get out.”
There are many people who oppose some concepts of the “banking” system and given its problems most people seem content with trying to make it less dictatorial, but not abolishing it entirely. Luckily, despite the obvious flaws, most teachers attempt to balance them. In Physics last year Mr. DePino admitted that lectures were boring without demos, so we explored what those words on the overhead meant: imploding marshmallows and computerized roller coaster architecture helped a bit. Then again, there are others who don’t have a clue: to suggest that AP History was practically coma-inducing would be wrong because I’m sure there are more enjoyable ways to get a coma. A finer example of “banking” is Mr. Quinlan: his classes consist only of him lecturing about a variety of subjects, from the victories of Alexander the Great to his stories of Joe the Roofer. It’s a fair assumption to say that Quinlan is admired by students more than any other teacher in this school, though it’s because he gives kids common sense knowledge and is a regular guy, something the Department of Education doesn’t seem to like. He teaches lessons and injects some personal humor, but deep down we all know that he’s a sadistic “banker,” right? As Wallace Shawn says in The Princess Bride: “Inconceivable!”
Parents, teachers, and students need to work together to help make some changes. If “banking” is going to survive then kids need to have more fun at school. I do credit some teachers with making learning pleasurable, but the number in thirteen years is far too miniscule. I got a great deal of my knowledge from my teachers, but my mom instilled the moral truths, and it is the writings of others, like I mentioned in my first paper, that have really made me a critical thinker. And it is critical thinking that is most important because it gives us the ability to reason about all of those ideas that have been instilled in us. We don’t need Mr. Freire’s radicalism, but “banking” must make some progress so that once we emerge from education, our eyes adjusting to the light of the real world, we can fend for ourselves rather than be slaves to a new system. There is no moderate answer here: Reform or accept the ideas that America’s schools will always be seriously plagued. As we hopefully progress to something greater in education during our new millennium, I can only say that I’m happy to be getting taught in American because it is our country’s educational system that gives us the greatest opportunity to subscribe to Seymour St. John’s fifth freedom: the freedom to be one’s best.