Paulo Freire Continued

In class today we had watched a short film “Who’s Paulo Freire?” The movie was taken at Freire Charter High school. The film was a short documentary that displayed the children of the school on search of finding out why there school is named after him and what has he accomplished in life to deserve that honour. They discovered that Paulo Freire was a philosopher of education. He was one of the most educational thinkers of his time. Freire was searching for change within the school system. He advocated for classroom learning to be taught through dialogue and open conversations. He believed that schools should use the real world as their class rooms. In the movie the topic of oppression in a learning environment was brought up. Many teachers and students believed that oppression will never end in school. Well to begin what is oppression? Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner (Barber, 2004). Oppression in a school environment correlates by inhibiting students from reaching their goals. If a student was liberated from oppression then they would be provided with help to understand there options in life. Freire wanted to transform the educational structure of schools so the students can become beings for themselves.
As a student myself I am very reliant on what professors have planned and are expecting from a student. Growing up in an oppressed educational system, I can see why freire believes children can learn and understand things better if there was more freedom to teach. Right now the current education system is training students for symbolic analytic thinking, rather than thinking for them selves. As freire believes the current education system is made for a different time period. He wanted people to change the world by being a part of it.
Being a student I can observe that the majority of University students at Carleton accept information learnt from lectures passively. We are taught to simply learn information, for most students that means memorizing lectures and course readings and everything other than that does not matter. This education pedagogy and pedagogy of the oppressed is not furthering students’ capabilities of becoming active thinkers and learners. Although the education system may believe that students are leaving school with a well-rounded understanding of how to be prepared for the “real-world” I have yet to believe that. How are students suppose to become critical thinkers if the idea of free speech is un-tolerated in a classroom environment? From my perspective by standardizing the education system and making every student think, learn and know the same information as everyone else, how is one student suppose to differ from another? How are we supposed to think critically on our own if we were never allowed to? If our educational system continues to progress in this direction, we will soon see a decrease of students leaving the education system with a full rounded knowledge on how to think for themselves, be more innovative and critically analyze events that occur in everyday life.