Pablo Friere was a leading Brazilian educator and philosopher who’s article, “Pedagogy and Power” was a critical work that helped shed an entirely different light on the education system than previously seen. In this article, Friere creates the banking model of education in order to help readers visualize the relationship between students and teachers as one of oppression, with the teachers assuming the role of oppressor. This is because, as Friere sees it, the teacher assumes him/herself as all-knowing, whilst the student is viewed as an “empty vessel” or “container” into which the teacher continuously vests knowledge to be stored. This model helps illustrate how flawed our understanding of the learning system truly is, being that students are only taught one “right” method or way of thinking, and are left without any room for creativity and individual thinking. Furthermore, the banking model of education forces us to think outside the box, revealing that if the teachers are by some chance wrong, no one student may be able to dispute it. Even if a student is able to dispute a mistake, most of the time the word of the teacher overrules the student no matter how ludicrous, thus only adding to the authoritarian style of learning. Given this information, it is safe to conclude that the empowerment largely goes to the educator/teacher and the dis-empowerment, obviously, in the hands of the students at the expense of their learning.

From the end of elementary school until the end of high school, I had always thought of the education system as beneficial but flawed. My reasoning for this line of thinking is similar to Friere’s in that most of the time, I did not feel as if my creativity was encouraged to flow, or that I have to think “outside the box” simply because it all seemed like a mindlessly repetitive pattern: school, study, sleep, repeat. Most of the time, teachers were just there to instill their version of knowledge and education into our brain, regardless of how monotonous or flawed it may be. To exemplify this, I remember after half a year of simply memorizing scientific terms and definitions for 6th grade science, I questioned a scientific theory once and my answer was a simple “because that’s what the book says”. Thinking about it now, it is a clear-cut example of my teacher using me as an empty vessel to just throw information into without truly considering its validity. Nonetheless, the education system is not complete chaos like one may assume, without rote information being passed down to us students, classes such a computer science and mathematics, where memorizing is the second step after understanding, would be a complete disaster.