Freire's Argument Analysis

I completely agree with Freire's argument that students are objects, just taking up space in a classroom. Under his hypothesis, in our current educational system, the student could only ever be as proficient as the teacher.

In Freire's opinion, mindlessly feeding the student material cannot lead to success. We should sink to the lowest common denominator. By setting such a low bar for our student's intellectual curiosity can never be fostered. Private schools have different methods, but they are not always the correct ones either.

For the past four years, I attended a boarding school where the students were expected in one way or another, to teach themselves. Problem sets replaced calculus textbooks and the mere proposing of lecture-based instruction caused the campus to uproar in discontent. I'm not completely convinced that the "Harkness Method", my school's ideological indoctrination of choice, aided my understanding of course material. What I do know, is that prior to having to compete in verbal jousting with sixteen other bloodthirsty teenagers around a wooden table, I was a shy and relatively awkward middle schooler. I wasn't able to tell someone their idea lacked thought because that was the
Disregarding the creepy Orwellian images that philosophy conjures, it correctly predicts as well. Currently, in the United States, we are at an educational impasse. The introduction of "No Child Left Behind" legislation as well as the importance surrounding Advanced Placement and other standardized tests forces the student to learn the test, not the material. Teacher's Unions understanding that the wages of their caucus depend on test scores encourages the teaching to tests. At that point the teacher is nothing. He or she could just as easily be replaced by a computer or a service like Khan Academy which has now become an integral cog in our nation's educational