1. Freire give many theories about the classroom but does little to back them up. This leads us to draw from our own experiences. He describes, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (p. 257). A “problem-posing” class would be one where the teacher does not engage students in lectures. Rather, he or she would simply stand in front of the class, voicing his or her opinions for a couple of hours. An “authentic form of thought and action” would be by contrast shown in a situation where classes are filled with group discussions and places where it is acceptable for students to question the teachers, while still being respectful. Freire presents that “reflection” is a positive goal and that it would entail both students and teachers learning from one another. He writes, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (p. 257). A time where I personally was “conscious with consciousness” would be in eleventh grade, when one of my teachers was very arrogant and assumed that she was better than all of her students. This affected me greatly, because she made me feel stupid at times for asking questions. This is not the type of learning environment which Freire encourages. When Freire makes comparisons between himself and the objects on his desk, he does so by generally stating, “Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the indivdual is spectator, not re-creator” (p. 260). When he applies this generalization to the books and coffee cups on his desk, he explains that you can only enter consciousness (as opposed to just being accessible to it) by realizing the true connection between yourself and everything around you.
2. Freire uses “alienation” when describing the separation of roles of the student and teacher and “praxis” in terms of describing possible relating solutions. For example, he writes (about teachers who distance themselves from their students), “Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity” (p. 257). Alienated, here, is used to show that the teacher is alienating the student. It’s almost like the teacher creates a well-read people only club and the student is rejected from joining it. He juggles the idea of praxis around by writing, “Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (p. 262). Here, praxis is used as a way (through again the use of reflection) to join people as one. Totally stepping away from the teacher-student alienation. Rather, in terms of in the education system, students and teachers would here work together to resolve the issues of barriers between them and found within the learning system.
3. Freire does enact his own principles in this essay, without making the reader feel distanced from him. Though there aren’t many question marks used in the essay to which the reader feels compelled to respond, there are implied questions asked by Freire. This is definitely not a piece to simply read and take as it is. It is meant to be explored and questioned. An implied question which is one of the main components of the piece, is how to be conscious of the fact that we are conscious. He explores this by mentioning the enigma of whether a world would exist with no people, since there would be no one to call it a world. Also, Freire engages the reader by continually mentioning integration between people, especially the teacher and student. He does not give an exact answer for the method of this integration, leaving the readers to answer it for themselves and to apply it to their own lives. Freire casts the readers, therefore, as questioners, not only of what he has to say, but of the situations of their own lives.
