Freire Second Reading
1. Most of the teachers I had in high school fully embraced the subject/object theory of education. They talked at the students instead of engaging with them. Typically, this is mostly in the math-science subject area. This may be because this area is seen as something that is more cut and dry, black and white with hardly any grey area to speak of. The teachers take advantage of the lack of wiggle room with their subject matter and fully take it as their own. This makes it easier to deposit the information directly to the student’s heads, because a formula is a formula and it will not change. One of my teachers, however, taught not by depositing information but creating a concious of what the information he had could do for us. My junior year english teacher, hereafter affectionately known as Prarie, used information not as a bank deposit, but as a tool for exploration of higher thinking. In my opinion, Prarie just may be the smartest person alive, not just because of his vast knowledge within the educational spectrum (i.e. in the areas of typical learning, like english, math, science, etc) as well as his knowledge of popular culture as well as life experience in general. By taking Prarie’s class I was “conscious of my consciousness”. This means that instead of listening in order to understand the facts to be able to regurgitate them back on a test, I listened because I knew that this information was actually pertinent and could one day really help me in life.
2. As used in the essay, alienation is used to describe the educational system as hollowed. The words used in the educational process lose all of their meaning in the subject/object scenario. This is because the words of the subject are changed to become meaningless because they no longer have value, they just become an idea that is expected to be regurgitated with no effort. In education, alienation is apparent when the teacher talks down to a student. They are alienating the student by forming groups: the informed and the unknowing. Information can be looked at in two ways in general: either enlightening or alienating. Information can help those who have it to become something better, while it can alienate those who don’t have the information and are unable to obtain of what the enlightened have.
3. Freire embraces his topic and does not speak down to the reader. He explains all of his theories on the educational system but not in a way of just feeding it to a consumer. There are spaces for the reader to either contradict his points throughout the reading as well as add more to them. In this way it is more of a dialouge between colleges than that of a forcing of knowledge from a subject to an object.
