1. “Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students,” (68).
Educators should make an effort to find a way for the educational material to relate to the students' lives. It is difficult and frustrating for students to learn about something that seems completely irrelivant, and relating it back to the "existential exprience of the students" makes it a more active learning process. Teachers should not simply discuss topics out of reach for the students to grasp. Educators need to make topics relatable for their students so that everyone learns from it.
2. “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other,” (69).
Knowledge can only exist through trials and tribulations, not simply through it being handed down from teacher to student. Students must learn through their own experiences with the aid of their educators, not through their educator's accounts of their own experiences.
3. “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence,” (69).
By assuming his students' ignorance, he causes their ignorance. Once the educator oppresses the student and prevents the student from asking questions and experiencing things for himself, he completely misses the point of education and is doing more of a disservice than his own job. While making himself seem more important and higher up, or as Freire puts it, justifying his own existence, he is in fact making himself completely worthless.
4. “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,” (69).
Education must be similar to a two-way street in that there is no set teacher and no set student, but both are actively learning from the other daily. Each student has valuable input and a different set of experiences to bring to the table.
5.“From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization...To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in relations with them,” (71).
While the teacher must maintain some sort of order, he should also think of his students as his equals. Mutual respect in the classroom is the quickest and easiest way to learn from eachother, and until that mutual respect is established, no knowledge can be passed on.
6. “But one does not liberate men by alienating them,” (73).
Educators cannot expect their students to learn if they alienate them with the information they present. The quickest way to lose your audience's attention is to irritate them into a frustrated state of ignorance.
7. “Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world,” (73)
Teachers that are genuinely concerned with their students' growth must not simply spew information at their students, but become aware that their students are conscious and able to learn.
8. “They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on ‘authority’ are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it,” (74).
While teachers are ultimately responsible for the educational growth of their students, these students also have a responsibility to their educators to teach THEM something as well.
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