education

            Born to this world of high efficiency, people nowadays have been trained to maximize the use of every second of their daily lives. Designing methods helping students to achieve "success" more efficiently is nevertheless one of the most popular goals of our society, other than inventing faster transportation tools or computers. Recently an article on the newspaper states that the government is considering to order public schools to provide online lessons for children who want to be educated at home because some parents claim that their kids may learn much better if the "bad influences" would not come any closer. The question remains, can exclusively receiving knowledge from only one source, let's say, online courses, without the interaction between both teacher and fellow students truly be qualified for the learning environment of "achieving a successful life more efficiently?" Paulo Freire analyses the disadvantages of education with no critical thinking involved in his The Banking Concept of Education which argue the importance of the interaction between the students and the teacher. .
             *Freire suggests in The Banking Concept of Education that the teacher-student relationship nowadays, inside or outside the school, appears to be more like a narration practice, which means the teacher only focuses on how many given facts the students can memorize. Taking my high school U.S. history class as an illustration, when the teacher lectured solely from the textbook word by word. The assignments were normally just answering the questions at the end of each chapter, which we could easily find the answers, simply some dates, names and locations of each events, in the book because they were usually in bold. Some answers were even in the back of the book, so we just copied. The exams were based on pure memorization of the text. It felt almost like we, students under this misguided system, were only allowed to receive, memorize, store and repeat.