There has been a lot of finger pointing on why our education system is insufficient within the United States. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator in the 1960's came from a politically oppressed country posits, "problem- posing education" which allows a cooperative and communicative relationship between the teacher and student (65). John Henry Newman, a converted Catholic back in 1800s conceived, "useless or liberal education" as seeking knowledge for own pursuit (53). In a modern education setting, Paulo Freire's education-as-praxis theory would work best, because it allows critical cognitive skills, unity, and communication. Both Freire and Newman's theories both immerse in critical cognitive skills. In "Knowledge Its Own End", Newman writes, "knowledge [i]s the very first objective to which we are attracted, after the supply of our physical wants" (55). We (students) have a curious nature to seek more knowledge (useless or practical) than what we already know and think outside the box. In "Learning To Read", Frederick Douglass writes his mistress had started teaching to read and write but stop the lessons. He still desperately wanted to continue to learn, so he came up with a plan to befriend all the white children in the neighborhood and make them into his teacher (47). In "The Banking Concept of Education" Freire writes, "Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in an ivory tower[i]t is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world"(65). In "Nobel Lecture", Toni Morrison writes a story about an old women (writer) conversing the importance of keeping language alive with a group of children (culture). She tells them the fate of language is their hands in order for it not to die out it cannot succumb to "static, "oppressive" and "sexist" language (539-45).
