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Education Should Educate Our Young People Are Failing Essay

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Education has always been an important topic of debate, and rightfully so since the young people of our generation will one day be called upon take up places of importance in this country. However, claims have been made that the methods we use to educate our young people are failing. One man in particular, Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, states that we treat our students like receptacles, which the object of the teacher is to “fill” the students up with knowledge that the teacher deems knowledgeable. In short, Freire states that teachers treat students as unknowledgeable individuals incapable of thinking for themselves. Freire calls this the “banking” style of teaching. William Beattie, a renowned Scottish physician and poet once said “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think, rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” Beattie states here that education should educate people to improve minds, to encourage creative thinking, and to come on with answers and questions of our own. I believe it would be safe to say that Freire would agree with Beattie on his educational stance. Freires fix to this problem, is to have teachers and students be an equal. Student teachers, and teacher students, this way everyone learns from each other and there is no “authority” who decides what the emphasis of the lesson will be on. Freire calls this method
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