Pedagogy Of The Oppressed And Richard Wright's The Library Card

The next form of hunger that Richard encountered was one for literature which seemed to give him a release from the suffocating reality of his surroundings. His appetite for literature became a defining characteristic as the novel progressed. Though her effort was short-lived, a boarder at his Grandma’s house, Ella, gave him his first taste of reading. “As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me…. My sense of life deepened…. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me” (Wright 39). In light of Richard’s continued pursuit for knowledge critic Dykema-VanderArk reflects that, “Richard's reading opens his eyes… ‘made the look of the world different’ and let him imagine his life under different circumstances. Richard eventually recognizes that the social system of the South strives to keep black Americans from just such ways of thinking.” His craving for literature sets him apart from most of the black community surrounding him.

After meticulously analyzing the relationship between students and teachers, Freire came to a grim conclusion, claiming “Education is suffering from narration sickness” (57). Already, in the first paragraph, Freire gets straight to his work’s purpose. He defines this sickness as the loss of knowledge coming from the verbal sharing of information. When a teacher narrates information to students, the students lose the ability to truly learn what the teacher is teaching. Without the experience received from answering a question themselves, it is impossible for a student to genuinely understand a concept.

Chapter 2 of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed discusses a failed teaching method between the student and teacher. It’s a common mistake for teachers to treat the teaching process as a “banking concept”. Freire discusses how this concept takes away creativity from students by forcing them to memorize facts as the teacher “deposits” them into their minds. It’s not expected of the student to comprehend what they’re learning. It’s expected of them to take what the teacher is saying as fact without critically thinking about the meaning behind it. Freire explains,

Ralph Ellison narrates the portions of his earliest days in the semi-autobiography “On Being the Target of Discrimination”, where he recalls the effects of racism had on his life. Though his chronological writing, he uses the timeline of his childhood as personal evidence of the effects of racism in the upbringing of an African American child in a Post-Reconstruction Era America. A creative narrative written in second-person, all his arguments are supported primarily through anecdotal examples that inspire emotions instead of statistics or other hard proofs. His work has two central arguments: discrimination is an institute supported by the actions of adults, and the best solution to the issue of discrimination is with laughter and

Despite knowledge being suppressed against African Americans during the 1800’s and 1900’s, the attempt for an African American to seek knowledge is presented in the stories, “Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass and “The Library Card” by Richard Wright. It is invariably true that knowledge is both a blessing and a curse, which is why both Douglass and Wright can relate to the inflicting role that knowledge plays in people’s lives. Knowledge is presented as a form of a blessing in both stories as both Douglass and Wright endure the chance to educate themselves, Knowledge is expressed as a form of a curse in both stories as both Douglass and Wright face the risk of encountering with the possible unbearable truth behind the knowledge they seek to obtain, also in both stories, both Douglass and Wright develop a self hatred after learning new information that has been kept from them since they are prevented the chance to be informed.

There is one thing that is universally sought after in this world, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, location, and upbringing. There is one thing that every single human being hungrily craves. There is one thing that can make the potential difference between a life of abject poverty or comfortable prosperity: knowledge. The human mind’s thirst for knowledge can never be fully quenched, and it is always left wanting more; although, this isn’t necessarily a detrimental thing. Many different and unique styles of education have emerged as an attempt to satisfy the universal desire of knowledge, but it is often debated which style of education is the most effective. There is a very wide range of teaching styles on the spectrum of education,

In the passage “The Library Card,” Richard Wright describes how he started to read when he living in the South as an African American and how the books changed his attitude towards the racism. Occasionally, Wright interested in an article which was a furious denunciation of Mencken, and he wanted to know more about Mencken to figure out why the whites hated him. In order to read the book, Wright decided to borrow it from the library, but unfortunately, he did not have the library card due to the segregation. Afterwards, he borrowed the card from Mr. Falk, and got the books. Once he read the book, he was shocked by the writing style and became fascinated with it. The more he read, the more he knows about the world, and he realizes his life

Paolo Freire thinks, “Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection”. (Page 31). I think education should provide a link for the students to analyse and develop their personal experiences and help them to view these under a new light. Education needs to be a “liberating” process by which the learner develops a critical analysis to learning. I believe in a constructivist educational approach that leads the student to research about the subject to “hit the problem” first. We then discuss it in the classroom so that when the solution is understood it is valuable and meaningful. I would like my teaching to lead the students to think for themselves so they develop and acknowledge the analytic process. The techniques explained in class should be supported by the student’s own researches. With the emergence of the World Wide Web and mostly online tutorial videos, it is vital that my learners

The relationship between the teacher and the student can be associated with two different methods of learning. Paulo Freire suggests the “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, in which the teacher “fills the account” of the student with information and knowledge they have (318). Freire also explains the concept of “problem posing” learning that contradicts the “banking” concept. This way helps the student become more involved with their education, and they are able to become a more well-rounded student. But Freire ignores to add any supporting detail to his points based on how a student feels about each method of education. Determining the best way of an education is all

I strongly agree with the Freire views on problem-posing. Problem-posing is the best way to go about teaching students. The students have the opportunity to express themselves through communication. By expressing themselves, they are vulnerable to learning and experiencing the benefits of problem-posing. Students become interactive with the teachers who are positioned to promote a comfortable environment. This assists in creating friendships. With problem-posing, men and women are able to experience freedom and success. As a mentor for the incoming freshmen in high school, I created an atmosphere that allowed the freshmen to feel comfortable enough to be confident in who they were.

Dialogue is seen as a means of maintaining the problem –posing system. Here the changes are happenings among both the oppressed and the oppressor, their humanity is to be restored but it can only be restored by the oppressed since the oppressor is unconscious and even unwilling to restore it. This is a system through which human beings are to reach their fullness, because human beings are not complete beings under oppression, and being oppressed has taken the elements of a full human being away from them. Freire assumes that, in a community of academic freedom, human beings can attain their true nature. Freire enlists technique to work with people in a community to identify the ideas that are essential to their lives and to generate

We are oppressed by our fears, ignorance and stereotypes. All one has to do is turn on the news to see that many people react in hateful ways towards other peoples, because they are ignorant of those that they have labelled as the “other.” But I wonder, if people were educated, would they be as hateful? Would Hitler have exterminated millions of Jews if his best friend were one? I do not know. Would Trump have decided that all Muslims are terrorists if his mother were one? Somehow I doubt it. Educating people about the “other” would allow us to realize that every person is beautiful in their own way and that we should not hate just because we do not understand them. Children need to be made aware of political issues and why they matter—why it matters if someone is oppressed and what they can to do help as opposed to simply hating. Children need to hear stories and encounter people not just be told

In “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Revised Edition, Paulo Freire discusses two different types of education: “banking” and problem-posing. The banking concept of education is when teachers “make deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (318), and ‘problem posing’ is when the teachers and students are equal. Instead of being treated as human beings that have their own thoughts and ideas, students are treated as containers that are simply filled by a powerful being, a teacher. In school, teachers are dominants that provide knowledge to the students, the subordinates; the knowledge that students learn are limited to what they’re taught by teachers. Similarly, in Kurt Wimmer’s ‘Equilibrium’, Librians are treated as reservoirs for knowledge.

Freire enlightens his readers into two different views of education; banking education and problem-posing education. These two approaches are on opposite ends of the educational spectrum. Banking education describes the student as a bank that the teacher is depositing knowledge into. In this form of education students are hoped to retain all the education that the teachers is presenting. Problem-posing education differs in the way that students gain information. This method is more creative and explorative. The students are not only learning from the teacher but also from each other. They are able to freely think and open their minds to different ideas. Freire discusses both of these methods in the view points of; the theory each methods

Classroom experiences are like polyatomic ions: some are positive while others are negative. While the majority of the experiences at the West Genesee School District have been positive, I can recollect one experience that was particularly negative. During the duration of my Advanced Placement global history course, I was the subject in a class, that, by definition, would be closer to the "problem-posing" classroom that Paulo Freire describes in his piece "The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education". In his works, Paulo Freire asserts that the “problem-posing education makes them [the students] critical thinkers” (Freire 221). As Freire describes, a class that implements the problem-posing policy is one in which students are to become critical thinkers. Freire would have been ecstatic that other educators carried out his ideas in their own “problem-posing” classroom. My teacher me made it unequivocal that this class was going to challenge the way we analyzed and understood history. The teacher continued to describe the role of the student in the classroom; the educator expected the pupil to analyze readings and argue about what the pupil deemed to be the most important concepts presented. Regardless of the content, Egyptian hieroglyphics or Genghis Kahn, while the students studied history, the teacher insisted that the students evaluated the relationships between the causes, effects, and relevance of various topics throughout the course. In addition, the student prepared to discuss