PEDAGOGY OF THE HEART (IV)

TEACHER-TRAP: BANKING PEDAGOGY

Every young students today falls a hapless victim to a teacher-trap of wrong stewardship. Although a sad fact, most students today sit in a class of banking pedagogy. Practiced by most teachers, this lackluster art of teaching grossly violates the student's humanity because it does not acknowledge his creative faculty. The teacher inside the classroom is the only all-knowing person and no one else. The moronic icon loads the student with all the facts, with all the knowledge he thinks the student must memorize without the latter being critically conscious about them. In this imbecilic exercise, the teacher suffocates the child's natural active curiosity and invalidly assesses learning by asking the student to recite like endless litany what garbage gets in the latter's young mind-withdrawing garbage from the empty mental vault. The student becomes a passive learner and the teacher (presumably thinking he is intelligent) assumes the role...of a mere spoon feeder. This is false stewardship because the teacher treats the student as an object in a system of knowledge. It wrongly portrays the world as static, finished and unchangeable; thus, it mirrors the dominating structure of an oppressive society.