"The Banking Concept of Education"

Paolo Freire gives very interesting insight on the thoughts of modern education. He compares education to “banking”.  Freire states that “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”  I completely agree with Freire’s assessment. In school, particularly high school, students are taught to accept the teacher’s realities as their own. They are made to accept what they say, and conform their ideas to the ideas of the educators in charge.

I believe that if you were to ask Paolo Freire what his thoughts were on standardized testing, he would have a VERY strong, very clear opinion on the matter. I think he probably highly dislikes standardized testing. They force every student to prove they know the exact same information, they know the exact same processes, and they have the exact same thought patterns as everyone else in their age group. Truly, I believe standardized testing is an unfair measure of how much a student learns. Everyone thinks differently, has different problem-solving methods, and comes to the solution in a different way. Forcing everyone to conform to one system insures that you will have some students who fail, some students who struggle, and SOME who succeed.