Currently, “education”, in the US specifically, comes in the form of public schools. The classrooms feel like prison rooms so students have nothing else to do except listen to teachers ramble on and on about their respective topics. They are being forced to learn with all the restrictions in place, I always thought it was weird that public schools can send the police to your address if you are skipping school. It makes it feel like you have no choice but to go to school, makes it seem like a chore. During remote learning, the environment is different. Students are not in such a prison anymore, so they are not forced to be learning anymore. As a result, the kids are not engaged with the topics the teachers are trying to teach to, so the students end up distracted, or unable to learn.

There were changes made during my education growing up to try and make students better critical thinkers, but I do not think that changes the core issue of having students wanting to learn. Even when science classes try to do more hands-on lab experiments instead of bookwork, and maybe the idea of projects in general not being just more practice problems, I feel like these start becoming the norm for education in high school, when I’m already engrained to think of education as a chore instead of something I’m motivated to chase. Changes need to be made earlier, and perhaps not just in the work given, but also in the way teaching in the classroom is done.

Freire Paulo was a 20th-century philosopher and educator. He focused on the philosophy of education, where his main proposal was the idea of critical pedagogy: “the belief that teaching should challenge learners to examine power structures and patterns of inequality within the status quo.” The main belief in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he talks about how current education in schools is teachers/professors asserting that they are more knowledgeable than the students and forcing them to store the information they are saying. He calls this the “banking concept” and it causes students to be passive and accepting of the world around them. Since students are too busy trying to just store all of the information in their brains, they have no time to “develop the critical consciousness” that comes from trying to change the world by being “transformers of that world”(73). This is a sentiment that I completely agree with, as looking back, I can see myself just being a passive learner in some classrooms, wanting to have the class be over, especially during remote learning. I was not trying to critically engage with the topic, I just wanted to learn enough to not get called during class with questions I couldn’t answer. By using this “banking concept” for education, the systems are trying to mold students into passive beings, who are ranked by how well they can store information and follow the guidelines set by schools. This education purposely does not foster creativity and critical thinking, so students do not realize their situation, and do not rise against the oppression they are facing.

Despite these ideas being a whole century old now, they still hold up well. As stated earlier, there were efforts put into schools, which most people know now as “Common Core” which claims to be a step forward to try to improve critical thinking in youth. The ideas of “Common Core” are good at heart, but I believe that alone is not enough. They try to go the way of Paulo’s “problem-posing methods” for education, which is why changes should be made to better motivate students to prepare for the real world. Paulo proposes that teaching should be like a conversation where “the teacher presents the material to the students for their considerations, and then re-considers her earlier considerations as students express their own” (81). It gives an inkling to the idea that, perhaps, the teacher is not always right, and that there are a lot of different ways to see the same topic. Problem-posing should be the teachers challenging the students and having them ask “why” more than “what” so they can understand gain a fundamental understanding of the topic and future critical thinking skills, rather than surface-level knowledge about a topic they will forget about after the exam. It also helps students talk to teachers, as the idea is that it should no longer be a conversation between a superior and an inferior, but rather a conversation between two people with the same interest in a topic.

Paulo, together in another book – with Horton Myles – called We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, have an interesting conversation about what it means to teach a certain topic. For their example, they ask “Is it possible just to teach biology?” They eventually conclude that it is not because every subject is interconnected. Say, for instance, you want to talk about evolution. You would eventually have to talk about Darwin who came up with the core theory of evolution we use today. However, there is also a whole social movement around this science called Social Darwinism, where people tried to use his research as a reason for oppression. It would be irresponsible to not mention something that had such a huge impact on the world when talking about biology, but it is also outside of the territory of biology to be talking about this. I think it is important still to bring up because knowing this allows students to connect the dots between all of their subjects, and helps them to be motivated to learn about all sorts of topics. I find it most fun and interesting when a lot of different disciplines can interact with one another, so for me, it would be the most engaging learning experience.

The main point of all this was to show how weak our education system currently is. It is built on oppression and force to get people to learn. It should not be like that. Kids should not see education as a chore, or something they need to get through. There are moments where even I thought that, but I can also see education as fun and exciting thanks to a few select teachers I’ve had over the many years. I know there are a lot of students that do not have the luck I do with teachers, so their experiences may only be bad in this system. A system built on force and oppression breaks down when that force can no longer be applied. When the education system has to be even more accommodating for the people who are worst off, education slows to a screeching halt. COVID-19 was a wake-up call for us to show the system is majorly flawed and changes need to be made. The bad experiences should not be the experiences that a majority of people have.

Changes more drastic, than the small incremental ones the government is currently doing, need to be made. Problem-posing methods proposed by Freire Paulo seamlessly fit into today’s standards. The most important change is that teachers should serve as a medium and motivator for students and the subject they are learning, rather than an oppressor in the classroom whose words are the law. The core goal of teaching should be to motivate students because, without motivation, there is no meaning to the student’s learning. Students becoming better critical thinkers through this will help them become more active members of the world they live in, rather than being molded into the passive shells the current system promotes. If we want change to happen, it has to start somewhere. A lot of people have already become passive thinkers, just as the current system is designed to do, so it is up to the people who can see this oppression clearly to try and fight back against it by exposing and advocating for change. The pandemic has brought this issue to light for the government officials involved, now it is the time for the next push forward.