Surely all of us, anyone who has made it through 12 years of formal education, can think of a class, or an occasion outside of class, to serve as a quick example of what Freire calls the “banking” concept of education, where students were turned into “containers” to be “filled” by their teachers.
If Freire is useful to you, however, he must do more than enable you to call up quick examples. He should allow you to say more than that a teacher once treated you like a container or that a teacher once gave you your freedom.
Write an essay (at least 1000 words), that focuses on several rich and illustrative incidents from your own and others’ educational experience and read it (that is, interpret it) as Freire would. You will need to provide careful detail: things that were said and done, perhaps the exact wording of an assignment, a textbook, or a teacher’s comments.
You will need to turn to the language of Friere’s argument, to take key phrases and passages and see how they might be used to investigate your case.
To do this you will need to read your account as not simply the story of you and your teacher, since Freire is not writing about individual personalities (an innocent student and a mean teacher, a rude teacher, or a thoughtless teacher) but about the roles we are cast in, whether we chose to be or not, by our culture and its institutions.
The key question, then, is not who you were or who your teacher was, but what roles you played and how those roles can lead you to better understand the larger narrative or drama of Education.
Freire would not want you to work passively or mechanically, however, as though you were following orders. He would want you to make your own mark on the work he has begun.
Use your example, in other words, as a way of testing and examining what Freire says, particularly those passages that you find difficult or obscure.
