Graphic by Kinsey Couture ’22
BY GWYNETH SPINCKEN ’21
An education should challenge the social reality of everyone involved, not reinforce it. We should question everything, not go to school to shut out wisdom and exclusively aim to earn the highest SAT score. Secondary education prioritizes practicality at the expense of an education in critical thinking. At this extreme, education becomes a mad scramble for high test scores and other quantitative, yet superficial, indicators of thorough teaching.
Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and pedagogical philosopher, called this imbalanced approach the, “banking concept of education.” It persists in the form of aggressive, hyper-competitive test preparation. Both educators and students should work toward emphasizing critical thinking in education. Even if test preparation is necessary in our pedagogical landscape, secondary schools should not sacrifice lesson plans which encourage the individual to apply knowledge to their own lives and supplement their worldview with academic guidance.
“Because of state-based standards for education, many teachers don’t have the possibility to teach more critical thinking skills outside of what is needed in the test,” Stephanie Huezo, a Mount Holyoke professor of history, said. “Colleges are a bit different, but in some cases, lectures can work as a way to deposit information for students to regurgitate back in a test.”
This is the crux of the banking concept of education, which objectifies the student, giving them pre-packaged information, and expecting them to conform to the expectations of those who created the lesson. According to Huezo, this forces people to lose the ability to express themselves. The word, “student” becomes synonymous with a passive object in this process of instruction, and these objects become consumers.
“I think the model of teaching from textbooks is particularly problematic, often because they’re written and edited by the same groups of people,” Llewyn Thomas ’21 said. “They don’t really reflect multimodal ways of thinking.”
The types of education relayed by this teaching method become a problem rather than benefit.
“We can strengthen student-focused teaching by connecting with students’ experiences,” Huezo said. “This is not always feasible, but any attempt to have students connect what they are learning to their own experiences allows them to critically think about the topic at hand because it is one that they lived through in one way or another.”
According to Freire, a dialogue-based approach is as integral as self-reflection. Every student requires respect and an ability to speak in order to learn. The next step is mobilizing that knowledge into action and community betterment.
“While practicality, as I view it, tries to solve a problem, critical thinking really digs into the root of the issue that the problem emerged from,” Huezo said. “[Think of] practicality as a top down approach in which you only use observations to solve a problem, while critical thinking has you take a step back and use your core values to approach a situation.”
Education is a balance, but critical thinking should be prioritized over practicality. A classroom is a space of encouragement and thought, not a wound clock machine of conformity and quantitative rewards. Instructors should allow their students to choose a final test that matches their strengths and would allow them to connect to the material. School is not about retention, rather analysis and the formation of new, educated perspectives.