Writing Project #1

Team Members: Grady Leonard

Topic: The space of education at WCU. Freire’s challenge for us to reimagine the ways in which we learn doesn’t just ask us to re-shape ourselves intellectually; Freire’s ideas also suggest a need to re-shape the spaces of education. Use your understanding of Freire’s ideas to analyze the space of education at WCU, identifying and proposing the means by which WCU’s space can be deployed to achieve the ends of Freire’s concept of learning.

Thesis (working): The typical classroom, or learning space, has always been the same since the beginning; it is set up in such a way that is conducive to the banking concept of education. The design of classrooms needs to change in a way which is more conducive to actually learning rather than memorizing, and the coconstruction of knowledge.

Quotes:

“The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside”—inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such
transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizaçao.”

“Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.”