Writing project, step one

Gabe Jasinski

I’ll be working alone on this assignment, making the choice to research the possibilities of topic number two, the Student power.

The idea that students in the collective are essentially slaves to the classrooms and teachers that inhabit them are merely scratching of the surface, to truly delve into the idea of power in the students we must first look at how students are perceived in society both on a historical and contemporary level.

Quotable sections:

1. The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another
2. Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of “welfare recipients.” They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized, and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy” folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be “integrated,” “incorporated” into the healthy society that they have “forsaken.”

Author: Gabriel Jasinski

4:25-5:45pm View all posts by Gabriel Jasinski