Hindering Critical Thinking

After reading the two articles written by Colombo and Friere, my previous perception of the education system was challenged and as a result adjusted. In Colombo’s article three major points stuck out. Public education has a single purpose of creating or developing an average human to meet the standards of society. Second, speaking from experience he stated that education was boring for both the teacher and student. The greatest point he made however, was in his conclusion where he said that it is up to the parents to teach their child ways of critical thinking. While I wasn’t a fan of the majority of the article, this idea needs to be spread throughout. Despite the fact that our children may spend more time with their teachers than their parents, the parents need to take initiative and be proactive if they want their child to rise above the average human that our education system breads.
In parallel, Friere’s article also speaks of how our current education system hinders creativity. He explains this using the example of a banking system. This states that the student is like a bank account in that the student is always receiving knowledge from the teacher. This is a one way relationship. The teacher teaches and the students only gain. He goes on to say how a better education system would contain a symbiotic student-teacher relationship where the teacher is teaching the student aswell as learning from the student and the student is learning from the teacher aswell as teaching the teacher. For the most part I belive that both student and teacher should ‘know’ their places, it does benefit both sides if student and teacher can keep an open mind with their relationship. Many times I think that the teachers are the only ones aware of this. Students may not even realize the impact of what they said in class or wrote in a paper has on their teacher. I’m quite positive that my perspective will change though because the teacher student relationship is much different in the collegiate atmoshpere. I have yet to come to any epiphanies.