Freire and Gatto (11/14)

Freire and Gatto agree on most points. The one that stands out to me the most is how students are passively learning. They simply take in what the teacher in telling them to learn. The education system is for shaping children into what "society" wants them to be, which is easily manipulated and adaptable.
Gatto: Our schools are... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be ahped and fashioned.... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
Gatto: "Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child left behind'? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them every really grows up?" (By this, Gatto is referring to our lack or curiosity to challenge ideas and notions in society. We are ignorant to the fact that we are being manipulated.)
Freire: "Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are."
Freire: "It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them."

Another point on which Freire and Gatto agree upon is how we should all learn how to think critically. We should be judgmental of the information that is bestowed upon us.
Gatto: "School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently."
Freire: "Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, responding to the essence of consciousness --intentionality -- rejects communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian split" --consciousness as consciousness of consciousness."