Almost Perfect Banking Student

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Paulo Freire has an analysis of a trap called the “banking” concept of education. Both teachers and students fall into this pattern that he calls “narration sickness.” Students become depositories and teachers become the depositors of knowledge. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay, “The Achievement of Desire,” it is clearly seen how he falls into the banking concept trap. Freire would analyze Rodriguez’s education as the nearly perfect example of a banking – concept student and what Rodriguez calls himself as a scholarship boy. If Freire were to analyze Rodriguez’s essay, he would say that Rodriguez was a banking – method student for the majority of his educational career. Rodriguez would prove him wrong by breaking the habit of being that type of student. It seems that Rodriguez became obsessed with becoming something that he was not and he himself was not even aware of it. Freire would say that Rodriguez was a “depository” since Rodriguez would take in the information his teachers would give him without exactly knowing why he was being taught a certain topic. It would also seem that Rodriguez was not full human. “In the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.” Rodriguez finally breaks out of the scholarship boy mold he himself formed. As Freire stated, “if men… are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive they contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and engage themselves in the struggle for [his] liberation.” Rodriguez may have been a banking concept student, but he was not the perfect one. During the early years of Rodriguez’s schooling, he seems like the perfect banking concept student. As Rodriguez’s teacher taught, he would receive, file and store the

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