Education today

Education is highly valued in today’s society. It is the key to getting well-paying jobs that would allow them to live securely and comfortably. Thus, many are willing to invest much time and money to get into expensive schools that promise to give them the best education in their field. However, some educators do not agree with traditional education’s ‘drill and skill’ notion of instruction, focus on objective achievement tests, and teacher’s authoritarian role. They challenged traditional education as mere technical training and not real learning.

One of these educators is Paulo Freire. He believed that education should be a dialogue between teacher and student instead of a strict and formulaic curriculum. The dialogue should be constantly evolving, making room for differences in students’ capacity. He believed that teachers should not treat students as ‘banks’ wherein they need only to deposit their knowledge. Rather, teachers should be open to learning from students as well continuously switching position with them in what he called an educator’s Easter experience.

Freire pushed the idea of “pedagogy of the oppressed,” an alternate and progressive education that aims to develop student’s consciousness of one’s ability to change reality. John Dewey is another modern educator who opposed the traditional education notion. He believes that people do not acquire education but are born already bearing it. Real education has a capacity for transformation as seen in how people act as a reaction to different social situations.

For the most part, education is unconscious, but throughout life, it is shaped and stimulated by a person’s social relationship and not just by institutions such as schools. Thus, education, in its core, is similar to democracy in that it relies on the recognized common interests and beliefs of social groups. In terms of academics, my own experience has been a mix of the rigid traditional and the more flexible progressive types of education. Reflecting upon their differences, I find myself preferring the more animated and person-oriented progressive education over other.

However, I also believe that encountering both kinds of education has helped me develop by opening my mind to more than just one way of learning. While some classes thrive with the differences in opinions, I think that there are also classes like math and science wherein order and rigidity is essential. In these classes, teachers impart proven facts to students, and these facts cannot be subject to change just because of opinions that came up during teacher and student dialogues. This is especially important for sciences like medicine which deals with human life.

The order in science classes may not empower students, but neither does it silence them, as Freire either-or progressive structure may suggest. In cases such as this, teachers’ banking or transferring of knowledge and experience to their students is essential and not limiting. Also, one does not give students information then tells them afterward that they cannot study or discover more beyond what has been given. The students are not held back by their teachers in trying to come out with scientific breakthroughs but for them to break or disprove a science formula which they have to know and understand first.

Teachers’ roles are to teach them those science formulae and lay the foundation for them. I agree with Dewey that people receive education from all aspects of life and not just through institutions such as schools. While I may initially consider academic knowledge different from social and emotional intelligence, Dewey would consider them as all under education. Through Dewey, I understood that education grows with a person’s sociological and psychological experiences; thus, a person’s academic knowledge gained by going to school is not a different thing.

For him, education is life and not preparation for life. Going to college to learn under a traditional style of education, no matter how rigid and structured the classes are, would not be limiting for me or for anybody else. One only needs to understand that academic education and technical training are parts of our total education. We should not get too caught up with it, but neither should one totally disregard its importance in cultivating a well-rounded education. .

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