Study

In “The Act of Study,” Paolo Freire describes an approach to study in which the student actively engages with the text – an approach in which learning is not memorization, but integration. The student acts upon the text, analyzing it, investigating it, connecting it to other information and contexts, breaking it down – and ultimately re-creating it, because the integrated text is a new text; in becoming integrated into the student’s mind it becomes reconfigured, translated into the student’s unique individual inner language, shaded with new levels of meaning and resonance born of its interaction with the rest of the student’s mind and life, and paraphrased and combined with other ideas in the student’s future writing and conversation... in the same way, for instance, that I am currently paraphrasing Freire and extending, coloring, and blending his ideas with my own reflections on those ideas, such that someone reading this paragraph without having first read the Freire piece would not know where in my summary Freire’s ideas leave off and my own interpretations, reflections, and extrapolations begin.

To truly learn something is ultimately to make it one’s own. Without the active critical process Freire describes, the student is merely memorizing and parroting someone else’s words. I like Freire’s term for this, “banking education” – the student is just a repository for other people’s ideas the way a bank is a repository for other people’s money.

For the most part, teachers in a “banking education” system are likely to be graduates of such a system themselves, and thus are perhaps incapable of guiding students in the process of critically engaging with and owning the material, because they themselves have never gone through that process.

The process of a “banking education” teacher is simple: receive the material; communicate the material to the student. The process of a good teacher might go more like this: receive the material; own the material through active critical engagement; communicate the material to the student; guide and support the student as needed through the student’s own process of owning the material.