Freire And Standard Tests

I think a better question is what would Freire be happy about in today's schools. Standardized tests spell out exactly what he demonstrated. They encourage spoon fed alien knowledge that is regurgitated when they ask for it. As he calls it, "the Banking Concept of Education". There are very few instructors that have the opportunity or guts to have a Socratic set up classroom, or a classroom that encourages a student to think for himself/herself and question established beliefs. Because of the amount of students public schools now have keep increasing, standardized tests have become a way of obtaining a general idea of how our schools in the U.S. are doing internationally.

In a way though, this has poised a problem to our students creativity; one of the most important aspects of human nature, and very valuable to entrepreneurial goals, whether they be in business, art, or science. Many teachers also reject experimentation with real world connections, "... Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another". As Freire explains, "It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness, that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world 'enters into' the students," meaning that the way students see the world from a classroom perspective, is regulated by the teacher. This can be dangerous when the students enter into the REAL world and have to take it on from their own perspective.