Robert Leander

ENC 1102

Ms. Stefanovic

28 October 2003

The Epitome of Banking

        If there was ever a moment where I felt information being “deposited” into me like a “container” it would be in preparation for standardized testing.  During my career as a student I have noticed this theory of the “banking concept of education” but I never put words to my thoughts.  The FCAT and SAT are both prime examples of how the banking concept is performed in every high school, middle school, and even elementary school today.  It is amazing when you realize how much standardized testing, such as the FCAT and SAT, fit under this description of the banking concept.

        I can remember the choices I had to make in my sophomore year of high school, but the most important decision was to pass high school, or fail high school?  Now one might think how would you make that decision at such an early time in high school?  This is easily answered by one little acronym: FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test).  To study for this test there is a period of time during the school year where all pursuit of education freezes and preparation for FCAT begins.  There is no learning in the classroom, only deposits of information into every sophomore receptacle in the school.  Not only do they stop the education process in Math and English (the classes that the FCAT is based on) but they also stop teaching in History, Science, and even in foreign language classes just to prepare you for FCAT.  In my Spanish II class I was taught how to do math problems and conjugate English verbs instead of learning Spanish.  I learned nothing about Spanish for almost three months worth of time.  This process repeated itself in each and every one of my classes throughout sophomore year.  After all “the more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is.  The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” (260).  So it all works out in the end, right?  Wrong, not everything is as good as it seems.  It is a travesty the time it takes to “prepare” or “fill the receptacles” for the FCAT.  It is actually quite scary.  You are told straight to your face; you pass this exam or you fail high school.  It is simple for the teachers to say such things when they are the ones filling us with this information. Little do they know, we can only retain so much.  “Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (260).  Also they put the burden of the grade your school receives in the category of “Excellency” on the students taking the FCAT.  The ratio of pass to fail of the students taking the FCAT reflects on the “performance” of the school as a whole.  The faculty makes it seem like they are not forcing it on us, and they even try to make a game out of it.  They’ve stooped as low as inviting everyone who passed the FCAT to a school-wide raffle for hundreds of dollars in prizes.  

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“The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation.  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.” (Friere 261)

In turn this obviously made the ones who failed, or did not meet the “standard” of the school, obsolete and inadequate.  Were these students’ not adequate receptacles?  Or were they just not interested in this banking method of teaching?  Maybe these students could have been ...

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