The Battle of City Spring

Under the educational policy No Child Left Behind, City Spring started implementing Direct Instruction educational method, which fully embodies Freire’s banking system of education. In DI, everything is planned: what to teach, how to teach, even instructor’s words. Children are always disciplined to sit still, walk orderly, and be crammed with knowledge—there is no process for true sense of “learning”. Students are just receiving knowledge.
For me, this system completely neglects individuality, not only children’s, but also teachers’. In the film, if there was a teacher who had problem in teaching, she was told to observe other teacher’s class and improve the way she taught. She could not teach in her own way. Also, DI system itself deprived teachers’ creativity—teachers do not have to beat their brains out how to teach effectively because everything is already decided. What is the role of teacher? Is it merely repeating the words on textbook? Or is it to teach in the way as principal told? Can’t they even use their own words? Under the DI system, the teacher is also the one who is oppressed.
The principal said “students who are not learning, it is never their fault, it is the teaching that should be blamed”. It sounds like the principal is a great educator but I think she actually is not. She was basically saying that it was teaching that all matters and children, who should be the center of education, were merely at the teacher’s mercy. It sounds as if children are not capable of deciding what to do, what they learn, and she did not trust that children are capable of learning spontaneously.
Although I completely disagree with the educational method the City Spring practiced, I agree with the principal’s idea that is concrete foundation is necessary for children to improve their capabilities further. Most of the students in the City Spring live in poverty, and their living environment is not really good. Their study levels are very low compared to the other children of the same age because the adults surrounding them might not have adequate educational backgrounds (a children said “This a ball”), and both parents have to go work in order to make their living so children might not be able to receive enough parenting at home. Thus I agree with the idea that students in City Spring need to acquire basic foundation, because critical thinking, analyzing etc, these higher mental processes cannot be done without basic foundation. Then I came up with a question…banking system of education is a mere deposition of knowledge to students, and students just memorize the information, but doesn’t learning start from memorizing? Think about learning foreign language. When you start learning Chinese, first you need to memorize Chinese vocabulary and Chinese characters; otherwise you cannot read, write, or speak. Is this process of learning also called banking system of education?