Teacher- Student Relationships

In “The Banking Concept of Education”, Freire touches on the topic of teacher- student relationships, or lack there of. He implies that a teacher is just there to spew information and the students are there to receive it, no other interaction. According to Freire, the teachers are the all knowing and the students know nothing, there is minimal back and forth discussion between them and there really is no “relationship” forming. In Hoarace’s Compromise by Theodore R. Sizer the English teacher Horace Smith, is exemplifying a similar teacher- student relationship to what Freire describes. Hoarace’s one class of high school juniors is reading Romeo and Juliet. As described in the book, he simply has them read the play for about 40 minutes straight with minimal stops for questions or corrections. There is no discussion of the meaning of the character lines or why something happened the way it did. It’s strictly just reading the play (11-12). It is evident that the students do not want to be reading the play and it even says in the book that the only reason they are reading it is because the curriculum says juniors have to read Shakespeare (11). This touches on the topic of the education system being an endless wheel of empty vessels being filled with information that the students are uninterested in.