Jeff Bliss: The Dichotomy Of Our Education

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The Dichotomies of our Education
“Quit bitchin.”, said a former history teacher of Duncanville’s High school to student Jeff Bliss on May 2013, when he tried to explain to his teacher that handing out children packets of information while sitting behind a desk is not a form of teaching. Jeff Bliss is a former student of Duncanville’s High school, known for boisterous classroom rant that went viral in 2013. Now of days we don’t see children standing up to their teachers when their education isn’t up to par, but as technology is advancing we get to know more about this world than ever before and we are given a wider view of the world while the quality of our education is diminishing. Students often have credulity when it comes to education …show more content…

There are two groups in almost everything and us as human beings tend to categorize everything whether they are people or subjects. The dichotomy of the classroom meticulously separates the teacher from the student. The teacher sits in the front of the classroom away from the other desks and away from the students. The position of the teacher’s desk is a cognitive example of authority and power. The students, on the other hand, sit together as one body scattered around like many of the other objects in the classroom setting. In "The 'Banking' Concept of Education", Freire mentions a dichotomy in the education system between the teachers and the students, "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." (216) An example of this would be Jeff Bliss, the student from Duncanville’s high school who wanted his teacher to be more involved when it came to teaching, instead of handing out packets of information and expecting students to memorize it all. Bliss states, "If you would just get up and teach us instead of handing 'em a packet, yo. There are kids in here that don't learn like that. … They need to learn face-to-face. You want kids to come to class? You want them to get excited? You gotta come in here, you gotta make 'em excited. To change him and make him better, you gotta touch his freakin' heart. You can't expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell him. " Here, Jeff is angry at the way his teacher takes the banking approach when it comes to teaching the students because it fails to teach the students anything when they are not driven. When repetition starts to take place students become disinterested and because they are not driven they will not question their education or their teacher. This is the way the manifestation of our education has been for decades and in result the