John Gatto and Paolo Friere Text Comparison

John Gatto and Paolo Friere seem to have some very similar views regarding education. Judging by what they wrote, I feel that they both see problems with teaching being standardized and broadcast to a population of clones. What Friere calls the “banking” concept of teaching and what Gatto refers to with the public school system in the U.S., seem almost identical. Friere stated in the writing “Education thus becomes an act depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” To me that goes hand in hand with Gatto’s belief that the structured system leads to teachers being bored and hence, the students being bored. This seems to be a cycle in which a student goes to school for years with a boring structured system, then later becomes a teacher only to teach the same boring style to new students and so on. Although I see a closeness with their points of view as far as the standardized teaching method, there is also a big difference in the writings. Gatto goes on to explain that many of our founding fathers had very little to no formal education and still accomplished great things. What I gathered from his writing was that he felt the ability to think freely from a very young age resulted in productivity later in life. Hence, Instead of being bored, free thinkers were thinking up ways to be more productive. Gatto felt that the public school system was a more communist type of system and that we could do better. He felt we were breeding workers instead of allowing creativity. Friere didn’t seem to have a negative view of the public school system, but rather a negative view on the teaching style he calls “the banking concept”. At least that’s what I gathered from the section we read from chapter two of his book.