Freire and Gatto's Smilarities

Paulo Freire and Gatto's papers have very strong opinions on the educational system in America. Gatto goes more in depth on the history of how we attained our system in America. While Freire explains the system in which the students are taught. I think they would both agree that the system they use to teach today is very boring. As stated by Gatto "Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around."  A quote from Freire states “The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.” After reading that I just think of how boring the lesson plans are for the students. Both of them talk about the “oppressor” who wants to keep things the way they created it to be and that they are not interested in people asking questions or changing their ways of doing things. As quoted by Freire, “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the student's creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. 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 always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.”  Gatto talks about how they put down originality and want to breed the same safe students who won’t ask questions and just do as their told. He states, “Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” They both have a lot of the same beliefs.