Teaching: power and responsability

Paulo Freire is a recognized Brazilian teacher, who has written many works about the modern educational system. We read a piece of him in the IS 101 class, named “The Banking Concept of Education”. I have to recognize that at the beginning it was a little bit hard for me to understand the language that he uses, but I thing that I comprehend most of his points. Freire argues that in the modern educational system there is a big issue concerning the relation between students and teachers. There is a sense of superiority from the educators, where they perceive  students as empty people who have nothing to contribute and that he or she has nothing to learn form them. This attitude is very prejudicial because it limits greatly the creativity and critical thinking of the students, who at the end interiorize this system becoming more alienated and  reproducing it leading to a hardly breakable cycle.      

I think that teachers are one of the most important pieces of society and this means a huge ethical responsibility. They have a big power of influence over their students and they should be aware of this all the time. As physicians have the responsibility of keeping their selves informed all the time about changes and innovation in the medical field, teacher need to keep an attitude of learning all the time.   The challenge for teachers is to assume this open attitude while keeping enough credibility in their students and this in my opinion only come with years of practice.  That why good teachers are so difficult to find, because sometimes the easiest way to teach is the conventional and practice teaching as any other paid job, but those who get to that equilibrium can feel satisfied of the positive impact that they are letting to the world.