School Vouchers

English 106

June , 24 2012

The definition of school vouchers is "a government cash grant or tax credit for parents, equal to or part of the cost of educating their child at an elementary or secondary school of their choice." ("School Voucher Definition." Dictionary.com. LLC. Copyright 2012.) All though many have argued for school voucher to be implemented throughout the nation's school system, upon careful examinations shows that schools and mainly students overall in under privileged neighborhoods would be hurt the most by such an act. "Critics argue that voucher programs would skim the best students and the most involved families from struggling schools, leaving less successful students, including learning-disabled, behind in schools that would then be even worse off (The School Voucher Debate." Education.com Copyright 2006-2012)."

In Paulo Freire's, The Banking Concept of Education, the essay discusses in great detail how our society is suffering from an educational standpoint when it comes to teaching in this method. If the school voucher system is implemented nationwide millions of children in poverty ridden areas would further suffer from the banking system and be stuck with less than stellar teachers who would rather teach this method than their counter parts who attend better schools within the school voucher system and possibly have access to teachers who teach beyond the banking system.

In James Loewen's essay, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, one passage that stood out states "So students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter (Greene and Lidinsky, Eds. 2nd ed. Pp. 388)." "Is this why so many high school graduates cannot remember in which century the Civil War was fought? None of the facts is remembered, because they are presented simply as one damn thing after another. While textbook authors tend to include most of the trees and all too many twigs, they neglect to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests (Greene, Lidinsky, Eds. 2nd ed. Pp. 388)."

Loewen illustrates from the above passage that when it comes to teaching history, high school students are so overwhelmed with learning facts that they don't have any time to retain what they learned because they are more concerned with forgetting the information as quickly as possible in order to learn new information. This goes back directly to Freire's, Concept of Education, where in paragraph five Freire discusses "the banking concept of education in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits (Feire, Paulo. "The Banking Concept of Education.")." This is explaining how the banking concept only allows for receiving and storing. This type of learning cripples students into learning information temporary, rather than helping students to learn out of peaking their interest with more factual details of American history.

After reading both Freire and Loewen's essays one can see how they both complement each other greatly. In the third paragraph Freire states "The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving..." which leads me to think that students turn what they've learned into flash card knowledge instead of being engaging and learning because they were moved by what was taught. This simply means that students are in a sense programmed to learn a certain way which is to bank information without giving a second thought to being engaging with the teacher in regards to questioning the knowledge, or asking why things are taught in a certain