“Critical Consciousness” and Pedagogy in Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray”

During my educational career, I sat in countless classroom regurgitating information back to the one at the head of the classroom who held my grades and my future in their hands. I felt, for the most part, disconnected from any of my experiences or reality. That does not mean that the information I learned did not relate to my life; it just means that the holders of my future never truly made those connections clear. This “banking” of education, as Paulo Freire calls it, made it hard for me to think about the information I learned in one class in relation to another class, let alone in relation to my own life outside of the walls that kept me ensnared for the majority of the day.

The depositing of information into my brain didn’t benefit me in any way, except for adding to my vast trivia knowledge that I always hoped to parlay into a game show appearance. At its base level, this banking only served to reinforce the structures and positions of those who held my future in their hands, thus causing me to comply to their whims and their positions in order to have any chance at success. Freire writes, “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” Thus, they feel as if those who enter their classrooms do not…