Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The Unlesson Manifesto intends to challenge the banking concept of education where ‘[t]he students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence – but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher’  

The Banking Concept

1. the teacher teaches and the students are taught
2. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing
3. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about
4.  the teacher talks and the students listen – meekly
5. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined
6. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply
7. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of        the teacher
8. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it
9. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students
10. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects 

(Freire 1970 p53/54)

The biggest complication we currently face is an education framework that thinks it has resolved the problem of the banking concept, thus creating a distorted version of the very same model. We think we are offering something different through the many numerous strategies applied on top of national curriculums but actually, as it currently turns out, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ or ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’.