David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech

                David Foster Wallace’s speech is a fairly unique commencement speech in which he discusses the point of education and the harsh reality of life. He expands on the often heard “We are teaching you how to think” statement. He explains what that really means is that we’re learning how to control our thinking and how to choose our meaning of events.

                One of the things he talked about that I particularly enjoyed was the “default settings” of us as people. He claims our default settings are set to have us self centered and selfish.  I’ve heard several things supporting this such as how people mostly enjoy talking about themselves in a given conversation, and the psychological principal called “Actor-observer bias” where one mistakenly attributes someone’s actiosn to their personality rather than thinking about if their current situation has caused the action (the example David used was the person driving the SUV).

The Banking Concept of Education Responce

       Freire discusses the short coming of our current educational system in "The Banking Concept of Education". He describes our current education system as dehumanizing, and that it limits creativity and detaches us from reality. He argues that this won't allow future members of society to help shape or transform reality. He feels that this form of education is oppressive and even likens it to necrophily. He presents his solution to the "Banking" education as the "Problem Posing" education. In this form of education, students are also teachers and teachers are also students and most of the learning and insight is gained through dialogue with the class.

       I feel that the "Problem Posing" form of education is a better way to learn as it encourages active participation from the student. However I feel that we still require the "Banking Concept" in order to get anything done with our education. One cannot simply just learn subjects such as mathematics just from talking about it; students need to be able to memorize key facts and able to retrieve them. This also holds true for subjects where discussion is more applicable to some extent. In order to discuss history for instance, a student should know some basic historical facts. So I believe the answer to education lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Part of me feels that the author is being a little over dramatic with the current education system; particularly when he compares it to oppression and necrophily. Also I feel that our development as a human comes from outside of school, instead the people who raised us and the community we lived in help us to learn to interact with the dynamic world.