University Student Experience Now vs.Then

This week, our reading came from Rebekah Nathan's My Freshman Year. Her project consisted of an ethnographic study, in which she did her best to immerse herself in undergraduate university life by becoming a student and observing her peers. Throughout the reading, I felt a sense of de ja vu because the description of the university system and its educational methods seemed similar to Freire’s description of the oppressive banking educational system.  Both, for instance, establish a hierarchy in which the teacher is superior giver of knowledge and student is inferior receiver of knowledge format, as demonstrated by the different tones of conversation and conversation topics Rebekah was exposed to as a student versus as a teacher. Both in the novel and Freire's article, there exists a cold, machine-like functioning of the school system that stifles creativity and critical thinking as demonstrated in a passage on page 9:

"Despite the great variety of planned activities, there was a curious sameness to many of them. As an anthropologist, I saw a "script" in these introductory experiences...More important, I could begin to see the repeated (and, after a while, anticipatable elements of the experience that marked shared understandings and  cultural elements."

This passage describes how the system can be so efficient and mechanical to the point of being predictable. Such a system, thus, makes it easy to follow precedence and not think outside of the box or to critically analyze how the repetition of the same types of events and activities impacts the students and posterity. Students and future generations are given the "script" and are often expected to follow it. In a sense, then, the information that is being "deposited" into the students is this undergraduate student life script which they are expected to rotely memorize.

I find the experience Nathan had to be true. When I first came to university I was excited to see all the new and exciting events and people but now that I have been going to school for three years, I see how all these events follow a certain skeleton. I also see how all these events are organized into neat boxes and are scheduled for certain recurring times and days. These events are consistently, mechanically, predictably the same. If you try to stray away from the system, if you are honest that you are straying away from the system, you get hit with fees and with obstacles.