Paulo Freire's (2004, p. 99) statement that "Education is suffering from narration sickness" refers to the traditional mode of education in the classroom where the teacher simply talks on and on and the students must sit patiently and listen like little receptacles of knowledge. As Freire (2004, p. 99) puts it, the "teacher-student relationship...[has a] fundamentally narrative character...[that] involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening objects (the students). Freire (2004, p. 99) points out that the teacher's job is to fill up the students with words that are so disconnected from reality that they have become meaningless for the students. This is a boring, dehumanizing approach to education that Freire (2004, pp. 100, 106) calls the "banking concept of education" predicated on deposits into children and that he insists would be better replaced by what he terms "problem-posing education" based on an educational environment where teaching and learning meld. In this kind of learning environment, dialogue between teachers and students as well as among students is more important than one-way narration by the teacher.
Lyn D. English (1997, p. 172) defines problem-posing education as "the creation of new problems based on a given problem situation." She identifies problem posing as adding a number of benefits to the classroom, including the promotion of "a spirit of inquisitiveness" and the generation of "more diverse and flexible thinking," as well as prompting children to be more responsible for their own learning. In this era of high-stakes testing, problem-posing education is far more worthwhile for students than the traditional rote learning approach. Students are unlikely to be able to recall all of the rote-learned facts they were taught prior to the test, but if they have been engaging in problem-posing learning, they are likely to be able to figure out the answers. By employing coll<...