rst facts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any book they told me to read, I read then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed" (Rodriguez 625). Rodriguez allowed his teachers to tell him how to think; he became completely submissive to their every belief. As Freire stated the teachers task is, "to fill the students with the contents of his narration contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that endangered them and could give them significance" (Freire 348). Instead of having his own opinion, Rodriguez permitted his instructors the privilege of reasoning for him. Rodriguez became a receptacle in every way possible. He basically left the fate of his education up to his teachers by allowing them to dump information into his mind. However, unlike the banking concept, his teachers did not dispose of knowledge in the form of narrated harangues. Instead, they used narrated literature in place of diatribes. Rodriguez read important books such as The Scarlet Letter and Great Expectations. "But I was not a good reader," Rodriguez claims, "merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read in order to acquire a point of view" (633). Rodriguez was a container in a sense that he retained the ideas of the books he read, but Rodriguez did not have an opinion about the authors content. This exemplifies Rodriguez as a student of the banking concept. Freire states that, "Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry" (Freire 349). Rodriguez did not question or analyze the information; he simply accepted and deposited the knowledge without any doubts. In high school, Rodriguez displayed his indifference and lack of opinion evidently in a list that he created. Rodriguez read a newspaper article about a retired professor who had his own list of the "hundred most important boo...
