Freire and Gatto-agree-disagree?

In the first couple of paragraphs of Against Schools- How public education cripples our kids, and why, John Gatto talks about boredom in our schools.  In Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed-Chapter 2, he also starts this chapter with descriptions of boredom but does not use the word boredom. Freire states that "the teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable" also in the same paragraph he stated "Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity". To me this sounds like a great descrition of boredom.

Gatto talks about The integrating function and Freire talks a lot about oppression, both very similar. The integrating function or conformity function's intention is to make children alike as much as possible and Freire talks about education shaping us to fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little we question it.

 Freire compares education to the banking process, making deposits. Describing the students as depositories and teachers as the depositors. He talks a lot about oppression. Gatto believes the purpose of schools is to establish our social label, maintain that level and to create consumers. To me sounds a lot like oppression. School are just "laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands."

Freire does however offer a solution, "Problem-Posing" education, where students and teachers work together and learn from each other. Gatto's solution is to teach our children the opposite of what our schools teach.

Freire communicates in a language that takes some serious thinking to process and Gatto is a little easier to translate. I enjoyed both and they really got me thinking about our education system here today.