Essentially the teacher is dehumanizing their students because they are taking away their freedoms that make them a human being. For the teacher, the fact that the student is only taught what they want them to know is to their advantage because they don’t want the student questioning them or this entire system. Not only are they dehumanizing the students but possibly even more so themselves. Freire mentions “No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” (Freire 41). With the “top down” method, in the end both the student and the teacher suffer
The “Allegory of the Cave” is a text that supports this “top-down” method. The story involves a group of people who live in a dark cave and know nothing about the real world outside of their cave. For these people, shadows are the realest things that they have ever seen. One day something forces one of the people to turn around and see the fire that is behind them and from that point the fire is the realest thing known to him. After the fire he is dragged outside of the cave and into the sunlight. At that point he sees the sun which becomes the most real thing he has ever