When Education Becomes an Empowering Act: Learning Fallacies Analysis

Abstract

In this paper the author argues that education in the Moroccan context, either in high schools or in universities, is rarely used to empower students by arming them with the basic critical-thinking skills to cope with the challenges of the modern world. Many researchers and teachers complain that schools are becoming like exam factories and that the prevailing model of education in schools, especially in the developing world, is banking education. In banking education, the teacher is a bank of knowledge and their role consists in filling their studentsi¯ heads with information. Students are rarely given the chance to question the input they receive from their teacher. Thus, in this paper the author calls for an alternative mode of education. This mode of education is problem-posing education [1]. By problem-posing education the author means education which makes students think critically about the knowledge and the discourses they receive from school and from society as a whole [1]. As Freire [1] suggests, problem-posing education is an alternative to the banking model of education; it is an empowering education which can lead students to acquire critical consciousness. In this paper, the author will depict how problem-posing education can be carried out through teaching Argumentation Theory, especially the teaching of fallacies analysis. In a study conducted in a Moroccan university, 25 students in an English master's class were given a course of critical reading which lasted for one semester. A pre- and a post-test were conducted before and after the intervention took place. Results suggest that students' critical-thinking abilities have developed at two levels. The first level is students' ability to detect fallacies in discourses and the second level is students' acquisition of a new meta-language to describe the argumentative structure of discourses.