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Dakota Trondle

Eng. 111

10-2-17

Lucia Elden

Martial Arts Helps, But Not How You Think

Martial arts is a very extensive and complex area of study and has uses outside of the

traditional classroom. It makes use of problem-posing and as such is not always very helpful

when dealing with classroom assignments as it allows for new experiences and the evolution of

an advanced thinking process that is very hard to nail down and explain on paper. Similarly, in

Finding Forrester, Jamal Wallace has experiences that would not help him in class by writing

about them whether it be basketball or the slums where he lives. Some things wont help you in

class by writing about them and martial arts, Jamal Wallace, and Paulo Freire help explain why.

Jamal Wallace goes through the movie learning how to be a better writer, but he does

not learn much from his current school. One of the reasons is that they have him write about

things he himself is not interested in writing about. At the private school he goes to partway

through the movie, the professor does something worse than having Wallace write about

experiences. he uses what Paulo Freire calls the banking concept of education, where

The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in

the action of the educator. During the first he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares

his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about

that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated
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by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards

which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking

the critical reflection of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of

and knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.

When he (the professor in Finding Forrester) should really be using problem-posing education

which would have a greater effect on his students and allow them to prosper in their education,

such as Paulo Freire states:

Indeed problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical characteristic of banking

education, can fulfill its function of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction.

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist

and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer

merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who

in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all

grow.

Jamal Wallace does find a teacher that uses problem-posing when taking Wallace under his

wings, that being under the wings of William Forrester (a great author living in seclusion).

Forrester, by using problem-posing, teaches Jamal a higher form of writing while Jamal teaches

him how to live life. On each of those topics they both learn and grow and become all the

better for it than if they merely deposited information in one anothers heads.

The problem-posing side of education is also rooted strongly in martial arts, where the

student has the capability to teach and the teacher the capability to learn and their vice versas.
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Hence when we learn things in martial arts and experience new things, those things do not

always have a place in the traditional classroom and would not help us therefore by writing

about them. When a teacher then tells a student that they need to write about something they

love to do in a way that anyone else would understand.it is quite difficult to carry out.

Martial arts is a very complex area of study and is not very useful when inside a

traditional classroom; it makes use of problem-posing much like how Jamal Wallace learns

about writing Forrester from and teaches Forrester about living life. These are experiences that

would not be helpful by writing about them in class and as such should not be looked to for

sharpening the blade of ones writing skills.

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Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Philosophy of Education.

Finding Forrester. Director Gus Van Sant. 2000.