Instructional theory is a discipline that focuses on how to structure material for promoting the education of human beings, particularly youth. This is categorized into two aspects, cognitive and behaviorist school of thought.
This theory originated in the US in 1950s and was formally known as the Taxonomy of Education Objectives –the first codification of the learning process.
In later years, instructional theories progressed into more detailed principles that influenced American instructors and mechanically instructed students. This promulgated the principle of ‘students as containers.’ Based on the theory, it is the responsibility of the teachers as ‘fillers’ to completely fill the empty receptacles. In this way he explains that in this since the educator creates an act of depositing knowledge in a student. The student thus becomes a repository of knowledge. The consequence then, was the system lacked creativity and the recipient suffered.
On the contrary, Paolo Freire, linguist –theorist, proposed another principle stating that "in the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence — but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher. The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."
