Hello students,
Below you will find excerpts from the second chapter of
Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is in this chapter that the
author’s develops his thoughts regarding the “banking concept of education.” I
have included those excerpts that I think are most relevant to our discussion
and that correlate to the assignment questions. However, in an effort not
to take Freire out of context, here is a link to the entirety of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Please answer the following questions in your own words as
much as possible.This assignment will be collected on Monday May 6
1. What does Freire criticize most about the “banking method
of education?”
2. What does Freire mean by, “a dichotomy between man and
the world?”
3. What alternative method of education does Freire offer to
the “banking method of education?”
4. We have discussed several different methods of education
throughout the course of the semester. These have included Behaviorism, Reconstructionism,
and Pragmatism. Which method of education do you think Freire would be in most
support of? Explain your answer.
Excerpted Text from Chapter Two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo
Freire
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level,
inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character.
This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient,
listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical
dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless
and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness…
…Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to
memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse still, it turns them into
‘containers’, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely
he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the
receptacles permit them-selves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are
the depositories and the teacher is the “depositor.” Instead of communicating,
the teacher issues communiques and ‘makes deposits’ which the students
patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of
education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as
far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have
the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.
But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the
lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided
system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot be truly
human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with
the world, and with each other.
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…
… It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards
men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the
deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness
which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that
world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the
more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view
of reality deposited in them.
The capacity of banking education to minimize or annul the students’
creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the
oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it
transformed. The oppressors use their ‘humanitarianism’ to preserve a
profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any
experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not
content with a partial view of reality but is always seeking out the ties which
link one point to another and one problem to another….
…. The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not
men living ‘outside’ society. They have always been inside - inside the
structure which made them “beings for others’. The solution is not to
‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that
structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’. Such transformation,
of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of
the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student
conscientization.
The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never
propose to students that they consider reality critically. It will deal instead
with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and
insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green
grass to the rabbit. The ‘humanism’ of the banking approach masks the effort to
turn men into automatons - the very negation of their ontological vocation to
be more fully human.
Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for
there are innumerable well-intention-ed bank-clerk teachers who do not realize
that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits
themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these
contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their
domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through
existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with
their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations
with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant
trans-formation. If men are searchers and their ontological vocation is
humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contra-diction in which
banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the
struggle for their liberation….
….. Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy
between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or
with others; man is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a
conscious being (corpo consciente); he is rather the possessor of a
consciousness; an empty ‘mind’ passively open to the reception of deposits of
reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup,
all the objects before me - as bits of the world which surrounds me - would be
‘inside’ me, exactly as I am inside my study right now. This view makes no
distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness.
The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are
simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of
them, but they are not inside me….
…. The truly committed must reject the banking concept in its entirety,
adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as
consciousness directed towards the world. They must abandon the educational
goal of deposit- making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men
in their relations with the world. ‘Problem-posing’ education, responding to
the essence of consciousness - intentional - rejects communique and embodies
communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: being
conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a
Jasperian ‘split’ - consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of
information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far
from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors -
teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of
problem- posing education first of all demands a resolution of the
teacher-student contradiction. Dialogical relations - indispensable to the
capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable
object - are otherwise impossible.
Indeed, problem-posing education, breaking the vertical patterns
characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function of being the
practice of freedom only if it can over-come 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 their turn while being taught also teach.
They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this
process, arguments based on ‘authority’ are no longer valid; in order to function,
authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches
another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the
world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are ‘owned’ by the
teacher.
The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything)
distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognates a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his
laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students on that object. The
students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by
the teacher. Nor do the students practise 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 culture and knowledge’ we
have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.
The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the
teacher- student: he is not ‘cognitive’ at one point and ‘narrative’ at
another. He is always ‘cognitive’, whether preparing a project or engaging in
dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his
private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students.
In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in
the reflection of the students. The students - no longer docile listeners - are
now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher
presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-examines
his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the
problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions
under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge,
at the level of the logos…
…. In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive
critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find
themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a
reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of
men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or
whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of
action men adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive
themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher- student and the students-teachers
reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this
reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and
action…
….Problem-posing education affirms men as beings in the process of
becoming - as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished
reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are unfinished, but not
historical, men know them-selves to be unfinished; they are aware of their
incompleteness. In this incompleteness and this awareness He the very roots of
education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of
men and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be
an ongoing activity.
