Of Frenchmen and Education

In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes what he coins ‘banking education’ to be a form of education in which the students are ‘banked’ in with knowledge as though they were mere objects or vessels to be filled and not actually human beings. A mechanistic style of teaching in lectures and lessons presented as empirical fact, this banking method produces adapted, antagonistic, fatalistic people who do not act or think consciously, but acts as the objects they were trained to be.

Or at least, according to Freire.

Though I would never say that I agree with everything Freire says (his French Revolutionary tendencies is really getting on my nerves – and a bit of my humor) the basic spirit of what he says about education isn’t really anything new to me. With as little offense to public-schooled people as possible, growing up as a homeschooled person, this ‘banking’ concept of education is what generally came to mind (and still does, to an extent) when I think of public education. Honestly, I think it is at least partway true, though I can’t make any hasty generalizations.

I have actually experienced Friere’s ‘banking education’ in the classroom several times, the most memorable of which was in a biology class I took over the summer, a class designed for non-science majors, in which our professor said multiple times:

“I know you’re going to forget this as soon as you take the test, so I’m just going to skip over it.”

Every time she said it, I could only stare in shock. This was ‘education’?! I think Freire’s explanation of ‘banked’ education perfectly describes this situation.

One point I disagreed with Freire was when he said that this ‘banking education’ must lead to revolution. (again with the French tendencies…)  I think that instead, an overabundance of this banking education, if followed through as Freire proposes, would end in the antagonistic, dead society that he attributes to banking education earlier on. Unless someone else is there to alert them of their own deadness, the ‘oppressed’ students will never realize that they are oppressed to begin with. Though honestly, I dodn’t think this had much to do with his main point, it was a point with which I disagreed with Freire.

As for his treatment of education as a whole, I find myself agreeing with Freire, though I probably don’t fall under the extremist category that he seems to (French!) I definitely think he has made a good point: Learning is not about purely storing knowledge; it’s about engaging with the object of that knowledge and putting that knowledge into practice and changing the world.

Final thoughts:

If teachers and students are supposed to be more equal in their engagement with each other (teacher-student student-teacher) how is it possible to maintain a level of authority?

Does banking education have its place in fundamental areas of knowledge? How do we define these areas?