Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Feire, in chapter two of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, gives us insight into the method of banking teaching, predominately used in the world of education, and the innately destructive nature of such teaching. “Banking” sets up a system “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, as I have seen in teaching experiences as a student myself, takes away the human characteristic in learning. I have been told before what to (blindly) think by a teacher, but I was lucky to have been shown by a few very good teachers to maintain at times a certain attitude of disbelief, provoking a certain proneness towards challenging what I am being told. This can make life very difficult at times, but also, and more importantly, genuine. Not every student has learned yet to question what they are being taught, rather because they were first taught to listen and obey and assume the role of “student”.

The “Banking” system of learning creates this set of expectations, that Freire describes, that encourage this idea that the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing. Freire elaborates on the dangers of this, “The more completely [students] 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.” He talks about how difficult it is for a student, in this system of learning, to develop the critical consciousness necessary to transform the world. It perpetuates oppression when the oppressors use means to transform the oppressed into their structure, to change the individual to their idea of the world. Rather, to change the structure for the oppressed is to liberate. Freire brings it back to how to radically change our education structure to liberate the oppressed; “[teachers] must be partners of the students in their relations with them… to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.”