2. Then, you should write a short paragraph where you explain how it relates to your
experience,class discussion, or other readings.
Freire, Paulo, et al. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition.” Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, 30th Anniversary, Continuum, 2000, pp. 71–86.
Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire summarizes the relationship between
teachers and students. A student is “a vessel to be filled” with the knowledge that the teacher
determines is useful. Without hesitation, the student retains that knowledge and can recite it at
any given time, however they never truly understand what that information actually means.
Freire calls this method “the banking method” and it serves “the oppressors who care neither to
have the world revealed nor see it transformed.” His main focus in explaining the banking
method is that when teachers teach within this method, they are preventing them from reaching
their full creative potential, thus creating “lazy, stupid, or incompetent” individuals that are
quickly labeled as “outsiders” working against the system. Freire disagrees with this
methodology and argues that all men are intelligent in their own ways. He says “Oppression –
overwhelming control – is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life.” And “Based
on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students
into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to
adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.”
When stopping to think about the banking method and how it could apply to me, one of
my previous courses comes to mind, human anatomy. I actually failed that course the first time I
took it, simply because of the teacher and his teaching style. His style of teaching resembled that
of the banking method because he wanted us to memorize every bone, muscle, tissue and
whatever else makes up the human body, but didn’t explain how they worked together or why
they were important. This made it very difficult. The second time I took the course, the instructor
didn’t focus on the memorizing of everything, but rather focused on teaching what things were,
where they were located, and how they worked together to make the body itself work
appropriately. He made it interesting, and easy to learn!
Two quotes in the reading that stuck out to me were:
"Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the
world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is a
spectator, not re-creator. In this view the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he
or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the
reception of deposits of reality from the world outside" (247).
And, "In problem-posing education, people 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 women and 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 they
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" (252).
