Posted: December 1st, 2014

“The Banking Concept of Education”

“The Banking Concept of Education”

EN 106 > Week Two > Essay #1 Assignment
Summary
& Close Reading
of Paulo
Freire’s
“The Banking Concept of Education”
A very common type of writing you will produce in your academic career involves carefully
reading and developing a summary of a given
text. The abi
lity to engage in close reading
to
identify salient argu
ments and represent them fairly
is foundational to entering academic
conversations as a competent and articulate participant. Summaries also serve an important
role in helping other reade
rs make sense of a difficult text.
You might think of summary as
the job of a tour guide: you are offering your readers a brief glimpse into another world.
As you learned from Greene and Lidinsky’s chapter, writing a summary involves a great deal
of criti
cal thinking and evaluation on the part of the writer. You must identify the author’s
thesis (what Greene and Lidinsky call “the gist”), uncover how the key claims of that thesis
are supported and developed, evaluate the conversational contexts of the auth
or’s work,
and, at all points, consider how your perspective affects your interpretation of the text.
For
Essay #1,
please
write a summary of an excerpt from educational philosopher Paulo
Freire’s famous work
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
after working with peers in class
discussion to understand this difficult text. Your audience will be educated peers who have
read Freire’s essay but who need your assistance understanding its “gist” and supporting
arguments.
Your summary essay should in
clude those elements Greene and Lidinsky recommend:
?
th
e context of Freire’s argument
?
a clear statement of what you feel to be “
the gist” of Freire’s argument
?
a description of
the key claims of the text
?
relevant examples (direct quotations or paraphrases)
taken from the text
to support
your interpretation
As no summary is neutral, you will want to weave an evaluative thread throughout your
summary that suggests to the reader your judgment of the value of Freire
‘s argument
to
your understanding of multicul
turalism, education,
freedom, and/or social class.
Guidelines for Essay #1 Length/Due Date
: approximately 600 words, due Sunday
midnight Central Standard Time (CST).
Style/Format
: This, as all essays in EN 106,
should
be formatted
in a standard scholarl
y
format. (Most students follow MLA or APA guidelines, which are outlined in
Easy Writer
.) No
matter what format you follow, be sure to do the following:
?
Use
12 point, Times New Roman font, double
–
spaced.
?
Use
1
–
inch margins top, bottom, and sides.
?
Although no cover page is needed, you should include your name, my name, the
course number/title, and date at the upper left
–
hand corner of the manuscript.
References
: Essay #1
should
include at least three references to the assigned reading.
Such refere
nces will
use
quotation or paraphrasing, and they
will include in
–
text citations
that follow the particular style you have chosen.
File format
: Please submit your essay in Rich Text Format (RTF). This is available in most
word processing programs; it will
ensure maximum document accessibility for all operating
platforms.
Works Cited
/References
:
Because you will be referring to Freire’s essay, please create an
appropriate bibliography
, with one entry for Freire’s essay.
Titles
: Include a descriptive tit
le at the beginning of your essay that tips your readers off to
your central interpretation of Freire’s work. Do not format your title with quotation marks,
boldface, underlining or italics. Quotation marks or underlining are only appropriate if the
title
borrows words from another source.
Deadline
: Submit your final draft essay to the essay #1
Dropbox
no later than
Midnight
CST on Sunday
at the end of this week by clicking on the
Dropbox
tab at the top of the
eCollege course screen.
Use of essays for
future courses
: Please understand that your essay may be used
—
anonymously
—
as a sample for future EN 106 students and instructors
unless
you expressly
request that it not be used. Your work, of course, will only be used for educational
purposes.
Assessme
nt
: See the
Grading and Assessment
content item under
Course Home
to
see the criteria and rubric I will use to grade your essay.
A Word about Plagiarism
: Freire’s work is oft
–
anthologized and assigned in first
–
year
writing courses; because of this, y
ou
can find countless Internet s
ites, free and proprietary
summaries
,
and term papers that respond to assignments similar to this one. Please be
advised that any undocumented use of another writer’s words or ideas constitutes
plagiarism and will result in fai
lure of the assignment.
Multiple instances of plagiarism may
result in automatic failure of the course.

“The Banking Concept of Education”

“The Banking Concept of Education,” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. New York: Continuum, 1993. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos [This is the citation

information you will need to construct a Works Cited entry; for in-text citation, use Paulo Freire’s last name and the paragraph number (since this is a reprint and

not the original, book-length source). Consult your Easy Writer for information about citing a book with a translator].

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.

, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the

students with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them

significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. “Four times four is sixteen; the capital of

Pará is Belim.” The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of

“capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Pará is Belim,” that is, what Belim means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, 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

themselves 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 reinvention,

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.

The raison d’être 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.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the

following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;

c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;

d. the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;

e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;

g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;

h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;

i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;

j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

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 capability 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 always seeks out the

ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them,” for the more the oppressed can be

led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the banking concept of education in conjunction with a

paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of “welfare recipients.” They are treated as individual cases, as

marginal men who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized, and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society,

which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy” folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be “integrated,” “incorporated”

into the healthy society that they have “forsaken.”

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 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 conscientização.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. 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-intentioned 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 transformation. If men are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking

education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to

engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this,

he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.

The banking concept does not admit to such partnership—and necessarily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, 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.

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.

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. His task is to

organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to “fill” the students by making deposits of information which he considers to constitute true knowledge. And

since men “receive” the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted man,

because he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well

men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the

more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading

requirements, the methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear

approach serves to obviate thinking.

The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot

impose oneself, nor even merely coexist with one’s students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and

proscribes communication.

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The teacher

cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower

isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers

becomes impossible.

——————————————————————————–

Conscientização: According to Freire’s translator, “The term, conscientização, refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to

take action against the oppressive elements of reality.”

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