Banking Concept of Education Paolo

Banking Concept of Education

Paolo Freire's Concept of Banking Education

In his famous text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire examines the education practices that create and support the tyranny of a dominant minority over the passive majority. One of the concepts that Freire points to as being central to the suppression of the majority is the "banking" concept of education. This method of education involves not only a manner of teaching that ignores the natural capacities of students, but also an idea of humanity that denies our pivotal sense of inquisitiveness.

Freire begins his discussion of "banking" education by examining the fundamental characteristic of this type of education: narration. The narrative method, according to Freire, presupposes that students are hollow shells able to be filled by the teacher with knowledge. In order to be narrated, however, this knowledge must be reduced to words that are "detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance" (Freire, para.2). Teachers in this system are merely "depositing" this insubstantial information into the receptacle of the student's mind -- hence the banking analogy.

This banking form of education constitutes for Freire a reinforcement -- in fact, even a miniature version -- of oppressive society as a whole. The teacher-student relationship mirrors the positions of the dominant minority and the oppressed majority by insisting on an irreconcilable opposition between the two. Freire isolates ten areas of alienation that the teacher-student relationship shares with the oppressor-oppressed relationship: teaching, knowing, thinking, talking, disciplining, choosing, acting, content, authority, and subjectivity (Freire, para.8). The more these dichotomies are reinforced in the minds of the students, claims Freire, "the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is," creating an ideal passive populace for the oppressive minority (para.9).

Not only does the banking concept of education create and maintain an opposition between teacher and student; it also assumes a distinction between human consciousness and external reality. Freire suggests that the practice of "filling" students with knowledge implies that all experience and external phenomena "enter" humans in the same manner, though the idea that data and other intellectual products can "enter" a mind does not necessarily mean that other phenomena reside "in" a person in the same way.

Freire wraps up his argument by claiming that the banking method of teaching