Chapter 2 - Banking Education v. Problem-posing education
Freire opposes what he names the "banking concept" of education with his "problem-posing" education. The banking concept of education suits the oppressors. In this system the students are treated as empty vessels into which knowledge can be deposited (like deposits in a bank) by the teacher. Freire depicts what actually goes on in the world of banking education succinctly. He writes "This relationship [teacher-student] 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.... His [the teacher's] 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".
In banking education the teacher 'knows', because he or she has received the officially sanctioned curriculum knowledge which is then imparted as a stale, static narrative to the students. This is reminiscent of the notion in Illich of the teacher as the deliverer of educational packages to the students. Both Illich and Freire notice that the student in modern education is excluded from participation in the getting of knowledge first-hand and as it relates to them. It is someone else's 'knowledge' which they are being given about objects which also belong to others. Students are excluded from inquiry and are in Freire's words "filed away".
Freire makes his critique of education in the Latin American context. The education proposed in that context, even by humanitarians, is an education which excludes the peasant from "restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry". Freire proposes that the themes of an education for the rural poor in South America be ones from their own experience and that they be trained in critical reflection on their own experience.
Freire sees clearly how the teacher in a banking system must assume that the students "know nothing", indeed the teacher projects an "absolute ignorance" onto others. He describes the modern teacher thus: "The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his existence." Banking education is banking education the world over, a theme echoed by Illich who points out that the institution of school is universal, in all political and economic regimes.
Freire argues that banking education fosters passivity in students by negating the spirit of inquiry. "The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to 'fill' the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge". It is this taking over of a natural process which alienates. Freire understands that the teacher is set up between the student and the world to offer a prescribed version of the world to the student, and to adapt the student to the world. The teacher is, as Illich pointed out, the custodian and transmitter of society's rituals. (Illich more than Freire analyses the role the exam system plays in this process though both describe how in modern education knowledge has become an official product not the result of inquiry.) In banking education the teacher owns the object of knowledge and prepares a lesson on it. The lesson is delivered to the students as secondary knowledge. The students never find out anything for themselves and thus are rendered passive. They are good students in as much as they can repeat the narrative about the world which they have been given.
The key to banking education for Freire is the relationship between teacher and student. In banking education there is an absolute dichotomy between the teacher and the student. The teacher always has knowledge. His knowledge is absolute. Linked to his absolute knowledge is his authority, not just subject authority but the authority of social control. The teacher chooses what is learned. (We would add that in curriculum systems the teacher may themselves have very little say in what is taught; it is determined as a matter of national policy). The students, in their serried rows, learn by absorbing what they are told by the teacher. The good student is the one who does this as meekly and passively as possible. For Freire it is a "ready-to-wear" approach to education which does everything to obviate the need for critical engagement with reality. The teacher imposes himself on the students. He is not with them. In banking education reality is made static. The students learn about it and adapt to it. In problem-posing education, which Freire contrasts with
banking education, the present is not "well-behaved" and the future is not pre-determined. In problem-posing education the students are involved in reality; they inquire into it critically and thus are able to transform it. Their humanity is thus not denied. Banking education teaches fatalism; the 'world' is a given; one can but submit to it.
Freire links these ideas to his idea of praxis, the idea that thought is only authentic when it is generated by action upon the world. it follows from this that the "thoughts; imparted to the students, devoid of action, are sterile, empty ones, which can only help to build an alienated consciousness". The point is that the student is given the thoughts of others. Educational success is measured by her ability to regurgitate these thoughts.
Freire's critique of banking education is located in his class analysis. "Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression". "Banking education", though, is precisely the method favoured in the West to teach almost everyone. Even private schools for the elites in the West use an approach which is essentially banking education, though perhaps with slightly more play in it than is used in the state sector, sufficient to instil a sense of social superiority in the students. Banking education appears to have a utility beyond keeping the rural poor subject to the law of the hacienda owner. It appears to have a utility beyond keeping the proletariat submerged in a false consciousness as understood in Marxism. Indeed banking education appears to have a very wide utility as a general purpose system for ensuring compliance to an existing system. It does this by engendering passivity, by teaching that social conformism is right and not to conform is aberrant, by stifling critical thinking about reality, by teaching submission to social authority as personified by the school-teacher, and by training the student to accept packages put together by others rather than trusting his own instinct to learn. This last point is touched on by Freire but taken much further by Illich in his critique of education as being a training in consumerism.
For Freire banking education alienates because it is outside the praxis. Banking education, by excluding the students from a living, critical engagement with the now (the present political and social conditions) is, without doing anything further, already indoctrinating students into acquiescence in the status quo. His ideas about "banking education" and what he proposes instead, "problem-posing education", have, in our view though, an applicability as a general educational theory outside of being the doctrine of the educational wing of the revolutionary party, but this field is not developed specifically by Freire in this book.
Freire, as we have seen, counters banking education with "problem-posing" education. The key is the relationship between student and teacher. In this approach to education the teacher-student teaches the student-teachers. This indeed recognizes a truth; it is never the case in fact that the teacher always knows and the student never does. Even quite 'conventional' academic authors often testify to the contributions their students have made; this bears witness to the fact that a meaningful dialog has taken place between teacher and students. In a subject, like history, where 'knowledge' is a matter of interpretation this is quite obviously so. But also in a subject such as mathematics it is likely that students will from time to time surprise their teacher. It is obviously true that where there is a great disparity in experience the teacher will rarely gain new subject knowledge from the students; for example a maths teacher with a Phd is unlikely to extend his own knowledge of mathematics greatly by teaching basic arithmetic to a group of 10 year olds, however bright and capable. Nonetheless two things remain true: i) In no case will the teacher ever be guaranteed not to be able to learn from his students and ii) even in those cases where this is unlikely there is no reason why a teacher cannot still work alongside the students, as an equal, posing problems and working with them to solve them. The method, if you want to call it that, of problem-posing education is applicable in all learning situations. It is obviously false to set up a situation where the teacher acts as if he has absolute knowledge relative to the students. Such a system can only be maintained by violence because it is untrue. This is why students in schools become 'disaffected'; they have been forcibly disengaged from the learning process by being denied their right to truth, to make a direct connection with it. It is an assault on their being. Another reason why problem-posing education is still relevant even with 'children' is that we were all a child once. That is - if someone cannot empathetically enter into the world of the child as an equal in spirit (and needs to hide behind a spurious authority which is maintained only by violence in the last analysis) then what is he or she doing in the classroom?
Problem-posing education is an approach to education where teacher and student approach a problem together. Student-teacher and teacher-students work together to solve the problem. There is a real critical engagement with reality and is part of the praxis. We would argue that even when the content of the educational programme is not specifically political a problem-posing approach is still politically liberating because it treats people as persons who can take their place in society as thinking beings while a banking approach is oppressive because it, as Freire says 'files them away'. In problem-posing education the students and teacher discover truths. In banking education the second-hand truths which have received the sanction of the board of education are disseminated to the passive students whose merit is the greater the more meekly they absorb other people's version of reality. Freire argues that in problem-posing education teacher and students are both Subjects. In banking education the teacher alone is the Subject; the students, as vessels to be filled are merely objects. In banking education the teacher fills the empty vessels with 'knowledge' about the world - a stultifying process. In problem-posing education the teacher does not claim to either own nor know the world; teacher and student approach the problem together. Freire writes: "Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation".
In Chapter 4 Freire emphasises that problem-posing education is 'dialogical'; that is it involves a dialog between student-teacher and teacher-students. Banking education progresses by issuing a series of communiqués, (for example from various committees in Whitehall and elsewhere which determine the national curriculum). In Chapter 4 he relates this especially to the classic revolutionary context and reminds the revolutionary leadership that they must dialog with the people and not just issue communiqués. Again, while distancing ourselves from the revolutionary analysis it is clear nonetheless this is still a pertinent criticism of educational methodology in general. Most teaching is indeed about issuing communiqués. These communiqués have been prepared in advance by others about subjects which they have determined the students should know. It is a one-way dialog.
Hence a situation is created where the concept 'back-chat' is created. 'Back-chat', a 'moral' notion unique to banking education, is the result of bright people driven into an untenable position: that of being asked to become an 'empty vessel'. In an educational situation where communication takes place in the form of two-way dialog there is no back-chat. The very phrase 'back-chat' with its pejorative intonation reflects the one-way nature of the approved educational process and the way it makes bad normal human creativity and interaction.
Freire discusses banking education versus problem-posing education in the context of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed; teaching literacy to the oppressed rural poor in Latin America and with it a social and political consciousness, in line with traditional Marxist orthodoxy. Nonetheless the basic concepts apply in non-revolutionary contexts, the criticism is applicable as a general critique of education. Certainly; in problem-posing education the teacher-student respects the student-teachers because a reality is recognized, that in fact the teacher is not an absolute authority on the subject and the students are able to make a valid contribution. As such the humanity of the students is valued; in that their truth as inquiring beings is engaged not stifled. This approach to education requires a teacher who can empathise with the students, who can enter into their activity of inquiry, alongside them. It requires patience and love as Freire says. It probably can't be done very efficiently on a large-scale and its fruits cannot be measured in exams which are just regurgitating the official words. (One of the dilemmas in contemporary school systems is that inevitably teachers 'teach to the test'. This happens to such an extent that students by the time they reach University may really come to confuse 'knowing' with placing the right words on paper that will enable the examiner to give them a mark. Because they never had to discover anything for themselves they know nothing). It can be seen that an educational methodology which is authoritarian and operates according to a one-way dialog excludes the students from a critical participation in social and political reality. The disaffected are those who won't give up their political and social consciousness, who won't be turned into 'filled empty vessels' but who reserve the right
to inquire for themselves. In trying to preserve their freedom the 'disaffected' are also trying to preserve the freedom of their oppressors and to keep open the possibility of dialog. For Freire, who believes that human destiny is to be realised in the final triumph of the proletariat in history this exclusion from social and political reality and the enforced alienation concomitant on it is specifically and only a class oppression. Thus banking education is linked to the "oppressing class" (owners of capital). Nonetheless even if we discard dialectical materialism, we still see that the banking approach to education is, in its apoliticalness, dehumanising and alienating.
