Glossy four-seater tables, congealed Maggi noodles eaten out of plastic lunch boxes, chipped pastel green wall paint, being told what conduct makes a good wife, asking for permission to drink water out of bright-pink plastic water bottles, unquestioned chants of Two one “za” two, two two “za” four echoing in a classroom, copied words off a chalkboard on three-lined notebooks to later be rote-learned — middle school looked a lot like adventure. Reading Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed deeply resonated with me since I had experienced what Friere describes as the banking model of education for most of my school years.
Not being taught how to analyze situations affected me severely when it came to topics I deeply cared about. One such topic was climate change. Last year, I realized that a lot of the climate education we were provided with lacked nuance, and when I learned the actual gravity of the situation, I was overwhelmed and uncomfortable. Additionally, I experienced some trouble explaining this new information to those around me. Having had this experience, Plato’s allegory of the cave made perfect sense to me!
“You start out learning about global warming and the greenhouse effect in school, nobody talks about it outside of school, and one day, you grow up, leaving behind awareness of environmental degradation like a discarded binder in a locker.”, writes Sarah Elahi (2020) in an article unpacking motherhood during the Anthropocene. Including me, most Pakistani kids have shared this experience where the environment is treated like an abstract entity divorced from reality. In middle school, I was told to paint “Save The Earth”, bright green and blue, on fresh single-use and non-biodegradable paper with paints containing non-biodegradable acrylic polymers.
Friere describes the fundamentally narrative character of schools, artfully saying that the educational system is suffering from narration sickness. He extrapolates on this, stating that the banking structure places the teacher in an authoritative position as a narrator, and students in a subservient passive position as listeners (Friere, 1968).
Reading, reflection, and introspection with respect to the model have made me realize the intensity of the dichotomy that the banking model creates between students and teachers. I had never dared to question this dichotomy before because I just believed that was how things were supposed to be.
An obvious reason why I never questioned this dichotomy was that I could not dare to question authority. I remember always being really excited to learn, reading random end-of-chapter activities in my textbooks, doing them at home, excitedly going up to my teachers, and telling them about my at-home educational adventures.
I wish I could say my teachers were always warm and welcoming in response to my excitement. When I was in the fourth grade, a teacher literally told me to shut up when I told her that I wanted to build a terrarium. I remember this so well because, after this, I kept my excitement to myself and stopped telling my teachers anything at all. After that incident, I have only had two teachers in my entire school life who supported anything I had to say that was even a morsel out of the strict syllabus content.
On Perusal and in discussions, I highlighted how Friere’s ideas mirror Friedrich Engels’ ideas of class consciousness and how the dichotomy between teachers and students mirror larger oppressive systems and power structures. However, I believe that it is important to acknowledge how in South Asian or desi societies, this dichotomy stretches into families as well, existing between adults as narrators and children as passive obeyers, also mirroring larger oppressive systems.
Growing up in a South Asian household, I was never allowed to question anything any adults around me said. It was genuinely a rule set in stone. Referring to this culture, writer Nuur Hasan (2020) writes:
You are told to walk in a straight line after you are thoroughly told what a straight line is, and how it is iron-clad into our society. Deviating from it is evil and unwise.
The straight line? – What is it? It is the root cause of all problem; the outdated, boring, even hurtful and restrictive self-proclaimed “laws” of our elders. Some call it culture, some call it traditions.
It becomes even harder to subvert the banking model in South Asia because of how deeply rooted obeying adults in the name of respect is in our culture. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with respecting adults. I completely endorse respecting everyone, however, the aforementioned obedience entails a lack of agency or autonomy. This might be to uphold the tradition of more concrete family structures which uphold the patriarchy along with neoliberal economies. This is due to the patriarchal and patrilineal notion that women are lower than men, it is automatically assumed that they are not primary breadwinners and hence require less money (Mitchell, 2016). Hence, women are not only systematically oppressed in workplaces but are also rapidly proletarianized and trapped in a cycle of poverty.
References:
Elahi, S. (2020, March 2). Apocalypse babies. https://www.sochwriting.com/apocalypse-babies/.
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Mitchell, A. (2016, September 7). Neoliberalism’s Exploitation of Women Workers: the true price of our clothing. Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies. https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/asiapacificstudies/2016/09/07/neoliberalisms-exploitation-women-workers-true-price-clothing/.
Nuur Hasan 1 year, 5 months. (2020, April 1).
What is wrong with our elders and ‘desi’ culture? Mashable Pakistan. https://pk.mashable.com/opinion/2311/what-is-wrong-with-our-elders-and-desi-culture.