Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, in chapter two of his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), explored the concept of the “banking system of education”. According to him, it is a system of education in which the teacher is the active depositor of educational knowledge, and the student is a passive recipient of that knowledge. To put it another way, the teacher is the one who tells the story, and the student’s job is to listen carefully, memorize, and reproduce them in future exams. The “banking system of education” is a repetitive cycle, the teacher deposits information in the student’s mind, the student listens and reproduces. This repetition becomes a sickness from which the student produces nothing new and does not produce knowledge, he/she just listens and absorbs the information without even questioning.
In his book, Freire also discusses how is the teacher-student relationship viewed, and I see this relationship as an authoritarian relationship where the teacher is the oppressor, and the student is oppressed. “The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;” (Freire, 1970, p.73), this is the quote from chapter two that most intrigued me. I was scared of teachers in my entire life at school. I always saw them as figures of authority. I was afraid to ask questions, and I just agreed with what was taught inside the classroom because I could never know more than a teacher since he/she is the person who has all the knowledge.
I only realized how problematic our educational system is after reading the criticism of Paulo Freire and bell hooks, and from there, we can see how manipulated and adapted our mind can be. I was taught in my school that “if you want to get a job in the future, you have to learn what is taught and get good grades”. I cannot generalize, but most teachers encourage students to learn the content to get a good grade in exams. If a student gets a good grade, it means he/she is having a good quality education. Furthermore, they do not encourage us to understand the content itself, to ask questions, to create knowledge or to have a debate with classmates. I was never asked if the teaching method was working or if I was enjoying the content program.
I would like to close this blog post with the following question: why are most students not able to think critically? My answer would be because the student’s role inside the classroom was always to absorb all the information taught by the instructors and never disagree with it.
References:
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
- hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.