Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I'm reading Paulo Freire's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and I am struck by how accurately he describes the oppressive nature of what he labels the banking concept of education which the rest of us know simply as school:

Worse yet, it turns them into "containers", into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she 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 the people themselves who are filed away throughout the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

Such a banking system that treats children as empty vessels to be filled requires a certain kind of teacher-student relationship. Because the student is considered to have an absolute ignorance, the teacher must define their existence as the opposite. Freire describes this relationship as a narrative where:

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, 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 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.

In this model, learning is passive and only the teaching requires action. Like the carpenter preparing to hammer the nail, the teacher would prefer it if the student would just sit still.



What does this look like? Friere shows us:

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 Para is Belem." 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 Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

So what's wrong with this model of education? Again, Freire explains:

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the worlds, with the world, and with each other.

In other words, children must be afforded the opportunity to openly and actively construct their own meaning while interacting with others. 


So how do we fix this factory-model of education? How do we unschool school? Before we can do so, we must first acknowledge the practices that perpetuate oppression. Freire offers a powerful indictment:

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: 

1. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

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

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

4. the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly;

5. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

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

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

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

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

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

If your schooling was anything like most people who inhabit this planet, this list is likely to be a familiar one. While there is nothing we can do to change the past, we had better be able to learn from it and aspire to something far better.

School simply has not changed very much since the turn of the century - and I'm not referring to 1999-2000. I would wager Paulo Freire's description of school would ring just as true for my grandfather who was born in 1916 and my father who was born in 1953, as I who was born in 1978.

My fear is that my daughter, who was born in 2008, will grow up and be all too familiar with Freire's list. If our children grow up and react to this list with anything less than shock and unfamiliarity, we will know that we failed them.