When Friere published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968, he explained how people pass ideas from one person to another, especially from teacher to student through the person who talks & the person who receives the knowledge should listen, memorize, & repeat this new found knowledge. Friere despised this idea because of it’s lack of creative thinking. This method is detrimental to teachers due to an abundance of young teachers who use the banking method end up despising what they do & quitting as most people who do if their job is just relaying words to young children with no fun. As well, banking method of education hurts the students because once you memorize a fact & use it for whatever you needed it for, the idea will just maneuver to the depths of your memory & will probably forget it unlike other methods where students can write things down & read them in the future or the ideas are relayed in a way where students will enjoy remember them for example many students like to memorize the 50 states & their capitals as a song for a test & plenty of people memorize songs. This method may be the best way to memorize work but if you end up just forgetting about it after your done with it.
Tag: Pedagogy and Power
Pedagogy and Power
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote an influential book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this book he touches on the idea of education where he states that the learning method is most likely the “Banking Model”. Freire refers to the banking model in order to criticize the way education is provided to the student. In his own words Freire says that students’s brains are like an empty container that can only be filled with knowledge from the teacher. Furthermore in the classroom only the teacher is allowed to talk and is the only person wise and knowledgeable. In the other hand, the student is not to speak nor challenge the knowledge given to him/her. This method clearly empowers the “intelligent” teacher and oppresses the student.
In my own case, I have experienced the banking model while I was in First and Second grade. I studied in Mexico my whole elementary school, but in the beginning I had the same teacher for two years. She was very mean. If any of the students had a question she would tell us to shut up, literally, and she would follow that sentence with “you are only allowed to speak when I ask you to.” She also used violence as a learning method because she would hit the students with a metallic ruler which would provoke tears on us. The only acceptable knowledge came from her and only her. It is until now that I have learned what that experience is called. However during that time the only positive thing I could get was to continue into third grade where teachers where more humane. 
Pedagogy And Power
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher that used the term “banking model” to describe and critique the traditional educational system. According to Freire, it is a method of educating where an educator teaches a student and the student must retain that knowledge, for example, the students are empty containers that need to be filled with the knowledge from the educators. This method allows educators to be empowered because they are the ones who can differentiate right from wrong and their teachings are passed down to the students. Meanwhile, the students are the ones that are dis-empowered, due to the lack of freedom of expression and creativity towards these teachings, and being forced to only accept the information given to them by the educator. This comes out of the students expense since they are not able to express themselves through questioning and creativity, while they are only being filled with information from the educator temporarily and will soon forget the teachings once the course is complete.
I’ve had experience with the “banking model” before with my math courses. In my math course, the professor taught a specific way to solve certain questions and equations and they had to be solved specifically to the way the professor taught it in the course. It was quite frustrating considering the fact that there was a much more efficient, quicker, and easier way to solve the problems and use the formulas, but the professor would not allow it due to the way he taught the class. If we were to not solve the questions his way we would not b able to receive full credit for the course. The positives that came out of the experience was knowing that there is a quicker and easier way to solve the problems instead of solving the problems the harder way. The Negatives that came out of the experience was it was a waste of time and could’ve saved a lot of effort and time.
Pedagogy and Power
According to Paulo Freire, the banking model of education can be thought of as students being empty vessels or containers in which teachers/educators must put new knowledge into those “containers” or students. Essentially, the teachers are expected to unload information into student’s brains, and it is then assumed that those said students will intake that information, memorize it, and then be able to regurgitate it. This is how Paulo Freire metaphorizes the education system. This model can be seen to empower the educators or teachers because in this sense, they have the ability to give forth any information that will fill the student’s mind or their empty container. Thus this model can be seen to disempower the student’s since they are not in control of the information that they are being filled with and expected to memorize.
I believe that throughout my academic career, I have experienced this model multiple times in which it had its positives and negatives. For me, one experience of the banking model that I encountered was when I first began to learn Spanish in middle school. In the beginning, for every class the teacher would give us new words to learn the meaning behind and then the different endings. For example, I would be taught that “descansar” meant to rest, and then be given a list of the different conjugations. During this time I was expected to have this information “deposited”, memorize it, and the recite it. I believe that for this kind of course, this model was an advantage because it is important to be able to memorize a word’s meaning as well as its conjugations, and repeat this information…just as one would with a word in English. Although, I think a negative of this learning was that I was never encouraged to memorize proper use or using it in a sentence. There was no critical thinking to the basics of this course, and therefore I personally had a difficult time learning the material. From this personal difficulty, my Mom would have to speak to me in Spanish and use the word in order for me to fully understand the word, and then I would have to create my own sentences; I was not always able to just memorize it and regurgitate it. 
Pedagogy and Power: What is the Banking Model to Friere? (And Me!)
In Paulo Friere’s novel Pedagogy and Power, he ridicules and dismisses the education system by creating a metaphor called the banking model of education. Friere constructs the banking model of education to appropriately describe the relationship between student and teacher as an oppressive one. Through Friere’s eyes, the teacher is seen as an all knowing being and the student an empty vessel. Their relationship consists of the teacher simply depositing all of their knowledge into the students like containers, establishing an inequality and reinforcing that there is only one right way to learn. It takes away any possibility that the teacher might not have all the right answers and takes away the possibility that the teacher could possibly benefit from a student’s knowledge (the student’s knowledge outside of the education system is ignored). Creativity is stripped away as well, when teaching methods remain rigid and authoritative. The students simply receive and memorize the knowledge bestowed upon them and spit it back out when taking standardized testing. This is not beneficial to either the donor or the recipient, however Friere is obviously assigning empowerment to the educator and disempowerment to
Before I went to college and read thought provoking and controversial pieces like Pedagogy and Power, I preached the banking model of education to anyone who would listen to me without even knowing they were Friere’s words. My entire 12 years of mandatory schooling within the education system is just flash images of me sitting in an uncomfortable desk listening to my teacher drone on and participating with answers and questions I knew they only wanted to hear. To question my teacher’s position as the proprietor was not only deemed as disrespectful but foolish as well. I don’t think I can narrow down my experience of the banking concept of education down to one moment in one class when I truly believe that my entire education from elementary school through to high school conformed to what Friere argued about. High School more so than perhaps middle school and elementary school, made me feel small and insignificant. The only class that made me feel as if what I had to say was important had to have been my English classes, but even then there was a right way to analyze a certain piece of literature that I might not have always got right. Having to deal with standardized testing (ELA’s, NY regents, etc) made me feel as though learning was a chore and pressured me into an anxiety ridden state of mind for not being able to digest and memorize all of the information thrown at me adequately. The only positives that I can think of concerning this way of learning as the student, is being open to the idea and prospect that we all still have plenty of learning to do and grow from.
Pedagogy and Power
The banking model to Friere is a concept of education. This concept of education defines students as empty vessels that are filled with information by their teachers. The ones who are empowered by this concept are the teachers and educators who deposit information into the empty vessels, the students. On the other hand, the ones that are disempowered by this concept are the students since they essentially know nothing because they are “empty”. The students are the ones who are at loss when it comes to this concept since the students don’t understand what they are taught, instead the take the information they are given, memorize it, and use it to get receive good grades on test but they never truly gain any knowledge.
An experience that I have had with this form of teaching occurred in my honors physics class during my junior year of high school. My teacher would always just have slides full of information and instead of explaining them he would just read what was on the board. However, when he did explain them the majority was still unable to understand the information that we were given. As a result the majority of the class had poor grades, reflecting their lack of knowledge in the subject. Although my experience with the banking model was mostly negative it was also positive in the sense that it taught me and my fellow classmates how to study on our own so that we we would able to understand the information we were given during class.
