Understanding Freire's 'Banking' Concept of Education

1361 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Personal experience with banking concept of education

Experiencing the “Banking” Process of Education In the essay “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, Paulo Freire examines the way some students are treated as a container where taught information is stored rather than partners in education. This method of teaching is explained as an “act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (Freire 1). By using this analogy, Freire is claiming that a teacher is reciting information quickly and the student is acting as a container for the teacher’s information, but is very rarely applying it. Freire labels this as the “banking concept of education”. Freire continues by stating, “Knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable …show more content…

Basically, Freire is saying that the banking concept dulls the student’s ability to be actively involved in their own education and are simply there to collect the knowledge that the teacher thinks is worthwhile. The students accept that they must be taught regardless which, they think, gives the teacher a reason to be there.
The banking concept of information is a damaging way to teach students and by using this method, the education system is quickly deteriorating. While the instructors are justifying their own need to be there, little attention is paid to the students. The pupils sit idly by and collect the information which is temporarily stored until they need it. After the students make use of the information, it is replaced but never kept for long.
Countless times I have run across this form of education. However, I don’t recall ever retaining much information or knowledge when it has been used in a classroom setting. Most times when I have experienced this hindering concept, I have been in a math class. Throughout high school, teachers would relay information, claiming that we would need to memorize an exact formula or equation because we would need to use it in our everyday lives. We, as eager students, would try and memorize these long formulas to the best of our abilities, but we were never given a situation in our everyday life in which we would be needing to use this information. Not once were we taught how to apply this to situations in our outside lives, just that we needed to know it for those

Show More
Related

  • Humanism Of Banking

    699 Words  | 2 Pages

    It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The "humanism" of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons -- the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human. – Paulo Freire” This is just as if students were being taught 2+2=4 in class but when it came to the pop quiz or the test the questions would say something like “If john had 2 cars and bought 7 goats how many bananas does he have?” and then everyone in the class is looking at the paper very confused because this is not what was taught in class. The teacher is sticking to a script strictly out of the book that they were given. So when 90% of the class fails and the teacher is very upset because they got in trouble because their fail numbers are so high they take it out on the students. But the teacher is only going out of the book and the students are only receiving what is being taught to

    Read More

  • The Banking Concept of Education and The Achievement of Desire

    1470 Words  | 3 Pages

    ... that a “banking” education is not the better choice for obtaining an education. He does not present both options and allow or encourage the reader to form their own opinions. The style of his writing is direct and straightforward as opposed to analytical. By analyzing Freire’s essay, one can assume that Freire received a “banking” education based on the way he has written his essay. This is another example of how the style of education you receive affects your life and relationships.

    Read More

  • Paulo Freire's The Banking Concept Of Education

    1357 Words  | 3 Pages

    How do teachers attempt to control the way you understand the world? Paulo Freire, author of “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, declares that “Narration (with the teacher as the narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (216). Freire’s statement implies that teaching utilizing the banking concept shifts the role of students as learners to robots that receive data and execute orders given by their programmers (teachers) but do not actually recognize the significance of the information. I agree with Freire 's interpretations because even though my role in high school was a student, my continuous encounters with banking

    Read More

  • Freire's The Banking Concept of Education

    460 Words  | 1 Pages

    The banking concept is “ a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those who they consider to know nothing'; (Freire 213). The goal of the ‘banking’ concept is to deposit as much information into the students as possible. This results in disconnected memorization without the real understanding and discouragement of creative thought.They cannot think for themselves. As Marx writes, just as there are two types of learning, ‘banking’ and problem-posing, he explains that society is this way also. There is the upper class and subordinate classes. They both struggle for economic and political power and the primary way the upper class keeps its power is through their beliefs and values. They are allowed to think. The subordinate classes believe they are subordinate due to the upper classes prestige and way of thinking. Like Freire’s ‘banking’ concept, education is the way to keep students down and this works because the students accept all knowledge from the teacher, just like the dominant class in Marx’s ideology, keeps the subordinate classes submissive.

    Read More

  • The Struggle With Education In Walker Percy's The Banking Concept Of Education

    1093 Words  | 3 Pages

    Freire believes that the “more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented reality deposited in them” (73). Percy claims that this dependency stems from the belief that “sovereignty [must be] surrendered to a class of privileged knowers” (54). Freire believes that due to this loss of sovereignty, the ones with authority attempt to “indoctrinate[e] them to adapt to the world of oppression” (78). Consequences begin to mount as students begin to mold into the world of oppression. Freire’s strongest belief is that, due to the banking system, a student simply becomes “the possessor of a consciousness: an empty ‘mind’ passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside” (75). This mentality causes students to become constricted thinkers, or mindless robots, only letting the engineer program predetermined ideas that the engineer deems them fit enough to know. “What has taken place,” claims Percy, “is a radical loss of sovereignty” among the students because in the way education is currently being utilized, educators perceive that knowledge can simply be placed into students, however, this method is sorely inhumane

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Malcolm X's Freedom Through Learning To Read

    879 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Banking Concept of Education, revolves around the concept that education and the teacher, student dynamic is supposed to indoctrinate the teacher into believe they are only meant to teach, and that the student is only meant to learn. Friere describes the teacher as a depositor of knowledge into a receptacle, the student without really going into complex details in a way that’s detached from

    Read More

  • The Banking Concept Of Education In Paulo Friere's Dead Poet Society

    1390 Words  | 3 Pages

    Paulo Friere’s essay “The ‘Banking’ concept of education” is a short passage from his book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" that explains the two primary types of education that exist according to Friere. Friere describes the two types of educating as the banking concept, which is briefly described as the transfer of the knowledgeable teacher, to the ignorant student "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." (Friere 1), and the problem-poser, which he describes as two way communication in which the students and teacher both teach and learn from one another "Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Banking Concept Of Education

    1155 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” he talks about how in education there is no conversation between the teachers/professors and their students. In this essay there are a few points I do disagree with, such as that there are some class in which there cannot really be any conversation or discussion, for example mathematics cannot be disproven because there are theorems and concrete facts, so teachers and professors have to teach for memorization. Another reason I disagree with Freire’s way teaching is because in the banking concept Freire is against when teachers are just telling students things and they are regurgitating them, but some students learn better using memorization for learning in the class room and also when studying. The next point I disagree with in Freire’s essay is he doesn’t really look at it from the teachers stand point, because in the United States at least the teachers are now forced to only teach certain points in their subject because of all the standardize testing that they now have in place, specifically grade school. The last thing in Freire’s essay that I disagree with is how he seems to kind of put down teachers.

    Read More

  • Subtle Acts of Rebellion

    873 Words  | 2 Pages

    In today's times, apart from having information flying at us from almost everywhere we turn, we also get to sit in a chair for nearly seven hours while someone tries to feed us even more information. Although it is true that our society needs some type of educational system, there is a real problem with the fact that although we are constantly changing and evolving into a brand new world, education has stayed still. In a way, we attempt to teach our children by putting them ...

    Read More

  • Should We Stop Making Kids Memorize Times Tables

    526 Words  | 2 Pages

    Memorizing facts gets boring, and students won’t learn and understand. It is proven that students that have deeper learning generally have more success in school ("Deeper Learning: Moving Students Beyond Memorization"). Studies are showing that the lowest performing students across the world are the ones who think math is about memorizing information ("Should We Stop Making Kids Memorize times Tables?"). Memorizing can help you at times, but it benefits you the most if you understand. It helps to understand and not memorize important

    Read More

  • Pablo Freire's Philosophy on Education and Banking

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    This is what Freire refers to as his concept of “banking education”. He also introduces numerous examples and other diverse concepts in his philosophy; for example, his proposition to confront the “banking” concept, the problem-posing education. Therefore, there is no need to search any further for what Paulo Freire illustrates as evident. Education is in crisis and it is up to the people in society to decide if they want to change it or not. Dropouts, illiteracy, violence and drug abuse in schools are some of the real reasons that prove the poverty of educational systems.

    Read More

  • Positive Transfer

    821 Words  | 2 Pages

    (2016) says, “positive transfer to real-world contexts should be a major objective in classrooms at all grade levels” (p. 207). If a student cannot put basic A,B,C’s and 1,2,3’s together they will never advance in grades or be able write their name or say how old they are. This goes for all grade levels. If the students cannot retrieve what they just learned and apply it to real life it will be forgotten. It is easier to apply something the student has learned to something in the outside world to associate it to memory.

    Read More

  • Knowledge And Education And Cathy Davidson's Project Classroom Makeover By Cathy Davidson

    1553 Words  | 4 Pages

    Inclusively, the relationship between knowledge and education is dependent on the way of the process as a whole. If education is implemented as dull and uninteresting, true learning is not happening. This passage by Davidson introduces the problems the education system faces with their methods of teaching, provides an explanation on how it came to be that way, and offers a solution to improve the system by conducting an experiment. Throughout this analysis, it is clear that knowledge and education are not the same but can depend on each other if processed

    Read More

  • Essay On Rote Learning

    1615 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...ts with loads of information and facts is not an intelligent way to educate them. On the other hand, learning without any memorization is ineffective too. We couldn't write great essay if we have difficulty in spelling words correctly. Rote learning may not be the perfect way to educate our children, but same goes to meaningful learning. There is no perfection in this world. Everything has it’s own flaws. ‘I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business.’ quote by Michael J. Fox. Owen Feltham also mentioned that perfection is immutable, but for things that are imperfect, change is the way to perfect them. So, rote memorizing should never be substituted. It should be used alongside understanding learning, which both balance up and compliment each other to create a better and effective learning style.

    Read More

  • Reflection Paper On STEM Education

    1234 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of my favorite quotes from Stacey Green states, that if we don’t make learning relevant to our students, then they just learn the answer from the test and forget when it is done. (Vaques, Sneider and Comer page 2) When students learn because of memorization and are not engaged and interested in what is taught, the information becomes a victim of your short term memory, where as when it is

    Read More

More about Understanding Freire's 'Banking' Concept of Education

Open Document