Understanding Freire's 'Banking' Concept of Education

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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

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