Critical Analysis Of Freire's The Banking Concept Of Education

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In Freire’s essay The “Banking” Concept of Education, Freire highlights two differing forms of education: banking and problem posing. The banking concept is one in which the students are only being “filled” by the teachers’ transferal of information. This type of education resists dialogue and suggests that the students are only objects in a passive setting. Often this causes certain facts to be concealed and a lack of true critical thinking, especially about reality. On the opposite side of the spectrum, problem posing encourages communication. In the style of education, there is an evident student teacher relationship in which, in a sense, both are being taught. Students are being challenged by the teachers, but at the same time, there is …show more content…

I felt as though I was only “filled” by my professor’s information and in a position where I must stick to the status quo that he implemented in the classroom. There was a certain lack of abstract theory and growth as students in this class, consequently causing me to learn almost nothing over the course of the semester. I had to drag myself to this 10:00am class and often came close to falling asleep as the education I was getting did nothing for me. Freire puts it perfectly as, “education is suffering from narration sickness” (216). I was certainly suffering from narration sickness in this class. PowerPoints were posted online in which each slide was jam-packed with information and in class all my professor did was read off the slides. Each session could not be more predictable and is essentially insignificant to most of us. As students, we were only there to “receive, file, and store deposits” made my teachers (Freire …show more content…

My professor wants to hear and build off of our thoughts and majority of the time, no answer is wrong. The format of the class is one in which our professor teaches us a way of looking at right versus wrong, giving us a structure to use, and then asking us to come up with examples that we together work through. He strongly encourages dialogue and people to possibly challenge the ideas he is relaying to us. In a sense, he allows our thinking to authenticate his thinking, as Freire looks at the problem-posing theory (Freire 220). In this class, there is open communication in which we are all benefiting from what our fellow classmates have to say and even our professor is learning from our thoughts. It gives a sense of true reality in which we look at various perspectives and can have whatever opinions we would like about these topics. I genuinely enjoy this class and it consistently provokes thought and critical thinking. In this environment, everyone can grow and be free to be their own person and it is truly

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