After making the transition from my high school education to my new college education, I find it easy to see stark differences between the two. Paulo Freire’s work entitled, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” is an excellent demonstrator of the various types of education offered in the United States today. He remarks about this “banking” concept where the student is merely a piggy bank of sorts into which the teacher makes deposits of information. “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (Freire 260). Throughout my career as a student, I encountered numerous situations of this kind with different teachers and subjects, and reading Freire’s views on the “banking” concept has led me to notice how much a teaching style affects the students being taught. In elementary school, the “banking” concept is a commonly used means of teaching students the basics, such as the alphabet, numbers, colors, and ways of completing simple mathematics. These bits of information are important; however, they are constantly used throughout our lives in hundreds of aspects, and we are able to truly learn them from that repetition. Yet, as I grew up, I saw many other instances of the “banking” concept where teachers were simply giving me facts or formulas or various other types of information that they expected me to memorize. A lot of it was useless, and I admit that I only learned a lot of things just for the exams, and then forgot about them afterwards. However, there are many pieces of information, including different techniques and interesting facts, that I “learned” in these classes and wish I could still remember. Why is this? The most logical explanation I can think of is that the teachers I was “learning” from were making use of the “banking” concept and its habit of putting forth the information, but never actually building upon it and actively teaching it. I, as their student, simply took what they gave me, believing that it was the teacher’s job to provide me with the appropriate amount of information on the topic being studied and unfortunately, I never built upon that information by myself. Although I can provide several examples of the use of the “banking” concept of education in my life, I am going to focus specifically on the learning process that I faced in my Chemistry class, as a junior in high school. To begin, I had an interest in science for several years and even considered going into pharmacy, so I expected that I would learn a lot of useful information in my first Chemistry class. The teacher had other plans though, and he implemented the “banking” concept every time something new needed to be learned. In class, he read us lists of elements or common compounds and their formulas, and we copied everything down as he said it. He gave us notes sometimes and told us exactly what we needed to memorize and “know” for the exams. When it came time to take those exams, they were straightforward and in agreement with what he told us we needed to know. It became a bad habit over the course of the class to ignore any subject or lesson on which we would not be tested. There were never any in-depth discussions about the subject matter. We never learned what exactly makes the two molecules of hydrogen bond with the one molecule of oxygen to create H2O, or water. It was just given that they would bond when put together; the teacher never explained it any more, and we never asked why. I guess we, the students, were partially responsible for not showing interest and asking questions about the information being handed to us. We never asked why things happen or what would happen if we changed a factor in an experiment. Our teacher was a very intelligent man when it came to the subject that he was teaching, but it seemed that he was not very passionate about his profession or else he would have initiated more discussions about different topics. It is incredibly difficult to understand and relate to the material in a Chemistry class when you are not told how different processes really work. When the class was over, I came to the conclusion that Chemistry was incredibly boring, tedious, and repetitive, and abandoned the thought of going into pharmacy. Looking back, I wonder if I had been taught according to Paulo Freire’s “problem-posing” education, would I be studying pharmacy instead of business here at Pitt? Unfortunately, the type of conscious stimulation necessary to follow the “problem-posing” method is not always possible because certain teachers simply avoid it and take the “easy way out” when teaching; that is when the students should feel obliged to introduce it into their class. In addition to the students’ responsibility of making their learning process an active one, the teacher needs to see that he or she is not being as effective as they could be. The stereotypical “good” teacher does not necessarily have to have hands-on experiments or diagrams or guest speakers or other teaching aides to be effective; he simply must fulfill his obligation to see that the students are actually learning the material, learning it correctly, and gaining something from it. Teachers need to worry about the young minds they are influencing and not the power that they have over them. Often, as Freire puts it, “the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students” (261). The “banking” concept of education plays on the idea of the “bad”, or authoritative teacher, and the submissive, obedient student. One result of this type of educational “governing” is that the students begin to lose their sense of reality, and their ability to think for themselves diminishes extensively. With what they think is sufficient information being handed to them to memorize, the students learn to be compliant to the world around them, and they do not take the initiative to develop their minds any more. With teaching, as with any other profession or activity, there are right and wrong ways of completing the job at hand. It seems that, beyond the basics learned in kindergarten or first grade, the “banking” concept of education is the wrong way of teaching. Still, teachers all over continue to utilize this method, and I have experienced it myself on numerous occasions, including in my high school Chemistry class. Reflecting on my own experiences, I see how much time was wasted and how much intellectual potential went unused by not being an active student who worked with Freire’s “problem-posing” techniques. Finally, Freire says that, “only through communication can human life hold meaning” (263), and the communication between a teacher and his student is crucial to the effectiveness of the education at hand.
Source: Internet
Source: Internet
