The "Banking" Concept of Education by Freire

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The “Banking” Concept of Education by Freire

Today, the systems of education are going about teaching in a very wrong way. Freire suggests that the teacher-student relationship that is seen today, at any level of education, is more of a narrative form of education. The teacher is usually the narrator and the children are the listeners. The methods are so mechanical that the information that is passed along becomes petrified and quite boring. The students become cramming machines and the teachers become speakers who just lay out rubrics that the students need to follow for them to be considered good students. The education system has instilled a wrong mentality among the students and their teachers alike that the more the students memorize, the better the students they become and the more the teachers follow their laid out curriculums, the better teachers they become. The education system ends up getting a disease called narration.

Indeed Freire was right in stating that in following the teaching manuals and rubrics that teachers do; they make their words lose their meaning and concreteness making them hollow. The task of the teacher is seen as that of filling the brains of their students with the contents of their narratives. The contents have a disjoint from reality and are deprived of their significance due to the method used to relay them to the recipients. Most of the times, topics about reality are discussed as if they were static, predictable and motionless. Topics discussed in class are not verified of their relevance to the students or how well they would grasp them and most of them appear to be foreign to the students’ existential understanding (Bartholomae and Anthony, 1999).

Narrative education has a major outstanding characteristic where it creates sonority in the words. This means that the words that come out of a teacher’s mouth are taken into the students’ brains as just words that shall remain resounding in their brains. This makes the words lack meaning and remain as statements that the teacher said. For instance, when the teacher says that six times four is twenty four and that the capital of the United States of America is Washington D.C., the student memorizes and records the phrases and repeats them without caring or understanding what six times four really means or what Washington D.C. really means to the U.S.. Narration therefore turns the students into containers that are opened up during their lesson times to be filled up by the teacher.

The mentality that follows then is that the more the teacher fills up their students the better a teacher they become. The students on the other hand perceive that the better containers they make themselves, the better students they become. This practice therefore makes education a depositing act where the teachers are the depositors and the students the depositories. The essence of communication in education becomes nullified and education becomes narrowed down to an act of the teacher making deposits that the students receive quite so patiently, memorize and then repeat over and over. This creates the banking concept experienced in today’s education (Bartholomae and Anthony, 1999).

The scope of the student’s participation in the education systems today extends as far as the storage, filing, and receiving of the deposits from the teacher just like it happens in a bank. This creates a huge lack of creativity, knowledge, innovation and transformation since the students sit back and relax and wait for the deposits that fill up their stores. Since knowledge can only be acquired by the restless efforts put in the creation and re-creation of ideas and the relentless pursuit of education, the students of today are highly disadvantaged when it comes to the amassing of knowledge. Narration becomes the most pressing and most serious problem in the education systems that are used in the schools today. The banking concept makes the students lazy and hurts their brains making them lack innovation and self thought. This in turn hurts society since it is these students that are trained to become the professionals and if they are incompetent then they pose a great risk in the building of the society.

Works Cited:

Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky, EDS. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Boston, MA: BEDFORD/ST. MARTINS, 1999; 348-359. Print.