10/11/17 - Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Banking, and Adaption vs. Change

Within Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes two very specific points that I wish to refute and/or confront. The first is that education should serve to make its student people who change the world instead of learning how to fit into the world. The second is that banking cannot exist in a truly beneficial education setting.

The idea that education should shape its student to change the world is one that I fully support, yet the way Freire describes what comes afterward is what troubles me. He writes that students should not learn how to fit into the world. That right there is an absolute lie. There is no way any given student or even group of students will change the entire world. They may change part of the world, but human nature is immutable; the world will always try to revert to the simpler system, to make people fit into its own framework. Furthermore, students learning how to fit into the world is not inherent negative. As educators, we may want to change the world, but we have to do it in an acceptable and legal framework. As educators, we ourselves adapt to how the education system works and attempt to make do with what we have. In short, it is impossible to avoid being changed by the world while we and our students are changing the world.

Banking alone cannot work in an educational setting. You need input from students to ensure they are learning and to spur on their growth. However, if, like Freire write, we were to take out all banking-style teaching in schools, then education will inevitably suffer greatly. Why? Because certain subjects need banking – certain subject have immutable facts that need to be passed on: math, science, history. Regardless of student input or student opinion, two plus two will always equal four. Despite what Little Susie might say, certain compounds will always have the same exact reaction when they come into contact with other certain compounds. And in history, events will always be the same as they have always been: the Roman Empire collapsed, the United States had a revolution to break free of Britain, and China went communist in the 1930s/40s.

This is not to say that these subjects are exclusively banking-style, only that they and many other subjects need an initial basis of knowledge which may require banking from the teacher.  Once student have this basis of knowledge, then they may move on to problem-posing, to applications of these subjects: how would we use advanced mathematics in our everyday lives, does evolution really work the way we think it does, how did the fall of the Western Roman Empire change the course of European history, etc. We definitely need problem-posing in schools, but to pretend that banking has zero place in the education system is bunk. Nor, as Freire writes, can education depend purely on banking when students need to develop critical thinking skills. Instead there needs to be a health balance of banking-style to problem-posing (probably at a 25-75 ratio or something like that). Education needs these two styles two work in conjunction with each other instead of in opposition.