Paulo Freire's "The Banking Concept of Education"

Essay by GatornickCollege, Undergraduate February 2009

download word file, 5 pages 3.0

Downloaded 36 times

In Paulo Freire's essay on "The Banking Concept of Education," he is a firm believer of advancement in today's teaching. He splits the means of education into two distinct societies, the revolutionary and the oppression. Freire criticizes the current values of education, and argues to support his own, radical ideas about how he believes education should work. He compares education to the banking system and by doing so he is establishing his own methods and systems on how to make the education system better in our world today. In his essay, Freire's arguments against the education system have been made quite clear by addressing actions that need to be made to better the future of our society.

At the beginning, he states how our current education system is very orderly and how the teachers are the "narrating" subjects and the students are "listing objects" not knowing how to think or act in the world today (Freire 318).

He believes, "education is suffering from narration sickness," and that, in our current system, words "become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity" to the students (318). He strongly tells the reader how education is transforming into a memorization game. He states how a student will record and repeat for the teacher, however, they will not gain the true knowledge that will help them later in life. He calls this process "the banking concept of education" (319).

Paulo Freire is saying that the teacher -student relationship is poor because of the fact that the teacher is just narrating about the subject of which the students are just listening and are not really involved. Freire states that as the teacher is narrating, the students have troubles understanding the narrations because of the words that the teacher speaks are somewhat foreign to them. Freire...