I am a frustrated and dissatisfied product of the banking system of education. As I fought diligently to learn Spanish in my junior Spanish class, I learned the devastatingly oppressive result of being taught through the “banking system” of education. After drudging through two years in the program, I left this Spanish class frustrated, discouraged and speaking very little of the still “foreign” language. But not until now did I realize my hard work may not have been purely ineffective, and instead, I may be a victim of educational oppression.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire accounts of the devastating nature of the banking system of education. The students are merely receptacles for facts while the teacher is the authoritarian fact giver. The students know nothing while the teacher knows everything. “Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher, The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are” (58). Without discussing with the students, dialoguing about the information and by merely spitting out facts, the teacher oppresses the students leaving them doomed to failure. In memorizing facts and data, but only long enough to regurgitate it out for test, it is not truly learned or understood. How do you say, “I feel repressed” in Spanish again?
The banking system of education, in its very nature, breeds suffering and artificial education. Only conversation, which necessitates interpretive reasoning, can effectively produce interpretive reasoning. Without communication there is no interpretive reasoning, and without interpretive reasoning there is no real edification. To further understand true dialogue, communication and its importance in education we must look again to Pedagogy of the...