Day 8: Academic Writing - The Banking Concept of Education (Freire)

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About the Author

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, capital ofthe state of Pernambuco in Brazil. By 1941, the twenty-year-old Freire was a secondary schoolteacher of Portuguese and a university student at a law school. While teaching literacy among peasants in poverty-stricken northeast Brazil in the late 1950s, Freire sparked the first ideas for what later would become the crux of his best-selling Pedagogy of the Oppresse (1970),  from which the following essay is drawn. He aimed his work at diminishing so­cial injustice and oppression by recognizing that the classroom should be a place where teachers and students have equal power and equal dignity. This ideal has become a model for educators around the world, but the military coup in Brazil in 1964 led to sixteen years of exile for Freire, and his educational theories were banned there for decades. During his exile, he taught in Europe and the United States and worked for the Allende government in Chile. Freire later worked with UNESCO, the Chilean In­stitute of Agrarian Reform, and the World Council of Churches. Until his death in 1997, he was also professor of educational philosophy at the Catholic University ofSao Paulo. Freire wrote two dozen books, including Education for Critical Conscious­ness (1974), The Politics of Education (1985), and Learning to Question: A Ped­agogy of Liberation (1987). 

"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider theInselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence-but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher" (Freire). 

Reading: The Banking Concept of Education (PDF)

Discussion Question: How does the use of parallelism and the variety of sentence structure in narrative writing create interest for the reader? 

PARALLELISM:

1. The state or condition of being parallel; agreement in direction, tendency, or character.
2. The state of being in agreement or similarity; resemblance, correspondence, analogy.  [quotations ▼]
3. A parallel position; the relation of parallels.