“Banking Education”

Although I attended a private Christian high school, I occasionally encountered an approach to education that was very similar to the “banking” method that was described by Paulo Freire in chapter two of his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The students were sometimes, perhaps unconsciously, viewed as “banks” in which knowledge was deposited. However, unlike Freire’s ideas, I don’t believe that any of my teachers consciously held any of the sinister intentions which Freire so soundly opposes. Nevertheless, in some classes, “Education [became] an act of depositing,” as Freire states (p. 72). Rather than “controllers” subjecting the “oppressed”, I think my teachers focused on the input of information so that we would have information with which to reason for ourselves. That was the heart behind their actions anyways.

 Sadly, in the process of presenting that information, some classes became one-way narrative where the teacher was the only one with valid information to give. Any questions asked, the students were expected to answer but strictly with textbook answers. Now, not all of my classes were like this, indeed some were just as challenging as my college courses now because they made me think, but as a whole, this is the type of education I experienced.

Please don’t get me wrong, I loved my high school years. I still do.  But, looking back on several classes I took, including Bible classes, I’ve come to realize that many times, I wasn’t expected to really engage the material and wrestle with the ideas presented, so much as I was required to absorb and then reiterate as much of the course material as possible without ever questioning why a certain fact was important or what the long-term implications of such-and-such a belief are. This realization simultaneously saddens my heart and makes me determined that as a future teacher, I will do everything in my power to help my students engage with and reason through class material.

Questions:

1) What makes education at JBU different than the “banking” system, if anything at all?

2)What are some practical ways that we (as education majors and future teachers) can help students reason for themselves in our classes?