PADEGAGY OF THE OPRESSED

Pedagogy of the Oppressed



Chapter 2

THE BANKING CONCEPT OF EDUCATION AS A MEAN OF OPRESSION. ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS, ITS CRITICISM

Through the analysis of the student -teacher relationship at different stages at school, one can assume that it is a convincing fact that this relationship presents a special and an outstanding character- the fact that it is fundamentally a relationship of narration. The is due to the reason that this relationship resembles a narration of contents, and tends to become petrified or dead, considering concrete values or dimensions of reality. This narration implies in a Subject and object, which pertain to the narrating teacher and students respectively. There is almost an illness in the narration.

The teacher mentions the reality as something still, static, compartmented and well behaved. Otherwise, he gives the students argument about something completely irrelevant to the existential experience of the students. According to him, the supreme concern of this education is to fill the students' heads with 'narration'. In its no restrainable anxiety, the teacher comes up as its unquestionable agent, as its real subject, whose indeclinable idea is to “fill” all the learners with the material from his narration. These learning are scraps of real life, which are not connected from the entirety where they engender themselves in the view with which they would acquire signification. The word, in these narrations become empty from the concrete dimension that it must have or it is transformed in a hollow, alienated and alienating verbosity. Thus, if it were more of a sound than a signification, then, it would be better not to mention.

The remarkable characteristics of this theoretical learning is the “sonority” of the word but not the strength of conversion. Four multiplied by four is sixteen; the capital of ParáisBelém; whatever the teacher fixes, the students memorize, and repeat, without realizing what four multiplied by four means indeed. In addition, what capital actually refers to, in the assertion, “the capital of Pará isBelém”, and what Belém means for Pará and what Pará means for Brazil is all that a student doesn't understand while following the narration process.38 It can be said that cases like these do not happen anymore in Brazilian schools. If these cases do not happen anymore, then the characteristic of narrating that we have been criticizing, continue to go on, nevertheless, in a preponderant way.

The teacher “makes notices” or mere incidences, instead of interacting, which the students, learn patiently, capture in minds and go through again. This is the “banking” conception of education, in which the only scope of action, which is offered to students, is the receiving of deposits, keeping and archiving them. As far as the scope of education is concerned, the students are only allowed to be the collectors of the things they archive. Although, in truth, it is the great ones who are archived in this misguided “banking” conception of education and lack creativity and transformation skills. They are archived in it because apart from the search for ...