Paulo freire banking concept of education

WAYS OF

READING

An Anthology for Writers Seventh Edition

David Bartholomae UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Anthony Petrosky UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

BEDFORD /ST. MARTIN'S

Boston • New York

For Bedford/St. Martin's Developmental Editor: John E. Sullivan III Production Editor: Kendra LeFleur Production Supervisor: Yexenia Markland Senior Marketing Manager: Rachel Falk Editorial Assistant: Christina Gerogiannis Production Assistants: Kristen Merrill, Katherine Bouwkamp Copyeditor: Lisa Peachey Flanagan Text Design: Anna Palchik Cover Design: Kim Cevoli Cover Art: Bookworm's Harvest [Anagram (A Pun)], 1998. Cover art© Robert

Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Composition: Macmillan India Printing and Binding: Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., an R.R. Donnelley & Sons

Company

President: Joan E. Feinberg Editorial Director: Denise B. Wydra Editor in Chief Karen S. Henry Director of Marketing: Karen Melton Soeltz Director of Editing, Design, and Production: Marcia Cohen Managing Editor: Elizabeth M. Schaaf

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004112285

Copyright© 2005 by Bedford/St. Martin's

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

9 8 7 6 5 4

f e d c b a

For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin's, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000)

ISBN:0-312-40995-8 EAN:978-0-312-40995-1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Henry Adams photograph by unidentified photographer. Circa 1875. MHS image num­ ber 1133. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Acknowledgments and copyrights are continued at the back of the book on pages 868-70, which constitute an extension afth� copyright page. It is a violation of the law to reproduce these selec­ tions by any means whatsoeoer without the written permission of the copyright holder.

PAULO

FREIRE

PAULO FREIRE (pronounce it "Fr-air-ah" unless you can make a Portuguese "r") was one of the most influen­ tial radical educators of our world. A native of Recife, Brazil, he spent most of his early career working in poverty-stricken areas of his homeland, developing meth­ ods for teaching illiterate adults to read and write and (as he would say) to think critically and, thereby, to take power over their own lives. Because he has created a class­ room where teachers and students have equal power and equal dignity, his work has stood as a model for educators

around the world. It led also to sixteen years of exile after the military coup in Brazil in 1964. During that time he taught in Europe and in the United States and worked for the Allende government in Chile, training the teachers whose job it would be to bring modern agricultural methods to the peasants.

Freire (1921-1997) worked with the adult education programs of UNESCO, the Chilean Institute of Agrarian Reform, and the World Council of Churches. He was professor of educational philosophy at the Catholic University of Siio Paulo. He is the author of Education for Critical Consciousness, The Politics of Educa­ tion, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Revised Edition (from which the follow­ ing essay is drawn), and Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (with

255

256 pAULO FREIRE

Antonio Faundez). Pedagogy of Indignation, the first English translations of Freire's late-life reflections on personal development, is forthcoming.

For Freire, education is not an objective process, if by objective we mean "neu­ tral" or "without bias or prejudice." Because teachers could be said to have some­ thing that their students lack, it is impossible to have a "neutral" classroom; and when teachers present a subject to their students they also present a point of view on that subject. The choice, according to Freire, is fairly simple: teachers either work 'jar the liberation of the people-their humanization-or for their domestica­ tion, their domination." The practice of teaching, however, is anything but simple. According to Freire, a teacher's most crucial skill is his or her ability to assist stu­ dents' struggle to gain control over the conditions of their lives, and this means helping them not only to know but "to know that they know."

Freire edited, along with Henry A. Giroux of Miami University in Ohio, a se­ ries of books on education and teaching. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, a book for the series, Freire describes the interrelationship between reading the written word and understanding the world that surrounds us.

My parents introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world. Deci­ phering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world; it was not something superimposed on it. I learned to read and write on the grounds of the backyard of my house, in the shade of the mango trees, with words from my world rather than from the wider world of my parents. The earth was my blackboard, the sticks my chalk.

For Freire, reading the written word involves understanding a text in its very particular social and historical context. Thus reading always involves "critical perception, interpretation, and rewriting of what is read."

The "Banking" Concept of Education

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level, inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The "Banking" Concept of Education 257

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compart­ mentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the stu­ dents with the contents of his narration-contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is six­ teen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and re­ peats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "contain­ ers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the re­ ceptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, indi­ viduals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through inven­ tion and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they con­ sider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a char­ acteristic 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 dialec­ tic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher's existence-but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.

The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

258 pAULO FREIRE

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contra­ diction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror op­ pressive society as a whole:

a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught; b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; d. the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly; e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the

action of the teacher; h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were

not consulted) adapt to it; i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own

professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the free­ dom of the students;

j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it trans­ formed. The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a prof­ itable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the conscious­ ness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them"} for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the bank­ ing concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients." They are treated as individual cases, as marginal per­ sons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized, and just" society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need

The "Banking" Concept of Education 259

to be "integrated," "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken."

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside"-inside the structure which made them "beings for others." The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves." Such transfor­ mation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of stu­ dent conscientiza�iio. o

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never pro­ pose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The "humanism" of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons-the very nega­ tion of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate real­ ity. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is re­ ally a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation.

But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibil­ ity to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual human­ ization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.

The banking concept does not admit to such partnership-and necessar­ ily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of liberation.

conscientizac;iio According to Freire's translator, "The term conscientizafiiO refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality."

260 pAULO FREIRE

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy be­ tween human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example, my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me-as bits of the world which surrounds me-would be "inside" me, exactly as I am in­ side my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction, however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they are not inside me.

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world "enters into" the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs sponta­ neously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge.2 And since people "receive" the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better "fit" for the world. Translated into prac­ tice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have cre­ ated, and how little they question it.

The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to pre­ scribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,3 the methods for eval­ uating "knowledge," the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking.

The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one's students. Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.

Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students' thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about real­ ity, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls "biophily," but instead produces its opposite: "necrophily."

The "Banking" Concept of Education

While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the de­ sire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things . . . . Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts. The necrophilous person can relate to an object-a flower or a person-only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world . . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. 4

261

Oppression-overwhelming control-is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. "This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed."5 But the inability to act which causes people's anguish also causes them to reject their impotence, by attempting

. . . to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how? One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group having power. By this symbolic participation in another per­ son's life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become part of those who act. 6

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domina­ tion and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn-logically, from their point of view-"the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike."7

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of stu­ dents, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the nai:ve hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pur­ suit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either

262 PAULO FREIRE

misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the specter of reaction.

Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries" those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by allen'!!ing them. Authentic liberation-the process of humanization-is not anothef'aeposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and re­ flection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of bank­ ing methods of domination (propaganda, slogans--deposits) in the name of liberation.

Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking con­ cept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their rela­ tions with the world. "Problem-posing" education, responding to the essence of consciousness-intentionality-rejects communiques and em­ bodies communications. It epitomizes the special characteristic of con­ sciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned in upon itself in a Jasperian "split"-consciousness as consciousness of consciousness.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of in­ formation. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors­ teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations-indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object­ are otherwise impossible.

Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical pat­ terns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the prac­ tice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him­ self taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each

The "Banking" Concept of Education 263

other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are "owned" by the teacher.

The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything) distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflec­ tion of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the "preservation of culture and knowledge" we have a system which achieves neither true knowledge nor true culture.

The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the teacher-student: she is not "cognitive" at one point and "narrative" at an­ other. She is always "cognitive," whether preparing a project or engaging in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the stu­ dents. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students-no longer docile listeners-are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the lat­ ter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to them­ selves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.

Education as the practice of freedom-as opposed to education as the practice of domination-denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

264 pAULO FREIRE

La conscience et le monde sont donnes d'un meme coup: ex­ terieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence relatif a elle.8

In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a codification) the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant said: "Now I see that without man there is no world." When the educator responded: "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars . . . wouldn't all this be a world?" "Oh no," the peasant replied emphatically. "There would be no one to say: 'This is a world.' "

The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of con­ sciousness. I cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the not-I depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness. Hence, the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: "La conscience et le monde sont donnes d'un meme coup."

As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena:

In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to the paper, for in­ stance. I apprehend it as being this here and now. The appre­ hension is a singling out, every object having a background in experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils, inkwell, and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also "per­ ceived," perceptually there, in the "field of intuition"; but whilst I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their di­ rection, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary sense. They appeared and yet were not singled out, were not posited on their own account. Every perception of a thing has such a zone of background intuitions or background awareness, if "intuiting" already includes the state of being turned towards, and this also is a "conscious experience," or more briefly a "con­ sciousness of" all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co­ perceived objective background.9

That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to "stand out," as­ suming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men and women begin to single out elements from their "background aware­ nesses" and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.

In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a ·static reality, but as a reality

The "Banking" Concept of Education 265

in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are per­ ceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.

Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis come into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing ed­ ucation regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality; thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowl­ edge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point.