Kerwin José Ceballos Mier

Critical Pedagogy
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Raction paper #2
Chapter 2

In this chapter Freire explains what does banking education means, and he refers to it as the
education model where teachers teach to their students in a narrative form and the only
function of the students is to absorb or memorize that knowledge without being part of the
process. In other words, the teachers focus in precise information such as facts, dates, rules,
etc, and the students are limited to memorize all that knowledge, even if it is not related to
them.
Freire opposed this model because for him the proper way to acquire knowledge is by
questioning everything around you and linking everything with their own experiences,
while banking education does the opposite; it negates questioning and encourage restrictive
learning, killing student’s creativity in the process.
He also points out that banking education can be used as an oppression tool because it
stablish teachers as the owners of knowledge, giving them power over the students, the
oppressed ones, who doesn’t have that knowledge. At the same time, banking education
creates a breach between students and teachers, where students can’t contribute to the
learning process due to their role as passive members and the presumption of their
ignorance.
Another negative aspect of banking education is the easiness of molding the student´s
minds into a state where they accept the knowledge as presented and never try to question it
or to change it, and this state lets oppressors to maintain their power over the students,
deciding which knowledge is permitted and which is denied. Simultaneously, it difficult
students to realize the oppression they are suffering, because as they do not have another
reference different from banking education, they won’t be able to understand the true nature
of the oppression to which they are being subjected.
That’s why with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed he presents a way to change this type of
relation between teachers and students by reforming both parts. It begins with making
students aware of more free learning methods, and also making teachers to be more open in
teaching. Also, both teachers and students need to develop a more equitable relationship
where teachers are not rulers and students can adapt the knowledge in the most appropriate
way for them.
By this practice the learning process will be more effective because it allows not only a
more open, diverse and free education, but it also lets students to teach teachers
respectively, because students would be at the same level than teachers and they could be
an active part of the learning process, where students can propose new knowledge obtained
through their own experiences and the teachers can learn this new knowledge, turning a
one-way learning process into a cooperative process where both students and teachers can
learn from each other.
As a conclusion, I support the idea of reforming our actual education model because it is
based mostly on the banking education, and as Freire has exposed, this model is not the
proper one to have a complete and successful learning process. Therefore, as a future
teacher I would take into account this theory in the development of an integral teaching
model where the interaction between students and me (as a teacher) will be beneficial to all
of us.