Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- Blog 6

The banking concept of teaching equates education to a gift that bestowed by the teacher, knower of everything, onto the students, knowers of nothing. Students then become a thing to which knowledge is thrust upon, which is almost true albeit in a twisted sort of way. The banking approach to teaching serves to dehumanize students, to treat them more as a commodity than as actual people. Students learn and teachers teach, nothing more. But when phrased like that, anyone can look at it and realize that that is not entirely accurate. Students can and should do some much more than just learn, and teachers can and should do so much more than just teach. If “students learn, and teachers teach” is the standard to which we are held then we are severely, catastrophically, underestimating ourselves as teachers and our students. The banking system also oppresses our students, it forces them into a little box that most of them will not fit into. It dehumanizes, as mentioned, but it also has the capabilities of killing creativity, ingenuity, and almost any original idea. If all students do is learn, then they are not exercising their creativity at all. Even if their assignment is to write a story, that story has to fit into specific guidelines in order to be graded to demonstrate that the student learned about narratives. It has to have a plot, characters, a setting, a rise-and-fall storyline, and some sort of theme or idea behind. Now plot, characters, etc. are important, no doubt, if we as teachers are forcing our students to make that plot and those characters fit into specific guidelines then they are not being honest with those characters. And as a writer, I take issue with that. In order to break the dehumanization, we cannot try to make our students fit the system, we have to change the system.
“The solution is not to ‘integrate’ [the oppressed] into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves.’”
--Paulo Freire


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