Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In Chapter Two, Freire describes two opposing models of education. He criticizes the traditional banking method, in which students memorize content deposited in them by the teacher, and contrasts it with problem-posing education, where teacher and students work together on an equal footing to investigate reality and acquire understanding.

Freire methodically analyzes both types of education. He demonstrates the hierarchical and dehumanizing character of banking education, which supports oppression. Conversely, in problem-posing education, student and teacher dialogue with each other to stimulate consciousness-raising and the fuller expression of their humanity. Freire’s account of these two educational styles draws upon the existential and phenomenological philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Edmund Husserl. The concepts of banking and problem-posing educational styles are arguably the most influential and well-known ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In traditional education, the teacher-student relationship is strictly hierarchical. The teacher assumes a position of authority, possessing knowledge that he imparts to the student. The student is a passive and empty receptacle for this knowledge, patiently receiving and memorizing it. Education has a narrative character, with a narrating Subject (the teacher) and listening objects (the students), who are filled by the content of the teacher’s narration.

This style of education poses many problems, explicit and implicit. The content the teacher presents to the students tends to become lifeless and abstract, stripped of its vital connections to the larger world. Narrative teaching presents reality as static and compartmentalized rather than dynamic and interconnected. Lacking a sense of how the subject matter relates to her own experience, the student often feels alienated by the teacher’s words.

In the banking approach, education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor” (72). This method views the student as ignorant and knowledge as a giftbestowed by the authoritative teacher. By treating the student as an object, rather than a participant in the discovery of knowledge, it dehumanizes him.

Moreover, the authoritarian character of the “banking” method stifles inquiry and promotes conformity. This makes it an effective tool of the oppressive state to secure cooperation among the people and disseminate its ideology. Freire observes:

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 that world as transformers of that world . . . [this] serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed (73).

The oppressors use education to manipulate the public to accept their subordinate place in the social order as a given. Thus, the oppressors “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 problem to another” (74). Freire quotes philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in support of this claim:

[T]he interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness 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 (74).

The effect of the banking approach is to “turn men and women into automatons—the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (74). Since it presupposes the student is a passive recipient of information, this education works to make the student even more passive. It thus serves to domesticate individuals to the roles the dominant class prescribes for them. At the same time, the banking method obscures the totality and historical causes of social injustice while it subtly indoctrinates the oppressed to adapt to the system.

This has important implications for the results banking education achieves. Students, Freire argues, “are not called upon to know,” but simply to memorize (80). They aren’t given the opportunity to have the genuine cognitive experience of discovering knowledge. Knowledge is the property of the teacher “rather than a medium evoking the critical reflection of both teacher and students” (80). Such education “anaesthetizes and inhibits creative power” in students (81). Moreover, it actively tries to “maintain the submersion of consciousness[,]” rather than educate, which etymologically means to “lead out” of a state of unknowing.

Banking education, by its dehumanizing method and fragmentary approach to reality, falsifies reality. It conceals facts about the way humans actually engage with each other in the world. It also suppresses awareness of the world as an unfolding process of historical transformation, in which all men and women are active subjects. Banking education is “immobilizing and fixating”; it “fail[s] to acknowledge men and women as historical beings” (84).

By treating men and women as objects, this approach is an expression of what Erich Fromm terms “necrophily”—an urge toward (or love of) death. It treats things and people as objects to be mastered and controlled, and “the act of controlling . . . kills life” (77). Banking education thus reinforces the fatalistic attitude of men and women in an oppressive society, inculcating passivity and alienation in them.

The methods of banking education are of no use in the struggle for liberation. Freire says:

[O]ne does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation—the process of humanization—is not another deposit to be made in men. . . 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 banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans—deposits) in the name of liberation (79).

Dismantling the teacher/student hierarchy is necessary for a genuinely transformative and humanist education. This education must be based on dialogue between student and teacher. Their relationship must be that of co-creators within the educational process, and it must be grounded on solidarity between the oppressed and their educators. The goal of libertarian education is to seek mutual humanization and in this quest, the teacher must become a student among students, and the student a teacher as well as a student. True communication between them is essential, since “the teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking” (77).

This problem-posing education displays the creativity and transformative power that banking education lacks. In the problem-posing method, teacher and students collaborate to identify themes that express the hopes, beliefs, desires, anxieties, values, and fears of the oppressed. The teacher then re-presents these themes to the students as problems requiring responsive action.

The focus of the educational process in this approach centers on shared experiences of acquiring knowledge, which occur through the critical thinking of both teacher and student. “Liberating education,” Freire insists, “consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information” (79). Knowledge is not the sole possession of the teacher but is a product of the mutual discovery of teacher and students dialoguing with each other. The teacher/student hierarchy, or “contradiction” in Freire’s terms, is overcome, and they “become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (80).

In problem-posing education, this collaborative process of communication and learning is paramount. The object of knowledge is no longer objectified to be delivered by the teacher to the student. Rather, it becomes the medium of the teacher and students’ interaction with each other: “People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are ‘owned’ by the teacher” (80).

Moreover, the problem-posing method of education is not static and predetermined but involves a process of constant reconsideration on the part of both teacher and student. They co-investigate, critically, the material under study, forming and reforming opinions as they listen to and engage with each other. This creates a learning environment in which knowledge as doctrine is replaced by true knowledge, which is revealed by continuing, energetic, and critical inquiry.

This method invites students to perceive their actual situation in the world as a set of problems, which they progressively recognize and respond to through praxis. Emphasizing the existential reality of people’s place in relation to the world, it leads them to commit themselves to the struggle for liberation.

At the same time, problem-posing education resolves the rift between the individual and the world that the banking method utilizes to alienate people from the historical conditions of their oppression. Consciousness, and the world which is the object of our consciousness, are utterly dependent upon each other. By recognizing this fact, problem-posing education orients the student and teacher alike to grasp critically how they exist “in the world with which and in which they find themselves” (83). Thus, “they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (83). Since problem-posing education doesn’t divorce thought from action, it prepares men and women to take up the struggle for their liberation as authentic beings, conscious of their history and ability to transform society.

Freire points out that the very existence of education owes to the fact that humans are always in a process of becoming, just as the world in which they exist is unfinished. Education, therefore, must be an ongoing activity and constantly remade. The problem-posing method embraces men and women as unfinished beings, aware of their incompletion and the challenges of their historical existence. While this revolutionary form of education will always be opposed by the oppressive order, it is the only type of education that can serve men and women in their struggle for freedom.