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Running head: PAULO FREIRE’S BANKING CONCEPT OF EDUCATION 0

PAULO FREIRE’S THE BANKING CONCEPT OF EDUCATION

Active involvement is the cornerstone of efficient learning. Many a times, lecturers and teachers overlook this very crucial detail in their day to day classes. Most just throw all the content they have at the students without enquiring whether they can make any relation between the material taught and real life situations.it is important to improve delivery of content so that better retention and application of the things taught in school is possible. This is the issue addressed by Paulo Freire in his essay about the banking concept of education. This paper tackles the concept and gives an instance from my high school teacher Mr W’s class to demonstrate the inefficiency of the ideology.

In his essay, Freire says that it is not proper to have the students sit quietly while the lecturer or teacher talks the whole time. He likens the situation to someone filling an empty container (Filyanina 2016). He postulates that the problem with our education system is that students can’t relate what is learnt in school with what they go through in real life. They just sit in the lecture halls like robots and absorb what their tutor or lecturer is teaching. This is truly an ineffective method of teaching (Irwin 2012). More involving methods of teaching ought to be adopted in order to boost retention of material learnt in class.

One incident that happened in my high school geometry class really supports the need for a better technique of education. It was on a cold Tuesday morning and everyone was sitted quietly scribbling while Mr W. gave his lecture. He was having a three-hour class to make up for time lost and many of my classmates were tired from writing after the first two hours. No one was paying any attention to what they were making notes about. He had given his monotonous talk without even looking to see if people were following what he was teaching

In the last one hour, Mr W. asked everyone to close their notebook or laptop and put it back in the bags. He then started asking the class simple questions about the very topic we had covered that day. Many people were taken by surprise and could not remember the things they had just been scribbling. Only the very attentive individuals managed to answer one or two questions correct. The back benchers were either inattentive, not taking the notes or sleeping. None of them got any questions correct. They also seemed oblivious of what was going on. It could be because he was largely inaudible and had taken to a very boring way of delivering his material but either way his classes were not very appealing to attend. Many students used to skip his lectures because he had not mastered good intonation and variation of sentence structures to make his lectures lively or captivating.

This is just one example of the inefficiency of the classroom setting and lecture orientation of the education system. In Freire’s eyes the students have no active part to play in the system. They just scribble notes down subconsciously and end up retaining close to nothing (Irwin 2012). My high school geometry teacher could really use Freire’s advice because that is actually the best way to get the students to pay adequate attention. Activities involving the students are highly encouraged as they prevent boredom or drifting off in ones thoughts. My teacher could have for example, involved the back benchers more in questions during the first two hours of class. He could also ask one student to work out a problem on the chalk wall from time to time. These and other simple techniques would eliminate the passive mentality that the students had.

Freire promotes the ‘problem posing concept’ in which the lecturer should pose different real life problems and have the students think of ways to go about them. This will greatly increase the participation of every student (Filyanina 2016). Many will also retain the methods learnt for a much longer period of time. The ’banking concept’ is flawed and its effectiveness is questionable. He discourages the use of this approach totally.

According to him, schools should try not to suppress the god given ability of man to imagine and ask for huge amounts of money for it (Filyanina 2016). He says that no thinking is allowed and the students are only allowed to listen, record and study what their teacher tells them. They can therefore never come to realize their full potential as they are evaluated on how well they have mastered the information ‘contained ‘ in their teachers (Irwin 2012). Their imagination is left unused for so long that they can’t solve critical real life problems. He encourages the teachers to allow the students to use their brains for thinking and imagining solutions as opposed to just memorizing and cramming.

Paulo Freire might have been the first to address the issue of passive learning in many institutions but the problem was there long before his time. The education system need to be revamped and the students involved actively in the learning process. It is crucial to understand that learning is more natural when participated in or done outside the classroom. What happened in my geometry class is a strong exhibit of the ineffectiveness of the ‘banking concept of education’.

References

Filyanina, N. (2016). The concept of liberation of education Paulo Freire and ekoeducation.

Skhid, 0(3(143)), 110. Doi: 10.21847/1728-9343.2026.3 (143).74860

Irwin, J. (2012). Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education: origins, developments, impacts and

legacies. London: Continuum International Pub.