The Banking Concept of Education Kills Creativity and Liberty - Term Paper Example

The Banking Concept of Education Kills Creativity and Liberty The banking concept of education is a learning situation where the teacher becomes the depositor and the students the depositories. The teacher deposits and the students patiently receive without questioning the validity of the deposits. The concept assumes that teachers are the custodians of knowledge while the students are clueless beings who should be rehabilitated back into the regular structure of existence. As a result, the scope of students’ action is limited to only receiving, filing, and storing the deposits in order to fit in the acceptable structure. The teacher narrates reality as if it something that does not evolve with time, but remain static and predictable. On the contrary, transformative education stresses that teachers and students are dependent on one another. Therefore, teachers need to humble themselves and play both sides of the teacher-student relationship. It requires dependency between teachers and learners. The banking concept of education should not be enhanced since it reduces students to mere objects that cannot think creatively to adapt and shape the ever-changing world. Banking concept of education considers human beings as adaptable and manageable creatures. The teacher thinks, but the students only store what the teacher instructs and acts on it later. As such, the students are busy working hard to receive the deposits from teachers. They lack room to develop critical consciousness that would help them transform the world by actively interacting with it. According to Bartholomae and Petrosky, “The banking concept imposes on students the passive role, hence making students to merely adapt to life as it is and to the fragmented view of the reality deposited in them” (320). However, the world is ever changing and needs people to change with it in order to survive. Banking concept does not allow people to adapt to the changing world. It is true that a banking concept gives students an opportunity for becoming collectors of the things they store. However, in the final analysis, the system files the people themselves through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this misguided system (Bartholomae and Petrosky 319). The system does not encourage inquiry and praxis. The students lack the ability to search for more solutions to real problems that face them. Thus, individuals fail to become truly humans. It is only through invention and re-invention, the impatient, restless, and continuous inquiry with each other and the world that people can gain knowledge. The banking concept of education dangerously assumes that teachers possess the gift of knowledge. The concept project a complete ignorance onto students. As a result, the concept is oppressive and refutes education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to students as their necessary opposite: he justifies his existence by considering the absolute ignorance of the learners. He believes that what he has is enough for the students and that it is impossible for him to learn from the students. The students thus become alienated and cannot see themselves as having the ability to educate the teacher. On the other hand, the raison d’etre of libertarian education stresses on reconciliation. It begins with solving the contradiction between the teacher and the student. It does this by bringing together the poles of the contradiction and allows both parties to act simultaneously as teachers and students. The solution provided by this concept is lacking in the banking concept. Instead of suppressing the contradiction, the banking concept maintains and even encourages the opposition. It does this by instilling attitudes and practices that mirror oppressive society as a whole. For example, the teacher teaches, thinks, knows everything, talks, disciplines, and chooses for the student. The student does or has the opposite of these attitudes and practices: listens, does not know anything, and accepts what the teacher chooses. There is thus a significant boundary between the teacher and the students. The custodians of banking approach fail to understand that their deposits in students contain contradictions about the reality (Bartholomae and Petrosky 320). However, these contradictions may lead initially passive students to resist their domestication and try to domesticate reality. Through their experience, the students discover that their present way of life cannot be reconciled with their vocation to become humans fully. After relating with the reality, they may perceive that reality is a process that undergoes transformation. If men and women are seeking a true humanization, they will eventually realize that banking education seeks to maintain them in the contradictions. The people will then start struggling to liberate themselves from these contradictions. A real revolutionary education seeks to unite the efforts of educators with those of the students to involve in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. The educators have a complete trust in the creative power of people. They willingly collaborate with students in order to achieve a true humanization. The teachers exchange the role of depositor for the role of student among students. The overall effect is an eradication of the power of oppression and allows free engagements in the quest for knowledge. The banking approach does not encourage such partnership since the oppressors apply humanitarianism to conserve a profitable situation. Banking concept implicitly assumes a dichotomy between the world and human beings: an individual merely exists in the world, not with others and the world. The person is reduced to a spectator rather than a re-creator. Consequently, the person ceases being a conscious being. He/she is rather the possessor of consciousness. He is an empty mind that passively receives deposits of reality from the world. The educated person becomes adapted to the world. Practically, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, who desire to make people fit into the world the oppressors have created. The minority can easily deprive the majority of the right to their purposes by applying the banking concept of education. The minority will encourage their lessons, reading requirements, the evaluation methods of “knowledge”, distance between the taught and the teacher, and criteria for promotion. The students (majority) will not be allowed to think. The more the majority completely adapt to the purposes that the minority prescribe for them, the easily the minority can continue to prescribe. Additionally, the bank-clerk educator fails to realize that he/she has no genuine security in his hypertrophied role. He/she does not understand the benefits of living with others in solidarity. A person cannot impose himself, nor merely co-exist with his/her students. Real communication is an important tool that creates solidarity. Human life holds meaning only through communication. An approach that entails a teacher thinking for students and imposes thoughts on them retards authentic thinking and communication. Since the banking concept fears communication, the solidarity remains unachieved. Objectifying men and women through banking education promotes the development of what Fromm calls necrophilia. Necrophilia people love things that are mechanical and do not grow. They value memory above experience and having rather than being. They can relate to an object only if it is under their possession. The person loves control, and if he loses possession, he loses contact with the world. Thus, people tend to adjust to the world and are afraid of creatively changing it. They are, for this reason, prone to suffering when they are unable to use their faculties in the ever-changing world (Bartholomae and Petrosky 322). The suffering brought about by the impotence to act emanates from the fact that human equilibrium has been disturbed. However, people reject their impotence and attempt to restore it. The people do this by submitting to and identifying with a group or a person having power. By symbolically participating in another person’s life, the weak men have the illusion of acting. In reality, however, they only submit to and are part of the charismatic leaders. The reactive behavior of the oppressed comes out more clearly in populist manifestations. When the oppressed identify with charismatic leaders, they eventually perceive that they are active and productive. The desire to act effectively motivates them to put forth a rebellion as they emerge in the historical process. The dominating elites respond by more domination and repression, performed in disguise of freedom, order, and social peace. They can thus condemn violence of workers’ strike and can ask the state to use force in stopping the demonstration. Banking education encourages students to believe almost anything. The ideological intent is to indoctrinate them to adapt to the world full of oppression. Mitchell points out that the educators themselves do not often perceive this ideological motive (314). Real humanists should not use banking methods of education in the pursuit of liberation since they would only abandon that very pursuit. A revolutionary society should never inherit these methods from an oppressor society. Revolution requires elimination of ways through which the oppressors oppress societies. Embracing banking education would be going against their good motives. While, on the contrary, banking education retards creativity, problem-posing approach entails a continuous unveiling of reality. The former tries to maintain the submersion of consciousness. On the other hand, the latter attempts to unravel the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. Since students are increasingly meeting problems related to them, they will be challenged to respond to the challenges. Since they perceive problems as interrelated to other challenges, the resulting comprehension increasingly tends to be critical. The students reactions to the challenge evoke new challenges and new understandings (Bartholomae and Petrosky 326). Gradually, the students regard themselves as committed. Proposers of banking concept of education argues that it takes less time to cover material, teachers provide clear information that the students need to know, it is economically, and finally, does not require the presence of a teacher in class. Though these reasons are logical, in the end, what matters is the impact of acquired knowledge on students, and the ability to translate this knowledge to everyday scenarios. Taking less time to cover material is convenient, but a teacher might cover the whole material without the students understanding anything. Thus, a method that engages students is better even if it takes longer to cover the syllabus since such an approach ensures that students study and master whatever they learn effectively. Maybe the concept can work in particular subjects, but it is undeniable that the presence of a teacher in the classroom is essential for the learning process. Cheap is always expensive eventually, and thus, it is better to invest in creative approaches to learning than the banking concept, which will leave student’s clueless when confronted with real world scenarios. Those who espouse the cause of liberation should reject the banking concept and embrace a concept of women and men as conscious beings. The world is changing with time. As such, it needs people that appropriately adapt to it by being creative, innovative and dynamic. They need to replace the deposit making with problem-posing education in order to respond to the essence of consciousness. Liberating education actively considers the cognition. Cognizable object (teachers) intermediates the cognitive actors (students). Accordingly, unlike banking concept, problem-posing approach aims at resolving the teacher-student contradiction. Works Cited Bartholomae, David, and Tony Petrosky. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999. Print. Mitchell, Morris R. World Education, Revolutionary Concept. 3rd ed. New York: Pageant Press, 2007. Print. . Read More