Freira's Concept of the Banking Model of Education - Admission/Application Essay Example

Freire’s concept of “the banking model of education” is simultaneously groundbreaking and entirely traditional. It is traditional because the “banking model” is probably the oldest model of education in existence, and any student must have had many experiences with it. On the other hand, it is groundbreaking the way Freire is able to dissect and understand how each player in the banking model acts. I had an extremely illustrative example of the banking model in a literature class. In this literature class, the teacher did not spend very much time at all ensuring class discussion or additions by the class, but merely went through the text pointing out themes, images and so on, all of these other literary devices, telling us what they were supposed to mean (according to the teacher) and how the author used them (again, according to the teacher).

At the end of this class we were assigned a final project: a large literary-critical paper that was supposed to dissect a book that we had studied in great detail. Part of the instruction said to “critically examine an aspect of this book discussed in class,” which I took to mean try to understand it in a new and interesting light. The book I chose was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In this essay I took a position very different from what our teacher had told us. I decided to write my essay about racism in this work, and took the position that “nigger” Jim, instead of being actually an anti-racist figure (by being the most humane character in the work) still actually portrayed more racial stereotypes than he destroyed, and was actually a racist “type” character.

The teacher had perpetually said that he was an anti-racist character. When I got my report back, the teacher had nearly failed me despite the fact that I had worked very hard on it. His biggest complaint was that he said my main thesis was wrong – he did not go out of his way to point out which parts of my arguments were wrong, but just said that it showed I had not paid careful enough attention in class. When I looked at a friends paper on the same topic, who merely parroted the teacher’s points using the information the teacher had said, he got a very good grade.

This demonstrates the banking concept of education. My teacher could not believe that I had anything of value to add to this conversation. He could not imagine that my different lived experience could lead me to see something he did not. He treated the students like “banks” – he put information out there – his information that he decided was correct – and tried to deposit that information in us. To him, the student who was most successful was the one that was the best “bank” – the one that took the information that had been given to him and simply gave it back exactly as it was given.

Giving back anything different was failure.