Pedagogy of the Oppressed-Chapter 2
Paulo Freire
The second chapter of the book examines the "banking" approach to education -- a metaphor used by Freire that suggests students are considered empty bank accounts that should remain open to deposits made by the teacher. Freire rebuffs the "banking" approach, claiming it results in the dehumanization of both the students and the teachers. Further, he presents that banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through these various attitudes and practices: (1) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; (2) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (3) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (4) the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly;( 5) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (6) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (7) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (8) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (9) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students and (10) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. All of these mirror an act of oppression in the educational system and in the society as a whole.
Freire asserts that in order to achieve an authentic liberation from the dehumanizing effects of banking education, the educator’s efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking. This is so because the teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. Freire declares that the teacher cannot think for his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Another step is to abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. “Problem-posing education”, that is, embodies the special characteristics of consciousness: being conscious of consciousness as consciousness of consciousness. This can be obtained through dialogue in which the teacher is no longer the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They then become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. Moreover, in the problem-posing education, the teacher does not regard cognizable objects as his private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the students. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly reforms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students-no longer docile listeners- are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. If students are constantly exposed to processes such as this and when they are increasingly posed with problems relating to them in the world and with the world, they will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge.
Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, hypothesizes fundamentally that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and alienating intellectualism; it also enables men to overcome their false perception of reality. The world-no longer something to be described with deceptive words but becomes the object of that transforming action by men which results in their humanization.
II. The Critical Response
The second chapter of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed has opened my eyes to the varied circumstances wherein the teacher becomes an oppressor to the students. However, at first, it is quite tough on my part whether to dispute or support Freire’s arguments because I don’t know where to stand—will I take a student’s view or a teacher’s? But since the discussion will be focusing on the relevance of Freire’s work (i.e. banking concept of education) to Literature teaching and literature experience, there is a need to examine both the conditions in which a teacher and a student fit in.
Freire’s concept on the educational system, which he terms as ‘banking’, poses such huge controversy considering that all his arguments are all aimed at criticizing those in the academe. His work, in one way or another, strikes the whole system of education, the administrators, the government, the educators and also the society that has been giving such high regard to education ever since the beginning. Such courageous attempt to reveal controversial issues against the mentioned forces is a great eye-opener to the world, which has always looked at education as ‘flawless’, so to speak.
The oppression, which Freire asserts is taking place in a classroom and in any educational institutions, does not only limit to the society which he knows, but to the whole world as well. It is not surprising that the Philippine educational system will always be caught up if matters concerning banking education, with its oppressive nature, will be dealt with.
It is at this juncture that I would like to express my contentions on how a teacher becomes an oppressor to his/her class. If oppression takes place when students are just made to wallow what the teacher gives them, then the Philippine educational system has always been guilty. On the contrary, it is not at all times that the teacher does the faults. Reality check, it’s the administrators--the DepEd that has the control. It was as early as my Practice Teaching days when my eyes were gradually opened to what was really happening to the system. Banking system-wise, the DepEd formulates the so-called PSSLC, PESLC and continuums which have to be strictly followed through by the teachers at all costs. This action fails to acknowledge the fact that more often than not, most of the students needed extra time for more drills (e.g. vocabulary building) before they could actually move on to the next topics (e.g. paragraph construction). Also, the formulation of the prototype competencies does not necessarily cater to the students’ needs. Because the teachers are compelled to abide by the competencies the DepEd imposes, the learning of the students often becomes half-baked. This brings to my memory the innumerable moments in my elementary years when I was exposed to what Freire calls the narration sickness. More often than not, my Science teacher would blabber on alien terms about atoms and neutrons and expected us to answer something during quizzes. What Freire suggests is that, in order to obtain a humanizing attempt to teaching as far as the latter situation is concerned, my teacher should have used tangible and visual models for atoms and neutrons and she should also have explained in lucid ways the relevance of these to human living.
Additionally, there were also petrifying moments during our Literature classes in elementary years when we were bombarded with painfully familiar questions like, “What is the title of the story?”, “Who is the author of the story”, “Who are the characters in the story”, “What happened to the main character?”, “Where did the story take place?”, and many others. There have always been problems as to whether we were really made to think creatively and critically. It is in this sense that the dehumanizing effects of banking education are exemplified. The stated questions delimit the students to giving what is already available in the text, thus; making students think superficially and not critically and independently. The teachers need to acknowledge the idea that literature learning should be a dynamic experience both for the students and for the teacher himself. It should help students reflect on their own thinking regarding the issues present in the literary piece and relate themselves to these issues. As Louise Rosenblatt (1998) stresses, “No one else can read a literary work for us. The benefits of literature can emerge only from creative activity on the part of the reader.”
Closely related to this statement is her book written in 1991 proposing the Reader-Response Theory. Rosenblatt explains in her work that students are able to understand what they read only by actively responding to the text. Her perspective on the relationship between the reader and the text opens an opportunity for students to partake in an active process whereby they must accept responsibility for much of their literary experience. Instead of a system in which teachers control and limit anticipated responses with ‘objective’ questions, students now contribute to the knowledge pool by providing personal reactions (Rosenblatt 1991, as cited by Bushman and Haas, 2001) In the process of engaging to the Reader-Response Theory, the teacher should ask questions to students which are non-objective. He or she should be able to formulate questions which will require the students’ critical thinking. Non-objective questions ask them to share ideas, reactions, and interpretations (e.g. “What is your stand on Miguel’s denial of his health?”, “If you were on his shoes, would you do the same?” and many others). It is in this way that Rosenblatt’s ideas recount Freire’s humanizing procedures as opposed to banking system. While Freire proposes dialogue as a fine tool in achieving his concept of humanization, Rosenblatt adheres to employing what she terms “spontaneous response”, which is in nature identical to dialogue. The former demands teachers to be both sensitive and sincerely responsive to the students’ reactions and insights.
Further, Stephen Reid (1998) emphasizes that sharing is crucial to appreciating literature. I strongly believe that in sharing, the students are not the only ones who learn, but the teachers as well. I remember the moment when I asked my students during a discussion of a short story what they would like to write in their epitaph. Initially, there was a complete silence until I shared with them what I would write on my own and how was I surprised to see everybody raised his hand. Some asked me why I’d write such, others flaunted their morbid plans. The next thing I knew there were varied emotions that flooded in my class alongside the discussion of the story. This reflects how important Rosenblatt, Reid and Freire’s perspectives are in achieving a worthwhile literary experience. Considering Freire’s claims that one way of achieving liberation from banking concept is through dialogue, Reader Response seems to be an appropriate device to realize this since it employs active participation by the readers while they read a literary work and engage in dynamic discussions. It is therefore a necessity that Reader Response be widely known to every literature teacher and even to curriculum makers so that they are one step closer to Freire’s concept of authentic liberation, to the process of humanization. If the teacher allows an open dialogue to transpire in his/her class, he would more likely know his/her students well and maintain a dynamic interaction in the classroom. If every literature teacher or even administrator adheres to these practices, he or she now becomes a humanist revolutionary educator as what Freire affirms.
At the outset, I have presented in this CRP probable ways to debunk Freire’s banking concept of education. However, there are perceivable factors that will affect how a teacher can actually become a humanizing teacher. Literature-wise, the competence of the teacher to employ “non-dehumanizing approaches” to teaching a literary piece has to be considered. My personal experience can testify that not all literature teachers know how to use Reader Response Theory in their literature teaching, or worse, they don’t even know that such approach to teaching actually exists unless otherwise until they attend their Masteral Studies. I have been so grateful that I was well acquainted with Reader Response even before I was exposed to teaching. Because of it, I knew I was less oppressive in my literature teaching. Now that I am well-aware of the oppressive tendencies of a classroom teacher as elucidated by Freire, I will always look into whether I become an oppressor or a humanizing instructor whenever I teach.
