Banking Education Chapter 2 Summary

Chapter 2 is a part of Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paolo Freire's book published in 1970 in New York. In this chapter, Freire compares two concepts of education. They are banking and problem-posing concepts. The banking approach considers students as the passive, lacking initiative “containers”, while teachers “fill” these “receptacles”. Students have to memorize mechanically information given them by teacher excluding the processes of inquiry. In contrast, the problem-posing concept encourages the creativity and critical thinking in students. Dialogue is a basis of teacher-student relationships. The author criticizes the banking education because of its narrowness, however, he praises the problem-posing approach for its humanist and liberating practices.

“[Banking] Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” (Freire, 1970). Freire (1970) considers the banking education as a process of narration in which the teacher fills the students with the prescribed information. In this process, students just memorize mechanically the data without interpretation and inquiry.
“… man is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.” (Freire,
The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic.” (Freire, 1970). Freire (1970) states that, in the frame of banking education, there is no creativity and initiative that means there is no life. People are oppressed to love prescribed, died information, instead of giving birth to the new