The Banking Concept

In Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education”, he discusses the importance of a student-teacher relationship and the issues of the educational system. The banking method signifies how teachers “fill” up their student’s minds with knowledge without any questions. This method, Frerie believes, limits the student’s capability to think for them-selves that leads for students to constantly rely on information from their teachers. Freire then proposed a solution for the banking concept called “problem-posing concept”, a method that challenges student’s mind when being educated. The problem-posing concept creates a communication between a student and the teacher, where they can both learn and challenge one another with a free thought.

During the first semester of college, I have experience the banking method in my Medical Terminology course at LBCC. When it comes to a science class I would expect the professor to explain every detail of the lesson even though the course was to learn about terms that exist in the medical field. Once classes had started, projector screen comes down and the projector and PowerPoint presentation have turned on. Our lessons would consists of the same exact terms that are in the book (in order) and the teacher would just read out the terms and definition from the presentation that we already have in our textbooks. We had classes once a week, every Tuesday and every week that we attend there would be a test or a quiz. Every week we had to memorize at least 50-80 terms, 30 of them presented on the test: our tests are 100% multiple-choice questions. This course was pure memorization and I honestly did not learn much from it because I was concentrated on memorizing the terms with the definitions rather than memorizing the terms and what is truly about.