Banking Concept of Education

In The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education, Paulo Freire describes the misconception of the current education system. Students are filled with information given by their instructors in which they are expected to retain and remember, but they do this in a robotic way. The students don’t fully comprehend what they are learning, causing them to forget the material once they have taken the test. Many students across the nation sit in classes of that range from 200-300 pupils and are unable to get a grasp on the material at hand due to the overpopulated classrooms and the dull environment. There is no interaction, just lectures and notes, causing students minds to be elsewhere. Being educated has no longer become interesting to young individuals, teachers and students go through the flow of “educating” and “learning”. Students become blindly opened to accepting what the teachers have to say, fully trusting that everything they are saying is completely correct. What they don’t realize is that the students are teaching the instructors as well, causing their ways of thinking to change from hearing different views. Freire then explains the “problem-posing concept”, in this case students are able to express their critical thinking with their peers and teach each other. They are free to propose ideas and arguments about topics in order to spark new opinions. Although Freire does no deliberately state he is against the “banking concept”, he does bring the “problem-posing concept” into full view and hopes to sway the opinions of the readers.

In “Is There Any Knowledge That a Man Must Have” by Wayne C. Booth, he dives into a deeper meaning of the purpose of human beings. He classifies humans into three categories; man as machine, man as animal, and man as a greater unit. In order to qualify as a human you must be able to recognise beauty, make decisions, learn about purpose, and think for himself. Man as machine, the students are thought of as machines and the teachers are thought of as programmers. They program information into the students so that it is encoded in their memory and they use that given information without any say. This theory shows that a machine will never feel the same type of emotions that humans do, therefore machines will never be greater than the human population. Man as animal is a theory that all humans can be taught things the same way that animals are taught. If a student is given a piece of candy each time they participate in class, this is a positive reinforcement causing the student to continue this act.