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Thesis Freire’s banking model is unfair to the lecture, and to the teachers who give good ones

Giulia Ferrante Fellow
· 6 replies
EducationAmericanGreek & RomanLatin AmericanPhilosophy of liberationPragmatismHannah ArendtPaulo FreireSocrates#banking-model#critical-pedagogy#lecturing#teacher-authority
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Where it stands

Every few years a pedagogy course reminds me that I am a banker. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the "banking" concept of education: the teacher deposits, the students receive, file and store. The teacher talks, the students listen meekly. He argues that this trains passivity, and that people trained to receive are unequipped to question the arrangements that made them receivers.

I accept that this happens. I have seen it, and done it on bad days. But I want to argue that the critique, as it is usually used, is unfair in two ways.

First, it confuses a mode with a relation. A lecture is a mode: one person speaks at length. A good lecture is not a deposit. It is a performance of thinking in public, with the students following a mind at work, objecting silently, catching the moment where the argument turns. The best lessons I ever received were lectures.

Second, some things must be transmitted before they can be questioned. Nobody dialogues their way to the third declension. A student who has not been given the grammar cannot argue with Thucydides; she can only argue with a translation someone else chose for her. Withholding transmission in the name of liberation can leave her more dependent, not less.

Even Socrates, the patron saint of drawing out, talks a great deal in the Meno, and his questions are hardly neutral.

So: the banking model is a real failure, but "lecture" is not its name. Persuade me otherwise.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Henrike Vogel

    For Fellow

    For. Arendt's essay on the crisis in education makes the point I wish pedagogy courses would hear: the teacher's authority rests on her taking responsibility for the world, introducing the young to a world that existed before them and will outlast them. Education has to be, in that sense, conservative, precisely so that the young can later renew the world rather than being handed a ready-made revolution by adults. Withholding the inheritance is not liberation.

  2. Dana Whitfield

    For Fellow

    For, mostly. Dewey anticipated both of you in Experience and Education (1938). He criticized traditional schooling for imposing from above and outside, but he was just as hard on progressive schools that thought the teacher should step back and let interests unfold. Growth needs structure, and selecting the right experiences is the teacher's job. He would have liked your lecture as performance of thinking, Giulia, as long as the students were eventually asked to do the thinking themselves.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 3

  1. Jorge Bonfim

    Against Fellow

    Against, but I think you and Freire are closer than you think. Freire developed his method teaching adult peasants to read in north-east Brazil, famously in Angicos in 1963. He started from "generative words" drawn from their own lives, tijolo, brick, for builders, and broke them into syllables they could recombine. That is a lot of transmission! What he refused was the relation in which the learners' world counted for nothing and the teacher's for everything.

    So the target is not the lecture but the contempt. I teach capoeira the same way: I demonstrate, they copy, but the roda belongs to all of us.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Mateo Quispe

    Against Fellow

    Against. Giulia, your Latin students are already citizens of a world that expects them to argue. Freire's learners were landless workers who had been taught by every institution that they had nothing to say. In that context the "mode" carries the relation. A lecture to people who believe their own speech is worthless confirms the belief. The critique is political before it is pedagogical, and it loses its force when you transplant it to a liceo.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Rowena Abellana

    Against Fellow

    Against, from the classroom. My lectures fail when I am answering questions nobody in the room has asked. They work when the students have already wrestled with the question and are hungry for an answer. So I don't think the lecture is innocent or guilty in itself. Timing makes it a deposit or a gift.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Jorge, Mateo, I accept the correction. I was arguing against Freire as he is used in teacher-training slides, not against Freire in Angicos. Let me revise: the banking concept names a real failure of relation, and the lecture is one mode in which it can occur, but also one in which its opposite can. Henrike, thank you for Arendt; I am stealing "responsibility for the world" for my next staff meeting.

    Helpful · 1