In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire discusses what he calls the banking system of education. In this system, the student is seen as an object in which the teacher must place information. The student has no responsibility for cognition of any sort; the student must memorize or internalize what the teacher tells him or her. Paulo Freire was very much opposed to this system.
He argued that the banking system is a system of control, not a system meant to educate successfully. In the banking system, the teacher is meant to mold and change the students’ behavior, sometimes in a way that almost resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force information down the student’s throat that the student may not believe or care about.
This process eventually leads most students to dislike school. It also leads them to develop resistance and a negative attitude towards learning in general, where most people won’t seek knowledge unless it is required for a grade in a class. Freire thought that the only way to have a real education in which the students engage in cognition was to change from the banking system into what he defined as problem-posing education. Freire described how a problem-posing educational system could work in Pedagogy.
Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge, because cause they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated”(81). The educational system developed by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and effective form of problem-posing education that leads its students to increase their desire to learn instead of inhibiting it.
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Freire presents two major problems with the banking concept. The first one is that students are not required to be cognitively active in the banking concept. Instead, they are meant to memorize and repeat information, not to understand it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the subject, and transforms them into passive learners who don’t understand or believe what they are being taught but accept and repeat it because they have no other option.
The banking concept’s second and more dramatic consequence is that it gives enormous power to those who choose what is being taught to oppress those who are obliged to learn and accept it. Freire explains that the problem is the teacher holding all the keys, having all the answers, and doing all the thinking. The Montessori approach to education does the exact opposite. It makes students think and solve problems to arrive at their conclusions. The teachers help guide the student but do not tell the student what is true or false or how a problem can be solved.
In the Montessori system, even if a student finds a way to solve a problem that is slower or less effective than a standard mechanical way of solving the problem, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s process because this way, the student learns to find solutions by themself and to think of creative ways to work on different problems.
