Group 11/14

In what ways did reading this website enrich, complicate and or confuse your understanding about Freire’s banking concept.

This website was a way to connect us reading it, to what freire is trying to give off to the readers from his second book published Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the book he goes into great detail of what the characteristics of teachers are. He writes about the banking process of educators and “the “banking” concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings, the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness that would result from their intervention in the world.” Here is talking about how students learn to adapt to what they are learning, the teachers know everything and the students know nothing. He states that the teacher talks and the students listen.  He also writes, “The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.”  The oppressors he speaks of he is talking also about the employers, the elected officials,  as well as anyone with socio-economic power over others. While the website states that, “as the illiterate person learns and is able to make such statements, his world becomes radically transformed and he is no longer willing to be a mere object responding to changes occurring around him. The educated are more likely to decide to take upon themselves the struggle to change the structures of society that until now have served to oppress them.”  He wants us to understand that we need to have an education where the students shouldn’t be afraid to speak out and to constructively criticize the teachers. They need to not let boredom overpower them in education being that the “educated man is the adapted man, because he is better “fit” for the world.” “The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes)”