Problem-Posing Education versus the Banking Concept of Education

James Dunn
ENGL B6400
Theories & Models of Literacy
Barbara Gleason, Professor
December 18, 2015

Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has an ideological view of literacy.  It is best espoused in the dichotomy of the problem-posing approach versus the banking concept of literacy education.  If anything, Freire’s approach to literacy education is ideological in that it is a call to action that transforms the teacher-student and student-teacher relationship from one of domination and control to one of freedom and critical consciousness.  In this sense, Freire’s approach to literacy education is revolutionary because it relies not only on action, but reflection as well.  Freire calls these acts a form of praxis. (87)  From this vantage point, students are able to ponder or reflect on their situation. By learning vocabulary, students are able to name and label the individual and collective circumstances that affect their lives. 

What in life is more powerful than to be able to reflect on our situations and circumstances?  It is good for the spirit.  Reflection has a way of stirring our internal beings.  It can spur us to action.  It can motivate us to pick up that book or to enroll in that GED course.   Thus, history is full of great people (and some ordinary ones as well) who were ignorant of their position and circumstance in life until their outlook was changed significantly by something they read.  For example, when abolitionist Frederick Douglass taught himself how to read and write, he became more conscious of his material plight as a slave.  In fact, the more he read newspapers, pamphlets, political materials, and books of every description, the more he questioned and condemned the institution of slavery.

So yes, Freire’s approach to language and literacy is not only ideological. It is also a spiritual reckoning with what makes us human: the desire for self-determination and self-actualization.  Ultimately, the problem-posing approach is about transforming lives. It makes real the wish of many educators: that students leave the classroom changed—not the same people who entered the classroom at the beginning of the school year or semester.

Teaching students to use critical reflection in order to develop abilities to change social power structures and students’ own circumstances is paramount to Freire’s ideological approach to literacy.  Yet, his problem-posing approach, which invites learners to focus on issues that require solutions and the use of dialogue to achieve goals, is Freire’s vehicle for helping to students discover their own voice.  More importantly though is Freire’s recognition of relationships. He suggests that “a horizontal student-teacher relationship where the teacher works as political agent and on an equal footing with students” (Taylor 8) is essential to overcome oppressive power structures.

            Freire, in his work in literary education, contributed three key concepts to literacy education.  First of all, he thinks it is not transformative for teachers to give students knowledge and have students memorize it. He suggests that students have something to give back and this kind of memorizing and regurgitating does not work in adult education because students have something to contribute to the learning environment. The second step is critical reflection, and the third step is a power-balanced student-teacher relationships.  In other words, the student and teacher work on the same level. There exists a real partnership between student-teacher and teacher-student. Using this idea to create an environment that people feel comfortable to share and communicate in, is especially important in adult education.

            In addition, Freire argues that education is a political act that cannot be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers (however uncomfortable it might be for some of them) sometimes have political notions that they bring into the classroom.  Freire claims that "education as the practice of freedom” is problem-posing in that student-teacher and teacher-student work hand-in-hand for liberation and to solve problems. (81)

            However, in terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher.  He insists that "it transforms students into receiving objects.  It attempts to control thinking and action, and leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (77).   To demonstrate his point, Freire uses economic and capitalist terms to illustrate the cold and impersonal nature of the "banking" concept of education.  His stark description of students as objects or "receptacles" to be filled illustrates how this model of education is dehumanizing and oppressive. (72)

            Ultimately, it seems that the banking model's aim is to control thinking and behavior and stifle the creative process.  Instead of encouraging students to focus on social issues that have implications for their lives, the teacher-student relationship maintains the status-quo.  It certainly is not transformative because the banking model does not set up the kind of dialogue between students-teachers where students can ask questions and create meaning for their own lives, a key component of transformative learning.  Some of the ways that transformative learning can be demonstrated in the classroom is through  “journal writing, simulations and case studies, critical incidents, role-playing, metaphors, personal biographical sketches, life histories, narratives, visioning, and both small and large group discussions” (Fleming & Garner 25).

Freire also argues that the dominant class creates a “culture of silence” which instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image onto the oppressed. (33)  The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress.  Also, a culture of silence can cause the dominated individuals to lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture.  Furthermore, this culture of silence, Freire suggests, is embedded into the conventional educational system and eliminates paths of critical examination for the oppressed. 

Similarly, in his best-selling book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, describes his experience in schools built on silence and repression.   His book explores the reality of growing up Black in the United States, and living in perpetual fear of violence within and outside the black community. Yet, it is his recollection of going to public school in Baltimore that is so devastating because instead of helping to liberate him intellectually, Coates says, “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”  Basically, Coates is arguing that education has been and still is responsible for perpetuating injustice.  In other words, Coates, like Freire, implicates education as an institution that turns students into zombies instead of free individuals that can question their unique and collective situations and circumstances. Coates recalls:

The laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working quietly. Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses — certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent. All of it felt so distant to me. (25-26)

The kind of educational experience that Coates describes speaks to Freire’s banking concept of education.  It is stark, cold, and lifeless.  There is nothing pretty about it. His school does not provide equal access to the world of thought and beauty. It does not aim to create thinkers and inquisitive learners.  Instead his school focuses on order, discipline, and passive learning.  No wonder, Coates feels very little connection with his educational experience.

            Perhaps more than ever, Freire’s problem-posing approach to education needs to be ensconsed on the pedagogical soul of every teacher and instructor.  Coates’ perception that the school system emphasized blind obedience over learning and curiosity, and privileged the prerogatives of the institution over the student as learner and individual is problematic to say the least.   But many students can probably sense, even if they cannot clearly articulate it, that they have been bamboozled, tricked, deceived.  Coates writes:

I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why — for us and only us — is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of higher learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. (26)

In “Strangers No More—A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum,” Kyle Fiore and Nan Elsasser use Freire’s concept of generative themes to investigate issues that affect the everyday lives of their students.  In this way, students bring their own knowledge into the classroom, and they can begin to understand the impact of society on their lives. (116-117) Fiore and Elsasser take the time to get to know some of the circumstances of their students’ lives in order to create a curriculum that will give their students an opportunity to read and write topics such as marriage and gender roles.  Coates was not as lucky. He reveals the cognitive costs of surviving the streets:  “Each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smile, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not” (24).  Perhaps Coates could have benefited from an instructor, any instructor, who was willing to stand with him and help him investigate some of the generative themes in his life: black male identity, violence, and disembodiment.

            Yet, it is clear that Freire’s problem-posing approach to education has the potential to help students reveal their own individual and collective truths. Unfortunately, this kind of approach can only work when teachers are willing to get into the ditches, get to know their students, and to design lessons based on generative themes that are derived the narratives of the oppressed.  Thus, Freire’s approach is cooperative in the truest sense of the word.  Both students and teachers work together to forge a bond based on dialogue and recognition of each other’s shared humanity.  Of course, none of these actions can take place without dialogue.  For Freire, words are the building blocks of dialogue.  In fact, he calls the word the “essence of dialogue” (Freire 87).  The problem-posing approach is ultimately about helping oppressed find and attached their own meanings to the words that liberate them.

   

Works Cited

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me., 2015. Print.

Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “"strangers No More": A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum”. College English 44.2 (1982): 115–128. Web...

Fleming, Cheryl Torok, and J. Bradley Garner. Brief Guide for Teaching Adult Learners. Marion,  Ind.: Triangle Publishing, 2009. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print

Taylor, Edward, “Transformative Learning. “Third Update on Adult Learning Theory. Ed. Merriam, Sharan B. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 5-15. Print. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education #119