Educational Banking

In Freire’s essay, he compares education to banking; “narration (the teacher as the narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically…turns them into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher…becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”

‘Banking Education’ dictates that the students must be meek and submissive, whereas teachers are the all-knowing, authoritative disciplinarians. After wading through the titanic amount of information in this essay, I have come to the conclusion that if you asked Freire his opinion on standardized testing, he would begin an angry rant and most likely lecture you on how standardized testing is simply a widespread attempt to conform students to a biased idea of what intelligence is. It is clear that Freire desires an environment where teachers and students can have a give-and-take dialogue, allowing the teachers to “teach while being taught and become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.” According to Freire, banking education “anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing/give-and-take education involved a constant unveiling of reality.”

Standardized testing is the antithesis to problem-posing education; the test is designed to trick students and degrade their sense of intelligence. Personally, I agree with Freire’s view of education as ‘banking,’ however who knows if the student-teacher imbalance will ever come to peaceful resolve? I believe that in some situations, a resolution is already in sight; as students grow older and become more independent and assertive, they make a give-and-take dialogue more possible. Yet in all reality, despite the amount of equality between teachers and students in the classrooms, standardized testing will always drive a wedge in the relationship and make it much more difficult for problem-posing education to preside.