Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Freire begins Chapter 2 by describing the characteristics of a traditional Western classroom. He focuses on its “narrative” aspects: the teacher is a “narrating Subject” with students who are passive. The teacher’s narration—or the facts that he/she is teaching—is disconnected from the students’ life experiences, and students memorize these facts without understanding their full meaning or context. Freire calls this the “banking” model of education, one in which teachers “deposit” knowledge into the minds of their students. He finds this model problematic because it stifles creativity, and does not encourage students to ask new questions through praxis.

Knowledge, for Freire, is the result of a constant process of questioning the world. However, the “banking” model conceives of knowledge as something that teachers have and students lack. This approach is closely tied to oppression, because it presumes that the people who don’t have power are ignorant. Freire then asserts that his pedagogy, which aims to help oppressed people become free, must change the contradictory relationship between teachers and students. In this relationship, teachers have absolute authority and control over their students.

The “banking” model molds the attitudes of students: it teaches them to adapt to the world as it is, instead of questioning it or trying to change it. This helps  oppressors, who want to prevent oppressed people from understanding the true nature of oppression. Freire argues that oppressors combine “banking” education with institutions like welfare, which treats oppressed people as if they exist outside of normal, “healthy” society. To liberate themselves, oppressed people cannot become “integrated” into oppressive society; rather, they must transform society entirely. “Banking” education combats this transformation by turning people into “automatons.”

Teachers who use the “banking” model—whether they are aware of it or not—do not understand that the model reinforces oppression. But Freire notes that some students may begin to understand that their education is in conflict with their natural drive for freedom. However, educators who truly want to help oppressed people cannot wait for this to happen—they should work with oppressed people, as fellow students, to achieve conscientização together. “Banking” education hinders this process through its assumptions about human beings and the world. In the “banking” model, people do not act on the world: they merely live in it and observe it. Teachers, then, control how their students observe the world and teach them to fit in.

The methods teachers use in the “banking” model create distance between them and their students. In contrast, Freire argues for authentic communication in the classroom: teachers cannot impose their ideas on students, but should instead work with students equally. Just like oppression, the “banking” model is “necrophilic” and stifles the life of human beings. But the suffering that results from oppression can spur people to restore their personal freedom and power. Freire calls out the “banking” model as oppressive so that revolutionary leaders do not use it in the struggle for liberation. He notes that revolutionary leaders often use this model already, but urges them to “reject the banking concept in its entirety” and replace it with a new model: the “problem-posing” model.

In stark contrast to “banking,” a “problem-posing” pedagogy is based on communication and dialogue, and it fosters human freedom. It transforms the relationship between students and teachers, merging them into teacher-students and student-teachers. Everyone in the classroom teaches each other and learns from each other. While the “banking” model consists of active teachers and passive students, the “problem-posing” model makes both groups into “co-investigators” who question reality together. Freire argues that the “problem-posing” model pushes students to gain critical awareness, because it uses topics and problems that are relevant to the students’ experiences. This, in turn, challenges students to take action and face those problems.

When education is designed to foster freedom, it treats human beings and the world as intimately connected. Freire supplies the example of a peasant student in a Chilean class, who argued that human beings must exist in the world to call it a “world” in the first place—and compares the peasant’s point to French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that human consciousness and the world are interdependent. “Problem-posing” education helps people develop their understanding of the world, so that they see the world as constantly in flux. More broadly, Freire reiterates that “problem-posing” and “banking” have entirely opposite goals. While “banking” separates people from history, “problem-posing” helps its students understand their place in history.

In the “problem-posing” model, human beings are incomplete and are working to fully become themselves. This means that education is also an ongoing process, a big difference from the lack of change in the “banking” model. “Problem-posing” is “revolutionary futurity,” according to Freire, because it relies on the hope that oppression is changeable and can be defeated in the future. When oppressed people understand this, they can shift from feeling resolved to feeling empowered. Therefore, the movement for liberation must support oppressed people’s right to make decisions and ask questions for themselves in pursuit of humanization. It must rely on dialogue at every stage of the process.