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WAYS OF
READING
An Anthology for Writers
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PAULO
FREIRE
PAULO FREIRE (pronounce it “Fr-air-ah” unless you
can make a Portuguese “r”) was one of the most influen
tial radical educators of our world. A native of Recife,
Brazil, he spent most of his early career working in
poverty-stricken areas of his homeland, developing meth
ods for teaching illiterate adults to read and write and (as
he would say) to think critically and, thereby, to take
power over their own lives. Because he has created a class
room where teachers and students have equal power and
equal dignity, his work has stood as a model for educators
around the world. It led also to sixteen years of exile after the military coup in Brazil
in 1964. During that time he taught in Europe and in the United States and worked
for the Allende government in Chile, training the teachers whose job it would be
to bring modern agricultural methods to the peasants.
Freire (1921-1997) worked with the adult education programs of UNESCO,
the Chilean Institute of Agrarian Reform, and the World Council of Churches. He
was professor of educational philosophy at the Catholic University of Siio Paulo. He
is the author of Education for Critical Consciousness, The Politics of Educa
tion, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Revised Edition (from which the follow
ing essay is drawn), and Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (with
255
256 pAULO FREIRE
Antonio Faundez). Pedagogy of Indignation, the first English translations
of Freire’s late-life reflections on personal development, is forthcoming.
For Freire, education is not an objective process, if by objective we mean “neu
tral” or “without bias or prejudice.” Because teachers could be said to have some
thing that their students lack, it is impossible to have a “neutral” classroom; and
when teachers present a subject to their students they also present a point of view
on that subject. The choice, according to Freire, is fairly simple: teachers either
work ‘jar the liberation of the people-their humanization-or for their domestica
tion, their domination.” The practice of teaching, however, is anything but simple.
According to Freire, a teacher’s most crucial skill is his or her ability to assist stu
dents’ struggle to gain control over the conditions of their lives, and this means
helping them not only to know but “to know that they know.”
Freire edited, along with Henry A. Giroux of Miami University in Ohio, a se
ries of books on education and teaching. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the
World, a book for the series, Freire describes the interrelationship between reading
the written word and understanding the world that surrounds us.
My parents introduced me to reading the word at a certain moment
in this rich experience of understanding my immediate world. Deci
phering the word flowed naturally from reading my particular world;
it was not something superimposed on it. I learned to read and write
on the grounds of the backyard of my house, in the shade
of the mango trees, with words from my world rather
than from the wider world of my parents. The earth was
my blackboard, the sticks my chalk.
For Freire, reading the written word involves understanding
a text in its very particular social and historical context. Thus
reading always involves “critical perception, interpretation,
and rewriting of what is read.”
The “Banking” Concept
of Education
A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level,
inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character.
This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient,
listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical
dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become
lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.
The “Banking” Concept of Education 257
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compart
mentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely
alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the stu
dents with the contents of his narration-contents which are detached from
reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give
them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a
hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.
The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the
sonority of words, not their transforming power. “Four times four is six
teen; the capital of Para is Belem.” The student records, memorizes, and re
peats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means,
or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital
of Para is Belem,” that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means
for Brazil.
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize
mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “contain
ers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely
she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the re
ceptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are
the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating,
the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students
patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of
education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only
as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have
the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.
But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away
through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at
best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, indi
viduals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through inven
tion and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful
inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each
other.
In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by
those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they con
sider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a char
acteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge
as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their
necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his
own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialec
tic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence-but, unlike
the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher.
The raison d’etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its
drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the
teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction
so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.
258 pAULO FREIRE
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On
the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contra
diction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror op
pressive society as a whole:
a. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
b. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
c. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
d. the teacher talks and the students listen-meekly;
e. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
f. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
g. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the
action of the teacher;
h. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were
not consulted) adapt to it;
i. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own
professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the free
dom of the students;
j. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are
mere objects.
It is not surprising that 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
which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of
that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on
them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the
fragmented view of reality deposited in them.
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 trans
formed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a prof
itable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment
in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a
partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to
another and one problem to another.
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the conscious
ness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”} for the
more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily
they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use the bank
ing concept of education in conjunction with a paternalistic social action
apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of
“welfare recipients.” They are treated as individual cases, as marginal per
sons who deviate from the general configuration of a “good, organized,
and just” society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the
healthy society, which must therefore adjust these “incompetent and lazy”
folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need
The “Banking” Concept of Education 259
to be “integrated,” “incorporated” into the healthy society that they have
“forsaken.”
The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not
people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside”-inside
the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to
“integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that
structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such transfor
mation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their
utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of stu
dent conscientiza�iio. o
The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never pro
pose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead
with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat,
and insist upon the importance of learning that, on the contrary, Roger
gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of the banking approach
masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons-the very nega
tion of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.
Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly
(for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do
not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive
that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But,
sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students
to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate real
ity. They may discover through existential experience that their present
way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human.
They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is re
ally a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women
are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or
later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education
seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for
their liberation.
But the humanist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibil
ity to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of
the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual human
ization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and
their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students
in their relations with them.
The banking concept does not admit to such partnership-and necessar
ily so. To resolve the teacher-student contradiction, to exchange the role of
depositor, prescriber, domesticator, for the role of student among students
would be to undermine the power of oppression and serve the cause of
liberation.
conscientizac;iio According to Freire’s translator, “The term conscientizafiiO refers
to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action
against the oppressive elements of reality.”
260 pAULO FREIRE
Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy be
tween human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not
with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In
this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is
rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open
to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside. For example,
my desk, my books, my coffee cup, all the objects before me-as bits of
the world which surrounds me-would be “inside” me, exactly as I am in
side my study right now. This view makes no distinction between being
accessible to consciousness and entering consciousness. The distinction,
however, is essential: the objects which surround me are simply accessible
to my consciousness, not located within it. I am aware of them, but they
are not inside me.
It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the
educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students.
The teacher’s task is to organize a process which already occurs sponta
neously, to “fill” the students by making deposits of information which he
or she considers to constitute true knowledge.2 And since people “receive”
the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive
still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted
person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into prac
tice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose
tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have cre
ated, and how little they question it.
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), the more easily the minority can continue to pre
scribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite
efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,3 the methods for eval
uating “knowledge,” the distance between the teacher and the taught, the
criteria for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to
obviate thinking.
The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in
his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity.
One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one’s students.
Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an
educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.
Yet only through communication can human life hold meaning. The
teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’
thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her
thoughts on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about real
ity, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If
it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the
world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.
Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men
and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm
calls “biophily,” but instead produces its opposite: “necrophily.”
The “Banking” Concept of Education
While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional
manner, the necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all
that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the de
sire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life
mechanically, as if all living persons were things . . . . Memory,
rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts.
The necrophilous person can relate to an object-a flower or a
person-only if he possesses it; hence a threat to his possession
is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with
the world . . . . He loves control, and in the act of controlling he
kills life. 4
261
Oppression-overwhelming control-is necrophilic; it is nourished by
love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the
interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static,
naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into
receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women
and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.
When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find
themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer. “This suffering due
to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been
disturbed.”5 But the inability to act which causes people’s anguish also
causes them to reject their impotence, by attempting
. . . to restore [their] capacity to act. But can [they], and how?
One way is to submit to and identify with a person or group
having power. By this symbolic participation in another per
son’s life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality
[they] only submit to and become part of those who act. 6
Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behavior by
the oppressed, who, by identifying with charismatic leaders, come to feel
that they themselves are active and effective. The rebellion they express
as they emerge in the historical process is motivated by that desire to act
effectively. The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domina
tion and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social
peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn-logically,
from their point of view-“the violence of a strike by workers and [can]
call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the
strike.”7
Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of stu
dents, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of
indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation
is not made in the nai:ve hope that the dominant elites will thereby simply
abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists
to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pur
suit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may
a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society.
The revolutionary society which practices banking education is either
262 PAULO FREIRE
misguided or mistrusting of people. In either event, it is threatened by the
specter of reaction.
Unfortunately, those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves
surrounded and influenced by the climate which generates the banking
concept, and often do not perceive its true significance or its dehumanizing
power. Paradoxically, then, they utilize this same instrument of alienation
in what they consider an effort to liberate. Indeed, some “revolutionaries”
brand as “innocents,” “dreamers,” or even “reactionaries” those who would
challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by
allen’!!ing them. Authentic liberation-the process of humanization-is not
anothef’aeposit to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and re
flection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. Those
truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic
concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, nor the use of bank
ing methods of domination (propaganda, slogans–deposits) in the name of
liberation.
Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking con
cept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as
conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the
world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and
replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their rela
tions with the world. “Problem-posing” education, responding to the
essence of consciousness-intentionality-rejects communiques and em
bodies communications. It epitomizes the special characteristic of con
sciousness: being conscious of, not only as intent on objects but as turned
in upon itself in a Jasperian “split”-consciousness as consciousness of
consciousness.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of in
formation. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from
being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors
teacher on the one hand and students on the other. Accordingly, the practice
of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student
contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations-indispensable to the capacity
of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object
are otherwise impossible.
Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical pat
terns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the prac
tice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. Through
dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease
to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.
The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is him
self taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught
also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.
In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in
order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.
Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each
The “Banking” Concept of Education 263
other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking
education are “owned” by the teacher.
The banking concept (with its tendency to dichotomize everything)
distinguishes two stages in the action of the educator. During the first, he
cognizes a cognizable object while he prepares his lessons in his study or
his laboratory; during the second, he expounds to his students about that
object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the
contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practice any act of
cognition, since the object towards which that act should be directed is the
property of the teacher rather than a medium evoking the critical reflec
tion of both teacher and students. Hence in the name of the “preservation
of culture and knowledge” we have a system which achieves neither true
knowledge nor true culture.
The problem-posing method does not dichotomize the activity of the
teacher-student: she is not “cognitive” at one point and “narrative” at an
other. She is always “cognitive,” whether preparing a project or engaging
in dialogue with the students. He does not regard cognizable objects as his
private property, but as the object of reflection by himself and the stu
dents. In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his
reflections in the reflection of the students. The students-no longer docile
listeners-are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.
The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration,
and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their
own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with
the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the
doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.
Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power,
problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The
former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the lat
ter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in
reality.
Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to them
selves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged
and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because 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. Their response to the challenge
evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually
the students come to regard themselves as committed.
Education as the practice of freedom-as opposed to education as the
practice of domination-denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent,
and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality
apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor
the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In
these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness
neither precedes the world nor follows it.
264 pAULO FREIRE
La conscience et le monde sont donnes d’un meme coup: ex
terieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence
relatif a elle.8
In one of our culture circles in Chile, the group was discussing (based on a
codification) the anthropological concept of culture. In the midst of the
discussion, a peasant who by banking standards was completely ignorant
said: “Now I see that without man there is no world.” When the educator
responded: “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that all the men on earth
were to die, but that the earth itself remained, together with trees, birds,
animals, rivers, seas, the stars . . . wouldn’t all this be a world?” “Oh no,”
the peasant replied emphatically. “There would be no one to say: ‘This is
a world.’ ”
The peasant wished to express the idea that there would be lacking the
consciousness of the world which necessarily implies the world of con
sciousness. I cannot exist without a non-I. In turn, the not-I depends on that
existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes
the world of that consciousness. Hence, the previously cited affirmation of
Sartre: “La conscience et le monde sont donnes d’un meme coup.”
As women and men, simultaneously reflecting on themselves and on
the world, increase the scope of their perception, they begin to direct their
observations towards previously inconspicuous phenomena:
In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness
[Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to the paper, for in
stance. I apprehend it as being this here and now. The appre
hension is a singling out, every object having a background in
experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils,
inkwell, and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also “per
ceived,” perceptually there, in the “field of intuition”; but whilst
I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their di
rection, nor any apprehending of them, not even in a secondary
sense. They appeared and yet were not singled out, were not
posited on their own account. Every perception of a thing has
such a zone of background intuitions or background awareness,
if “intuiting” already includes the state of being turned towards,
and this also is a “conscious experience,” or more briefly a “con
sciousness of” all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co
perceived objective background.9
That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper
implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to “stand out,” as
suming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men
and women begin to single out elements from their “background aware
nesses” and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of their
consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.
In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive
critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find
themselves; they come to see the world not as a ·static reality, but as a reality
The “Banking” Concept of Education 265
in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women
and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are per
ceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that
the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they
perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the
students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world
without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an
authentic form of thought and action.
Once again, the two educational concepts and practices under analysis
come into conflict. Banking education (for obvious reasons) attempts, by
mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human
beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of
demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing ed
ucation regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which
unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance;
problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education
inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy)
the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the
world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of
becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on
creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality; thereby
responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only
when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. In sum: banking
theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowl
edge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and
practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point.
Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the
process of becoming-as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a
likewise unfinished reality. Indeed, in contrast to other animals who are
unfinished, but not historical, people know themselves to be unfinished;
they are aware of their incompletion. In this incompletion and this aware
ness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifesta
tion. The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational
character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.
Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be, it
must become. Its “duration” (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is
found in the interplay of the opposites permanence and change. The bank
ing method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary; problem
posing education-which accepts neither a “well-behaved” present nor a
predetermined future-roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes
revolutionary.
Problem-posing education is revolutionary futurity. Hence, it is
prophetic (and, as such, hopeful). Hence, it corresponds to the historical
nature of humankind. Hence, it affirms women and men as beings who
transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom im
mobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only
266 PAULO FREIRE
be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that
they can more wisely build the future. Hence, it identifies with the move
ment which engages people as beings aware of their incompletion-an
historical movement which has its point of departure, its Subjects and its
objective.
The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves.
But since people do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the
movement must begin with the human-world relationship. Accordingly,
the point of departure must always be with men and women in the “here
and now,” which constitutes the situation within which they are sub
merged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by
starting from this situation-which determines their perception of it–can
they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state
not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting-and therefore chal
lenging.
Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men’s fa
talistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents
this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the ob
ject of their cognition, the nai:ve or magical perception which produced
their fatalism gives way to perception which is able to perceive itself even
as it perceives reality, and can thus be critically objective about that reality.
A deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to appre
hend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation.
Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over
which men feel themselves to be in control. If people, as historical beings
necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not
control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity.
Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in
the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important;
to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change
them into objects.
This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization
the people’s historical vocation. The pursuit of full humanity, however,
cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship
and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations be
tween oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while
he prevents others from being so. Attempting to be more human, individual
istically, leads to having more, egotistically, a form of dehumanization. Not
that it is not fundamental to have in order to be human. Precisely because it
is necessary, some men’s having must not be allowed to constitute an ob
stacle to others’ having, must not consolidate the power of the former to
crush the latter.
Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits
as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for
their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to be
come Subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism
The “Banking” Concept of Education 267
and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their
false perception of reality. The world-no longer something to be described
with deceptive words-becomes the object of that transforming action by
men and women which results in their humanization.
Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of
the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin
to question: Why? While only a revolutionary society can carry out this
education in systematic terms, the revolutionary leaders need not take full
power before they can employ the method. In the revolutionary process,
the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justi
fied on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a
genuinely revolutionary fashion. They must be revolutionary-that is to
say, dialogical-from the outset.
NOTES
1Simone de Beauvoir, La pensee de droite, aujourd’hui (Paris); ST, El pensamiento politico
de Ia derecha (Buenos Aires, 1963), p. 34.
2This concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the “digestive” or “nutritive” concept
of education, in which knowledge is “fed” by the teacher to the students to “fill them out.”
See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une idee fundamentale de Ia phenomenologie de Husser!: L’inten
tionalite,” Situations I (Paris, 1947).
‘For example, some professors specify in their reading lists that a book should be
read from pages 10 to 15-and do this to “help” their students!
4Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York, 1966), p. 41.
51bid., p. 31.
61bid.
‘Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1960), p. 130.
8Sartre, op. cit., p. 32. [The passage is obscure but could be read as “Consciousness
and the world are given at one and the same time: the exterior world as it enters con
sciousness is relative to our ways of seeing and understanding that world.”-Editors’
note]
‘Edmund Husser!, Ideas-General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London, 1969),
pp. 105-06.
QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING
1. While Freire speaks powerfully about the politics of the classroom, he pro
vides few examples of actual classroom situations. As you go back through
the essay, try to ground (or to test) what he says with examples of your
own. What would take place in a “problem-posing” class in English, his
tory, psychology, or math? What is an “authentic form of thought and ac
tion”? How might you describe what Freire refers to as “reflection”? What,
really, might teachers be expected to learn from their students? What ex
ample can you give of a time when you were “conscious of consciousness”
and it made a difference to you with your schoolwork?
268 PAULO FREIRE
You might also look for moments when Freire does provide examples
of his own. On page 260, for example, Freire makes the distinction be
tween a student’s role as a “spectator” and as “re-creator” by referring to
his own relationship to the objects on his desk. How might you explain this
distinction? Or, how might you use the example of his books and coffee
cup to explain the distinction he makes between “being accessible to con
sciousness” and “entering consciousness”?
2. Freire uses two terms drawn from Marxist literature: praxis and alienation.
From the way these words are used in the essay, how would you define
them? And how might they be applied to the study of education?
3. A writer can be thought of as a teacher and a reader as a student. If you
think of Freire as your teacher in this essay, does he enact his own princi
ples? Does he speak to you as though he were making deposits in a bank?
Or is there a way in which the essay allows for dialogue? Look for sections
in the essay you could use to talk about the role Freire casts you in as a
reader.
ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING
1. Surely all of us, anyone who has made it through twelve years of formal
education, can think of a class, or an occasion outside of class, to serve as a
quick example of what Freire calls the “banking” concept of education,
where students were turned into “containers” to be “filled” by their teach
ers. If Freire is to be useful to you, however, he must do more than enable
you to call up quick examples. He should allow you to say more than that a
teacher once treated you like a container or that a teacher once gave you
your freedom.
Write an essay that focuses on a rich and illustrative incident from
your own educational experience and read it (that is, interpret it) as Freire
would. You will need to provide careful detail: things that were said
and done, perhaps the exact wording of an assignment, a textbook, or a
teacher’s comments. And you will need to turn to the language of Freire’s
argument, to take key phrases and passages and see how they might be
used to investigate your case.
To do this you will need to read your account as not simply the story
of you and your teacher, since Freire is not writing about individual per
sonalities (an innocent student and a mean teacher, a rude teacher, or a
thoughtless teacher) but about the roles we are cast in, whether we choose
to be or not, by our culture and its institutions. The key question, then, is
not who you were or who your teacher was but what roles you played
and how those roles can lead you to better understand the larger narra
tive or drama of Education (an organized attempt to “regulate the way
the world ‘enters into’ the students.”
Freire would not want you to work passively or mechanically, how
ever, as though you were following orders. He would want you to make
your own mark on the work he has begun. Use your example, in other
words, as a way of testing and examining what Freire says, particularly
those passages that you find difficult or obscure.
The “Banking” Concept of Education 269
2. Problem-posing education, according to Freire, “sets itself the task of de
mythologizing”; it “stimulates true reflection and action”; it allows students
to be “engaged in inquiry and creative transformation.” These are grand
and powerful phrases, and it is interesting to consider what they might
mean if applied to the work of a course in reading and writing.
If the object for study were Freire’s essay, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of
Education,” what would Freire (or a teacher determined to adapt his prac
tices) ask students to do with the essay? What writing assignment might he
set for his students? Prepare that assignment, or a set of questions or
guidelines or instructions (or whatever) that Freire might prepare for his
class.
Once you’ve prepared the writing assignment, write the essay that
you think would best fulfill it. And, once you’ve completed the essay, go
on, finally, to write the teacher’s comments on it-to write what you think
Freire, or a teacher following his example, might write on a piece of stu
dent work.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
1. Freire says,
Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to them
selves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged
and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the
challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a
theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increas
ingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. (p. 263)
Students learn to respond, Freire says, through dialogue with their teach
ers. Freire could be said to serve as your first teacher here. He has raised the
issue for you and given you some language you can use to frame questions
and to imagine the possibilities of response.
Using one of the essays in this book as a starting point, pose a problem
that challenges you and makes you feel obliged to respond, a problem
that, in Freire’s terms, relates to you “in the world and with the world.”
This is a chance for you, in other words, to pose a Freirian question and
then to write a Freirian essay, all as an exercise in the practice of freedom.
When you are done, you might reread what you have written to see
how it resembles or differs from what you are used to writing. What are
the indications that you are working with greater freedom? If you find evi
dence of alienation or “domination,” to what would you attribute it and
what, then, might you do to overcome it?
2. Freire writes about the distribution of power and authority in the classroom
and argues that education too often alienates individuals from their own
historical situation. Richard Rodriguez, in “The Achievement of Desire”
(p. 562), writes about his education as a process of difficult but necessary
alienation from his home, his childhood, and his family. And he writes
about power-about the power that he gained and lost as he became
increasingly successful as a student.
270 PAULO FREIRE
But Freire and Rodriguez write about education as a central event in
the shaping of an adult life. It is interesting to imagine what they might
have to say to each other. Write a dialogue between the two in which they
discuss what Rodriguez has written in “The Achievement of Desire.”
What would they say to each other? What questions would they ask? How
would they respond to each other in the give-and-take of conversation?
Note: This should be a dialogue, not a debate. Your speakers are trying
to learn something about each other and about education. They are not
trying to win points or convince a jury.
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