The Good Teacher and The Good Pupil - Critique Of The Teacher-Student Relationship

Paulo Freire, courtesy Paulo Freire

Institute Critique of the Teacher- Student

Relationship in the "Banking"

Concept of Education

Introduction

At the very least, education implies change. At its highest, education implies rapid evolution, revolution or transmutation. The greater the perception of present inadequacies and imperfections, the greater the spur for radical change or transmutation. The stage through which we are passing in human history is marked by crises in which the perception of human inadequacies becomes increasingly acute. We are dissatisfied with ourselves, both individually and collectively. If we define justice as Plato did, as a state in which everyone occupies his proper place in a social organization, then the whole world is in a state of injustice. Things, events, and men are not where they ought to be. In such circumstances, education must be ^ a process of total revolution and transmutation.

Education is fundamentally what takes place in the body, mind and heart of the pupil; what happens in the pupil depends largely on the teacher-pupil relationship; this relationship determines and is determined by the educational system; and the educational system is overwhelmingly determined by the economic, social and cultural relations in human society. An imperfect society cannot hope to provide a just educational system, right relationships between teacher and pupil and valid pedagogical processes. It is equally true that imperfect human beings cannot create a perfect society, and so long as human beings continue to remain within the narrow grooves of their present limited consciousness, we cannot hope to create a just society. The revolutionary process, therefore, must operate both within the educational system

and outside it. An awakened teacher and an awakened pupil can participate in this revolution by revolutionizing their own relationships and processes of teaching and learning.

There is widespread oppression in the world. It aims at conquest; its methods of action are manipulative; it invades individuals and groups and inhibits creativity and expression. Oppression aims at preserving itself; it perpetuates the division of the oppressor and the oppressed; it resists any revolutionary movement advocating dialogue, co-operation, unity, humanization, and spiritualization. In the teaching- learning process, oppression tends to perpetuate the status quo. It advises teachers to teach and pupils to learn, while opposing the processes of education where teachers become learners and where students can teach their own teachers. It opposes the dialogic character of the teaching-learning process.

Paulo Freire's book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a stimulating exposition of the phenomenon of oppression in our educational system and society and the manner in which this oppressive action can be reversed and defeated. Freire criticizes the present concept of education, calling it the "banking concept", where knowledge is a gift bestowed by those considered knowledgeable upon those who are not. "Banking" education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings and minimizes or annuls the creative power of pupils. It reacts almost instinctively against any educational experiment which stimulates the critical faculties. Freire points out that oppressors manifest interest in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, but not the oppressive situation itself.

The educator's role in "banking" education is to regulate the way the world "enters into " the student, to "fill" the students with deposits of information considered as true knowledge. "Banking" education is "necrophilous" — a word which Freire explains by quoting the following passage from Erich Fromm' s The Heart of Man:

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 desire 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.¹

1, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 50-51.

The process of humanization, on the other hand, is a process of liberation, and authentic liberation is not merely another "deposit" to be made in men.

Freire says, "Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men 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 banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans — deposits) in the name of liberation. "¹

Freire advocates "problem-posing" education, the creation of dialogic relations between teachers and pupils. He says, "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 himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. "²

Freire makes it clear that problem-posing education is revolutionary and futuristic in character. "... it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future. "³

Freire is not merely an armchair philosopher but a radical who, having known poverty and hunger and oppression first-hand, evolved his educational methods while teaching illiterates in Latin America. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is not the result of thought and study alone, but is rooted in concrete situations observed during the course of his highly original and successful educative work. Freire is a great lover of humanity and a seminal thinker whose influence may result in fundamental changes in our educational system. Towards the end of his preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he says: "From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. "⁴

We present here Chapter II of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a scathing criticism of contemporary teacher-student relationships and an insightful call for change.

1. Ibid., p. 52.

2. Ibid:, p. 53.

3. Ibid., p. 57

4. Ibid., p. 19.

The burdened child, Photo EAVP, India, 2005

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 teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students 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 sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes and repeats 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 still, it turns them into "containers", into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles 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 men 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, men cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re- invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men 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 consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic 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 dialectic, 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.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

1. The teacher teaches and the students are taught.

2. The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.

3. The teacher thinks and the students are thought about.

4. The teacher talks and the students listen — meekly.

5. The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.

6. The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply.

7. The teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher.

8. The teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it.

9. The teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional

authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.

10. 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 capacity 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 use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable 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 is always seeking out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in "changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them" (Simone de Beauvoir in La Pensee de Droite Aujourd'hui) 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 banking 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 men 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 to be "integrated", "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken".

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not marginals, are not men 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 transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientization.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they consider reality critically. 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 men into automatons — the very negation 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 reality. 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 really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men 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 possibility to materialize. From the outset, his efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in men and their creative power. To achieve this, he must be a partner of the students in his relations with them.

The banking concept does not admit to such a partnership — and necessarily 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 under- mine the power of oppression and to serve the cause of liberation.

Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; man is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, man is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he 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 inside 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. His task is to organize a process which already happens spontaneously, to "fill" the students by making deposits of information which he considers constitute true knowledge.¹ And since men "receive" the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted

man, because he is more "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, 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 prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements,² the methods for evaluating "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 his students, nor can he impose his thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, 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 as objects, it cannot promote the development of what From, in The Heart of Man, calls "biophily", but instead produces its opposite: "necrophily".

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 desire 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.

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 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, men suffer. "This suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed", says From. But the inability to act which causes men'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 person's life, [men have] the illusion of acting, when in reality [they] only submit to and become apart of those who act.

Populist manifestations perhaps best exemplify this type of behaviour 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 domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order and social peace (the peace of the elites, that is). 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" (Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society).

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, 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 naive 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 the methods of banking education in the pursuit of liberation, as they would only negate that pursuit itself. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society. The revolutionary society which practises banking education is either misguided or mistrustful of men. In either event, it is threatened by the spectre 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 very 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 men by alienating them. Authentic liberation — the process of humanization — is not another "deposit" to be made in men. Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men 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 banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans — deposits) in the name of liberation.

The truly committed must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness directed towards the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit- making and replace it with the posing of the problems of men in their relations with the world. "Problem-posing" education, responding to the essence of consciousness — intentionality — rejects communiques and embodies communication. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness: 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 information. 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 first of all demands a resolution of the teacher-student contradiction. Dialogical relations — indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object — are otherwise impossible.

Indeed, problem-posing education, breaking the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function of being the practice 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 himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their 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. Men teach each 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 on that object. The students are not called upon to know, but to memorize the contents narrated by the teacher. Nor do the students practise 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 reflection 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: he is not "cognitive" at one point and "narrative" at another. He 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 students. 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-examines his 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 anaesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Students, as they are increasingly faced with problems relating to themselves 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 under- standings; 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 men. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it. "La conscience et le monde sont formes d'un meme coup; exterieur par essence a la conscience, le monde est, par essence, relatif a elle",³ writes Sartre. 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 consciousness. "I" cannot exist without a "not I". In turn, the "not I" depends on that existence. The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world that consciousness. Hence the previously cited affirmation of Sartre: "La conscience et Ie monde sont  formes d'un meme coup."

As 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. Husseri writes:

In perception properly so-called, as an explicit awareness [Gewahren], I am turned towards the object, to the paper, for instance. I apprehend it as being this here and now. The apprehension is a singling out, every object having a background in experience. Around and about the paper lie books, pencils, ink-well and so forth, and these in a certain sense are also "perceived", perceptually there, in the "field of intuition"; but whilst I was turned towards the paper there was no turning in their direction, 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 "consciousness of all indeed that in point of fact lies in the co- perceived objective background.

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", assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge. Thus, men begin to single out elements from their "background awarenesses" and to reflect upon them. These elements are now objects of men's consideration, and, as such, objects of their action and cognition.

In problem-posing education, men 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 in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action men 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 men exist in the world;

problem-posing education sets itself the task of de-mythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education 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 men 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 men 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 acknowledge men as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take man's historicity as their starting point.

Problem-posing education affirms men 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, men know themselves to be unfinished; they are aware of their incompleteness. In this incompleteness and this awareness lie the very roots of education as an exclusively human manifestation. The unfinished character of men 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 andchange. The banking 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), and so corresponds to the historical nature of man. Thus, it affirms men as beings who transcend themselves, who move forward and look ahead, for whom immobility represents a fatal threat, for whom looking at the past must only 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 movement which engages men as beings aware of their incompleteness — an historical movement which has its point of departure, its subjects and its objective.

The point of departure of the movement lies in men themselves. But since men do not exist apart from the world, apart from reality, the movement must begin with the men-world relationship. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with men in the "here and now", which constitutes the situation within which they are

submerged, 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 challenging.

Whereas the banking method directly or indirectly reinforces men's fatalistic perception of their situation, the problem-posing method presents this very situation to them as a problem. As the situation becomes the object of their cognition, the naive 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 men to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation. Resignation gives way to the drive for transformation and inquiry, over which men feel themselves in control. If men, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other men in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of men's humanity. Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate men from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.

This movement of inquiry must be directed towards humanization — man'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 between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. The attemptto be more human, individualistically, 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'shaving must not be allowed to constitute an obstacle to others' having, to consolidate the power of the former to crush the latter.

Problem-posing education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that men subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation. To that end, it enables teachers and students to become subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables men to overcome their false perception of reality. The world — no longer something to be described with deceptive words — becomes the object of that trans- forming action by men 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:

Paulo Freire, courtesy Paulo Freire Institute

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, justified 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.

From Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 45-59.

References

1. This 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 fondamentale de la phenomenologie de Husserl:  l' intentionalite", Situations I .

2. For example, some teachers specify in their reading lists that a book should be read from pages 10 to 15 — and do this to "help" their students!

3. "Consciousness and the world are formed at the same time. The world, being by essence external to consciousness, is by essence relative to it."

Biography

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, the centre of one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas in the Third World. As the economic crisis in 1929 in the United States began to affect Brazil, the precarious stability of Freire's middle-class family gave way and he found himself sharing the plight of the "wretched of the earth". He came to know the gnawing pangs of hunger and fell behind in school because of the listlessness it produced. It also led him at the age of eleven to make a vow to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger, so that other children would not have to know the agony he was then experiencing. As he grew up, it became clear to him that one of the main reasons for chronic poverty and the "culture of silence" around it was the educational system. As he studied and experienced the world of education, he applied the insights of many contemporary thinkers and philosophers, such as Sartre, Mounier, Erich Fromm, Louis Althusser, Martin Luther King, Che Guevera, Unamuno and Marcuse. But he arrived at his own prescription for education, which seeks to respond to the concrete realities of Latin America.

In 1959, Freire presented his philosophy of education in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Recife. Later, he worked as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education in the same university. His radical methods were widely used in literacy campaigns throughout north- east Brazil. But the old order began to consider him a threat, and he was jailed immediately after the military coup in 1964. Released seventy days later and encouraged to leave the country, Freire went to Chile, where he spent five years working with UNESCO and the Chilean Institute for Agrarian Reform in programmes of adult education. He also acted as consultant at Harvard University's School of Education, and worked in close association with a number of groups engaged in new educational experiments in rural and urban areas.

Although Freire began his career as a Brazilian educator, in the course of a few years his thought and work spread from north-east Brazil to the entire continent, and made a profound impact not just in the field of education but on the overall struggle for national development. Today, the work of Paulo Freire is being gradually acknowledged even in the United States.

Freire has written many articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and his first book, Educacao como Pratica da Liberdade, was published in Brazil in 1967. In 1970, Cultural Action for Freedom appeared as the English translation. In this book, he pointed out that learning is not a matter of

memorization and repetition, but of reflecting critically on the very processes of reading and writing, and on the profound significance of language itself. In this book he outlined the principles' which underlay his highly original and spectacularly successful method of teaching literacy, which sought to challenge the basic concepts that dominated education and culture in the slums and villages of Latin America. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first published in Great Britain by Sheed and Ward in 1972.

Many people today are writing and thinking about education in radical terms. Ivan D. Illich for instance, in Deschooling Society argues that school is one of the major means by which the status quo is preserved. He points out that school is not only inefficient in terms of education, but also profoundly divisive. Everett Reiner, in his book School is Dead argues that for most people schools are "institutional props for privilege". He sees as an urgent priority a consideration of alternatives in regard to the content, organization and finance of education and in regard to the very concept of education itself, its nature and possible functions in a future society. UNESCO has spearheaded a radical programme of education in its publication Learning to Be. There are other important and radical trends in the educational field today. Against this background Paulo Freire can be considered one of those radical thinkers whose influence may ultimately bring about fundamental changes in our educational system. Freire combines a compassion for the wretched of the earth with intellectual and practical confidence and personal humility.