Paulo Freire explains in this glossed segment of his 1968 book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” why formal education – as part of public administration - keeps power structures in place. He also shows why formal education is a powerful agent of capitalism and the main cause of why intradisciplinary solutions to climate and social crisis have not been found so far: the banking model of education, as Freire calls it, keeps knowledge structurally separated in an assembly line of highly specialized faculties. As of 2025, his analysis gives me hope that advanced artificial intelligence will not only transform education but also social power structures and thus establish climate justice.
According to Freire, liberation is never about the democratization of violence, human misery and obscene poverty. Liberation that resolves the contradiction between the oppressor and the oppressed can only do so by the appearance of the new man and women, neither oppressor nor oppressed, but man and women in the process of liberation. The inability to resolve the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed to make linkages and to become a tramp of the obvious, as Freire would say, is directly related to what Freire identified in the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” as the failings of a prevalent banking model of education, a process through which education becomes an act of depositing in which the student is the depository and the teacher is the depositor.
Instead of communicating the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits while the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the banking concept of education in which the scope of action allowed to the student extends only as far as receiving, filling and storing the deposits. The banking model of education is largely at work in instrumental literacy programs for the poor in the form of a competency-based skills banking approach to schooling and even through higher education, the highest form of instrumental literacy for the rich acquired in the form of professional specialization (gloss: e.g. training to become a notary, dentist, lawyer, or surgeon).
However, despite their apparent differences, the two approaches share one common feature: they both prevent the development of critical thinking that enables one to read the world critically and to understand the reasons and linkages and to behind what may appear seemingly obvious but remains ill understood (gloss: e.g. class self-awareness). Literacy for the poor through the banking concept of education is by large characterized by mindless, meaningless drills and exercises given in preparation for multiple choice exams and writing gobbledygook in imitation of the psychobabble that surrounds them. This banking and instrumental approach to education sets the stage for the anesthetization of the mind as poet John Ashbery eloquently captures in “What is Poetry”:
In school all the thoughts got combed out.
What was left was like a field.
The educational cone for those teachers who have uncritically accepted the banking model of education is embodied in practice sheets and workbooks, in mindless computer drills and practices, that mark and control the pace of routinization. This drill and practice assembly line numbing the student’s capacity of thought leaves the ground prepared for the teacher’s instruction with a narration with the teacher as narrator leaves the student to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles, to be filled by the teacher. The more meekly the receptacle permit themselves to be filled, the better student they are. The students have been measured by high stakes tests that reflect often militaristic control transaction of the teacher’s narration and the student’s memorization of the mechanically narrated content. Hence the dominant effects of this mechanistic banking education inevitably create educational structures that favor rote learning and necessarily reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of capital and anesthetizing students’ critical abilities to domesticate social order for its self-preservation.
Instead of communicating the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits while the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the banking concept of education in which the scope of action allowed to the student extends only as far as receiving, filling and storing the deposits. The banking model of education is largely at work in instrumental literacy programs for the poor in the form of a competency-based skills banking approach to schooling and even through higher education, the highest form of instrumental literacy for the rich acquired in the form of professional specialization (gloss: e.g. training to become a notary, dentist, lawyer, or surgeon).
However, despite their apparent differences, the two approaches share one common feature: they both prevent the development of critical thinking that enables one to read the world critically and to understand the reasons and linkages and to behind what may appear seemingly obvious but remains ill understood (gloss: e.g. class self-awareness). Literacy for the poor through the banking concept of education is by large characterized by mindless, meaningless drills and exercises given in preparation for multiple choice exams and writing gobbledygook in imitation of the psychobabble that surrounds them. This banking and instrumental approach to education sets the stage for the anesthetization of the mind as poet John Ashbery eloquently captures in “What is Poetry”:
In school all the thoughts got combed out.
What was left was like a field.
The educational cone for those teachers who have uncritically accepted the banking model of education is embodied in practice sheets and workbooks, in mindless computer drills and practices, that mark and control the pace of routinization. This drill and practice assembly line numbing the student’s capacity of thought leaves the ground prepared for the teacher’s instruction with a narration with the teacher as narrator leaves the student to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into containers, into receptacles, to be filled by the teacher. The more meekly the receptacle permit themselves to be filled, the better student they are. The students have been measured by high stakes tests that reflect often militaristic control transaction of the teacher’s narration and the student’s memorization of the mechanically narrated content. Hence the dominant effects of this mechanistic banking education inevitably create educational structures that favor rote learning and necessarily reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of capital and anesthetizing students’ critical abilities to domesticate social order for its self-preservation.
At the other end of the spectrum, the domestication of the social order is achieved by an equally mechanistic approach to the education for the rich by the hyper-specialization that, on the one hand deposits high level skills, and on the other discourages the linkages of different bodies of knowledge in the name of pure and specialized science that produces a specialist subject who according to the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe but is radically ignorant of all the rest (gloss: compare e.g. Return to Meaning – a social science with something to say)
How much rote learning is necessary to harness lateral thinking? How much value training and empathy building is required to devote one’s life not to personal profit but collective progress i.e. genuine growth?
