In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he calls the banking system of education. In the banking system, the student is seen as an object where the teacher must place information. The student has no responsibility for cognition; they must memorize or internalize what the teacher tells them. Paulo Freire was very much opposed to the banking system. He argued that the banking system is a system of control, not a system meant to educate successfully. In the banking system, the teacher is meant to mold and change the students’ behavior, sometimes in a way that almost resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force information down the student’s throat that the student may not believe or care about.
This process eventually leads most students to dislike school. It also teaches them to develop a resistance and a negative attitude towards learning in general, to the point where most people won’t seek knowledge unless it is required for a grade in a class. Freire thought that the only way to have a real education in which the students engage in cognition was to change from the banking system into what he defined as problem-posing education. Freire described how a problem-posing educational system could work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed 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 real context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated”(81). The educational system developed by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and effective form of problem-posing education that leads its students to increase their desire to learn instead of inhibiting it.
Freire presents two significant problems with the banking concept. The first one is that in the banking concept, a student is not required to be cognitively active. The student is meant to memorize and repeat information, not understand it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the subject, and transforms them into passive learners who don’t understand or believe what they are being taught but accept and repeat it because they have no other option.
The banking concept’s second and more dramatic consequence is that it gives enormous power to those who choose what is being taught to oppress those who are obliged to learn and accept it. Freire explains that the problem is that the teacher holds all the keys, has all the answers, and does all the thinking. The Montessori approach to education does the exact opposite. It makes students think and solve problems to arrive e at their conclusions. The teachers help guide the student, but they do not tell the student what is true or false or how a problem can be solved. In the Montessori system, even if a student finds a way to solve a problem that is slower or less effective than a standard mechanical way of solving the problem, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s process because this way, the student learns to find solutions by themself and to think of creative ways to work on different problems.
The educational system in the United States, especially from grade school to the end of high school, is almost identical to Freire’s banking approach to education. During high school, most of what students do is sit in a class and take notes. They are then graded on how well they complete homework and projects, and finally, they are tested to show that they can reproduce or use the knowledge taught. Most of the time, the students are only receptors of information and take no part in creating knowledge. Another way the U.S. education system is practically identical to the banking system of education is the grading system.
Students’ grades primarily reflect how much they comply with the teacher’s ideas and are willing to follow directions. Rates reflect submission to authority and the willingness to do what is told more than they reflect one’s intelligence, interest in the class, or understanding of the material being taught. The U.S. education system rewards those who agree with what is being taught and punishes those who do not. For instance, in a government class in the United States, a student who disagrees that representative democracy is superior to any other form of government will do worse than a student who accepts that representative democracy is better than a direct democracy, socialism, communism, or another state of the social system.
Furthermore, it discourages students from questioning and doing any thinking of their own. Because of our education system’s repetitive and bland nature, most students dislike high school. If they do well on their work, it is merely to obtain a grade instead of learning or exploring a new idea. The Montessori Method advocates child-based teaching, letting the students control their education. In E.M. Standing’s The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing says the Montessori Method “is based on the principle of freedom in a prepared environment”(5).
Maria Montessori started to develop what is now known as the Montessori Method of education in the early twentieth century. Studies done on two groups of students of the ages of 6 and 12 comparing those who learn in a Montessori to those who know in a standard school environment show that despite the Montessori system having no grading system and no obligatory workload, it does as well as the traditional approach in both English and social sciences. Still, Montessori students do much better in mathematics, sciences, and problem-solving. The Montessori method allows students to explore their interests and curiosity freely. Because of this, the Montessori system pushes students toward the active pursuit of knowledge for pleasure, meaning that students will want to learn and find out about things that interest them simply because it is fun to do so.
The Montessori Method focuses on the relations between the child, the adult, and the environment. The child is seen as an individual in development. The Montessori system has a fundamental notion of letting the child be what the child would naturally be. Montessori believed the standard education system causes children to lose many childish traits, some of which are virtues. In Loeffler’s Montessori in Contemporary American Culture, Loeffler states that “among the traits that disappear are not only untidiness, disobedience, sloth, greed, egoism, quarrelsomeness, and instability, but also the so-called ‘creative imagination’, delight in stories, attachment to individuals, play, submissiveness and so forth”.
Because of this perceived loss of the child, the Montessori system enables a child to naturally develop self-confidence and the ability and willingness to actively seek knowledge and find unique solutions to problems by thinking creatively. Another critical difference in how children learn in the Montessori system is that a child has no defined time slot to perform a task in the Montessori approach. Instead, the child can perform a task for as long as he wants. This gives children a better capacity to concentrate and focus on a single charge for an extended time than in the standard education system.
The adult or teacher’s role in the Montessori system marks another fundamental difference between the Montessori s Method and the standard education system. With the Montessori Method, the adult is not meant to teach and order the student constantly. The adult’s job is to guide the child to continue to pursue his curiosities and develop their notions of what is honest, suitable, and accurate. Montessori describes the child as an individual in intense, constant change. From observation, Montessori concluded that if allowed to develop by himself, a child would always find equilibrium with his environment, meaning he would learn not to mistreat others, for example, and interact positively with his peers.
This is important because it leads to one of the Montessori Method’s most deep-seated ideas: adults should not let children feel their presence. This means that although an adult is in the environment with the students, the adult does not necessarily interact with the students unless the students ask the adult a question or request help. Furthermore, the adult must make it so that the students do not feel like they are being observed or judged in any way. The adult can suggest to the children but never orders or tells them what to do or how. The adult must not be felt like an authority figure, but rather almost like another peer of the children.
The consequence of this, not surprisingly, is that a lot less ‘work’ gets done by the students. Nevertheless, the student’s development is dramatically better in the Montessori system than in a standard education system. But how can students who have no obligation to do any work possibly compete with students taught in the traditional approach and do much more work in class and at home? I believe the answer is that while students trained in the standard way are constantly pushed towards disliking school and doing things mechanically without thinking about it, Montessori students are led to explore their interests and enjoy doing so actively. Furthermore, Montessori students are constantly engaged in cognition. They are continuously learning to think in different ways and creating solutions to problems from scratch, as opposed to students in the standard Method of education who only solve problems with the tools or information the teacher gives them to use.
The final important aspect of the Montessori Method is the environment in which the student learns and explores. As mentioned before, it is of utmost importance that the children feel safe and free to do what they want for as long as they wish. It is also essential for the children to have a variety of didactic material to play and learn with. These can be as simple as cards with different letters, which the students use to make other words. In this way, the student can get the idea of the letter being a physical object that can be moved and manipulated to formulate words instead of simply an abstract concept that he must repeatedly write on a piece of paper. Montessori describes a copious amount of didactic materials that she used.
She also tells how effective they were at helping the children grasp concepts such as the formation of sentences, square roots, and division. The didactic materials do not just help the students understand different abstractions from reality. They also make learning a game, giving students a natural joy for learning and thinking about abstract concepts. In The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing talks about a young girl learning to read and play a game. She attempted to read words from cards containing words marked with varying difficulty levels. Standing states about the girl, “She was fairly rushing at this intellectual food. But even in Set 2, most of the words seemed beyond her. At last, she had made out one, M – A – N, MAN. How delighted she was! With what joy did she place the card triumphantly under the picture of the man!”(173). This aspect of the Montessori Method, in which children are left to play different learning games at their will, creates a hunger and excitement for learning.
With the use of didactic materials and allowing students to use them or not use them whenever they want to, the Montessori system gives the students the freedom to learn what they want to when they want to. Especially at a young age, it is much easier and enjoyable for children to learn with didactic materials instead of simply sitting in a classroom and taking notes when they wish they were somewhere else or doing something else the entire time they are meant to be learning. This is especially important when we think about how the standard Method of education, like the banking system, forces students to ‘learn’ even when the students don’t want the information being shoved down their throats, and this leads to a form of artificial learning where students memorize information or to a mechanical process where students do not internalize the information and forget it as soon as they are not being graded on it.
Montessori criticized the standard Method of education greatly. In addition to seeing it as inefficient and outdated, Montessori, like Freire, believed it was oppressive to the students. In her book The Montessori Method, Montessori writes, “The principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy, and therefore, the same principle pervades the school”(16). Montessori then goes on to describe a simple example that illustrates her point. She talks about how chairs are specially designed for classrooms. These classroom chairs, Montessori posits, are made to restrict as much movement as possible, force the children to look forward towards the teacher and make them as visible as possible to the teacher so the children always feel like they are being watched and must behave properly.
Montessori views the standard Method of education as an antagonistic model in which the teacher is fighting the student, constantly trying to control him and repress his childish behavior while attempting to force-feed him the knowledge that the student does not want. Despite the many studies showing that the Montessori Method is more effective and humane than the standard Method, and even though more than 100 years have passed since it was introduced to the United States, very little has changed in how children are educated here.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says that education manipulates and controls the masses. He proposes that the banking system of education exists and persists not because of its effectiveness at getting students to learn but rather at indoctrinating children into believing something that the people who control the schools want them to feel. This leads to an important question. What is more important for the United States: that children grow up being able to think for themselves or that they grow up believing what others deem correct? Here, especially in public high schools, there is a strong emphasis on nationalism, and many ideas are taught as inherently inferior to others.
For example, it is not only taught in schools that capitalism is better and more humane than, for instance, socialism and communism, but rather students are also taught to fear these concepts and to fear the very idea of questioning or thinking about social structures other than capitalism and economic models other than the free market. Furthermore, teachers often promote the false portrayal of the United States as the hero and police of the entire world. The U.S. education system is not meant to liberate students and inspire them to seek knowledge. Still, rather it is intended to keep them in line and is used as a tool to shape a kind of po thinks only as far as is socially acceptable. It is questionable how much our education system is manipulated by the interests of the people who control it. However, it is clear that whether or not our education system is being used to manage the masses, it lends itself well to doing so and can be used to sway people’s opinions and repress ideas that might go against the establishment.
Our current education system is closer to the banking system than to something like the Montessori Method, in which the child’s development is put first, and children are presented with a form of problem-posing education. It is likely difficult to change to a way of teaching that allows students to learn for themselves and be inspired to seek knowledge actively. A good place to start would be to use didactic materials to the extent possible and to present students with different sides of arguments judgment-free. Another important point is that creative thought should always be encouraged, and dissenting ideas should be welcome and debated thoroughly. By transitioning to a problem-posing education system, students would be encouraged to think critically and create different, unique, and inventive ways to solve problems. This change would lead to enormous growth in innovation and scientific development and give students a more humane and interactive way of learning.
