Written Assignment 5 Final
Written Assignment 5 Final
Written Assignment 5 Final
Freire used the term “depositing” in his pedagogy of the oppressed and I will expand this term
here. After studying Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and critical thinking, I have come to
know that Freire was an advocate of emphasizing on creating critical thinking skills in students
With “depositing”, Freire means the depositing of knowledge. Freire was a teacher himself who
was very critical of teachers who see themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge while they
see their students as empty receptacles into which teachers must deposit their knowledge. He
calls this pedagogical approach the “banking method” of education. This pedagogical approach
is similar to the process of colonization, given that the colonizing culture thinks of itself as the
correct and valuable culture, while the colonized culture is deemed as inferior and in need of the
colonizing culture for its own betterment. He believed that the banking method is a violent way
to treat students because students are human beings with their own inclinations and legitimate
ways of thinking. The banking method treats students as though they were things instead of
human beings.
This term has formed the basis of curriculum reform. It is this term which has drawn the
attention of educators to establish a curriculum in which students are not passive but active
learners. We have studied in the previous learning material about the services of John Dewey in
introducing curriculum reforms and we also know that the basis of those reforms was to make
student as active learners in the process which later took the form of a progressive learning. He
(Dewey, 1897) said that education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the
school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information
is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed.
He said that the old banking method is focused on the child's powers and interests. If the child is
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thrown into a passive role as a student, absorbing information, the result is a waste of the child's
education (Dewey, 1897). Moreover, the term “banking method” gave rise to the development of
a democratic classroom and a child-centered curriculum that best meets the needs of all students.
Freire has basically focused on the achievement of liberation and equality of all people through
dialogues. He has focused on the importance of dialogue in the liberation of people and wiping
out the existence of dominant groups within the society. (Freire, 1970 & 1993) said Dialogue
further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create
and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an
elite, but the birthright of all). He also said that only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is
also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and
without communication there can be no true education. He further said that for the anti-dialogical
banking educator, the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will
discourse to his students; and he answers his own question, by organizing his own program
(Freire, 1970 & 1993). I found this to be very valid relative to what Freire has tried to convey in
this chapter as this term focuses on eliminating the authoritarian behavior of teacher in a
classroom. With this term, Freire want to convey that critical thinking should be developed in the
students so that they can question the inequality in education and in society and decides for
themselves that what do they want to study rather studying a textbook set by the elites and taught
by a teacher in an authoritarian way. He believed that education shouldn’t be a one way process
where a teacher will keep depositing knowledge into students and it should be as such where
students are engaged in a dialogue with the teacher and through mutual consensus, design a
curriculum.
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I agree with the Freire’s choice of term since I have also been studying in a system where
students had no voice in what they want to learn. The mode of teaching was completely
authoritarian and the mode of learning was textbooks designed by authorities many years ago. I
have witnessed the difference between a school of elite and a government schools. I have seen
that the system is designed in such a way that government school’s students can never come
parallel to the children of elites as the system of government schools is set as such purposely by
elites to draw a line between the two classes. Freire has used such a fine word of depositing as
the general way of learning in my times was to memorize the books. We were not learning, but
memorizing.
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