Post 6

The Banking Concept by Paulo Freire is an essay on the way things are taught in today's society and the problem with that.

On page 111 of Educational Foundations Freire talks about a conversation with a peasant that went as follows: ""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 remained, together with trees, birds, animals, rivers, seas, the stars...wouldn't all this be a world." "oh no," the peasant replied. "There would be no one to say. 'This is a world.'""

This reminded me of a quote from the philosopher Descartes, "I think therefore I am." This is important because it tells us that the only thing we can truly know is that we exist because we are thinking. We perceive the world, call it a world, and all the things in the world by name too. Without us thinking this they would not exist in the capacity that we think of them. They would not have the name we gave them. If we were to discover a new creature, and call it a gobbler, it is only a gobbler from that moment on. Before that it wasn't a gobbler because it didn't exist in our minds before then and therefore there was not such a thing as a gobbler. In this way, without us identifying the world to be the world, it wouldn't be a world.

Throughout the whole essay the words 'oppressed' and 'oppressors' are used frequently. This is extremely harsh language, but makes a huge impact on the reader of the essay. He makes a specifically harsh distinction because it allows us to see how bad the Banking method actually is. However, I got slightly confused about who in particular were the oppressors. This is because the oppressed were obviously those being taught, but sometimes it was also the teachers themselves. Which makes me wonder when we know who is the oppressed teacher and who is an oppressing teacher. My thoughts are that it's probably the oppressed teacher is unaware of the way in which they are teaching and is not aware of another style, the oppressive teacher is the one that recognizes another way but makes a conscious decision to use the Banking Method instead.