“The Banking Model of Education: Paolo Freire’s Critique of Traditional Education and Class Oppression”

Read pp. 71-77 (to the end of first full paragraph on p. 77) of Chapter 2 from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Published in English in 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed presents Freire’s ideas about the problems with traditional models of education. He argues that these traditional models of education have reinforced unfair class distinctions, leading to the oppression of the poor. Here, we read an excerpt from just one small excerpt of the entire work, and, as a result, we will be concentrating simply on Freire’s analysis of what he calls “the banking model” of education.
Freire’s ideas were controversial when they were published, and they continue to be so. It is worth engaging with controversial texts in order to understand how the author makes his/her argument. Rhetorical analysis gives us the tools to do so without feeling threatened by the author’s ideas.