Freire’s banking model of education was met with active hostility from university professors

Evidence

Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh are two of the “teachers” who have touched me deeply with their work. When I first began college, Freire’s thought gave me the support I needed to challenge the “banking system” of education, that approach to learning that is rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store it. Early on, it was Freire’s insistence that education could be the practice of freedom that encouraged me to create strategies for what he called “conscientization” in the classroom. Translating that term to critical awareness and engagement, I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer. Education as the practice of freedom was continually undermined by professors who were actively hostile to the notion of student participation. Freire’s work affirmed that education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor. … His philosophy was similar to Freire’s emphasis on “praxis”— action and reflection upon the world in order to change it. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 39

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘banking system’ of education and ‘conscientization’ as hooks translates them.
• XREF: Banking model recalls Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; engages Marxism and Form reading on knowledge. — connects to: Professors can espouse liberatory theory while practicing domination in class; University professors are highly conformist and suppress views conflicting with their academy’s beliefs — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 129