Officials treat citizens as passive recipients of stored expert knowledge.

Evidence

If all we needed was an expert to make decisions for us, we would not need democracy — we could just have a scientist, a lawyer, and an economist make our decisions for us. The officials treated knowledge as an object which they had stored up and could deposit into the spongy brains of the citizenry — the “‘banking theory of knowledge’’ (Freire 1970). Activists, in contrast, wanted to help produce knowledge, through discussion. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1381

Categorization

• DEFINE: Brings in Freire’s ‘banking theory of knowledge’ as a label for officials’ model of citizen education.
• XREF: Connects to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where banking education is the passive-deposit model — same concept transplanted from classrooms to civic meetings. — connects to: Expert delegation and naturalized narratives manufacture passive consent to capitalism — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 27; Technocracy is the power of experts to discipline citizens. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 216; Modern democracy depends on insulated expert knowledge for its administrative state — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 189

Broader Connections

• Technocracy is the power of experts to discipline citizens. #expands (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 216
• Expert delegation and naturalized narratives manufacture passive consent to capitalism #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 27