After making the transition from my high school education to my new college education, I find it easy to see stark differences between the two. Paulo Freire's work entitled, "The "Banking" Concept of Education," is an excellent demonstrator of the various types of education offered in the United States today. He remarks about this "banking" concept where the student is merely a piggy bank of sorts into which the teacher makes deposits of information. "In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire 260). Throughout my career as a student, I encountered numerous situations of this kind with different teachers and subjects, and reading Freire's views on the "banking" concept has led me to notice how much a teaching style affects the students being taught.
In elementary school, the "banking" concept is a commonly used means of teaching students the basics, such as the alphabet, numbers, colors, and ways of completing simple mathematics. These bits of information are important; however, they are constantly used throughout our lives in hundreds of aspects, and we are able to truly learn them from that repetition. Yet, as I grew up, I saw many other instances of the "banking" concept where teachers were simply giving me facts or formulas or various other types of information that they expected me to memorize. A lot of it was useless, and I admit that I only learned a lot of things just for the exams, and then forgot about them afterwards. However, there are many pieces of information, including different techniques and interesting facts, that I "learned" in these classes and wish I could still remember. Why is this? The most logical explanation I can think of is that the teachers I was "learning" from were making use of the "banking" concept and its habit of putting forth the information, but never actually building upon it and actively teaching it.
