Everyone has a different way of learning. Some enjoy listening to lectures and taking notes, others benefit from a hands-on learning experience, and others favor doing both. I will be discussing two learning techniques that Paulo Freire discussed in his analysis of a teacher-student relationship entitled, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." One of the techniques discussed is called the "banking" concept, and the other is called the "problem-posing" method.
             I will first discuss the concept of banking, where you have the students as depositories and the teacher is the depositor. With the teacher, or educator, as the narrator in the classroom, the students are lead to memorize what is said. For example, the educator may say, "The square root of 100 is 10." Later, when asked what the square root of 100 is, the students will respond with the answer 10, without knowing how they got the response. To the teacher, the more information that is fed to the students, the better he or she is as a teacher.
             In education, there must be a solution of the teacher-student contradiction, but this solution cannot be found in the banking concept. In contrast, this "banking" system maintains the contradiction through the following practices: (1) the teacher teaches and the students are taught, (2) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing, (3) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about, (4) the teacher talks and the students listen, (5) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined, (6) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply, (7) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher, (8) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students adapt to it, (9) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, and (10) the teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the students are mere ob...