Banking Education

Banking education is a term coined by Brazilian educational reformer Paulo Freire to describe the traditional style of education in which the student is just a repository for other people’s ideas the way a bank is a repository for other people’s money. In banking education, students are pushed to memorize and regurgitate information and prefabricated opinions without personally engaging with the material critically or creatively.

Freire writes: “It’s impossible to study seriously if the reader faces a text as though magnetized by the author’s word, mesmerized by a magical force; if the reader behaves passively and becomes 'domesticated,' trying only to memorize the author’s ideas; if the reader lets himself or herself be 'invaded' by what the author affirms; if the reader is transformed into a 'vessel' filled by extracts from an internalized text.”

For me this talk of people being “mesmerized,” “invaded,” and “transformed into vessels” by banking education evokes the image of zombies, hollow corpses possessed and animated by demonic forces that are themselves essentially unthinking viruses or insectile hive minds driven by the blind urge to endlessly self-propagate.

A qliphotic system like banking education demands that humans serve as vessels for its propagation. The more of a person’s being and energy is turned to serving the purposes of qliphotic systems, the less of that person's being and energy is available for serving his or her own soul.

The converse is also true: Impulses of the human soul such as curiosity, creativity, and personal morality interfere with the efforts of banking education to turn students into passive, hollow, unquestioning receptacles – so banking education, like any qliphotic system, actively (and often brutally) discourages its victims from heeding the impulses of their souls. Freire recognizes the nature of the game and the stakes when he writes that the focus of banking education “is fundamentally to kill our curiosity, our inquisitive spirit, and our creativity.”