Authentic Thinking

Freire stated that “Education is the practice of freedom” (The Banking Concept of Education, Ways of Reading pg. 251) In order to experience that freedom, according to Freire, the most common sort of education, or banking education, must be abandoned. In what Freire calls banking education, information and ideas are simply deposited into the student’s mind. The problem with this method of teaching is that the students in no way discover the information on their own and are therefore “filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system” (244).

Authentic thinking is not having ideas imposed on you, or unquestioningly accepting every bit of information you are told. It is only in reality, applied in the real world, that such an idea can be authenticated, which is the basic idea of authentic thinking. Banking education stifles this type of thought, because the students are focused more on memorizing or storing the information and ideas that are fed to them by the teacher than they are actually criticizing and analyzing ideas. In addition, it is Freire’s belief that the banking education has the capability of diminishing the student’s creative power, which advantageous for their oppressors (pg 245).

The resolution to the problems caused by banking education is to instead embrace problem-posing education. This method of learning by curiosity, discovery, consciousness and questioning encourages authentic thinking by requiring the students and teacher to engage in dialogue, where both the students and the teachers will learn by authenticating each other’s ideas.
Freire believes problem-posing education to be a practice of freedom and humanization, if and when it overcomes banking education (249). It allows the teacher and the student to experience both classroom roles and are both allowed to participate in a growing and ever-changing world of knowledge and learning.