One of the first pieces of pedagogical theory I ever read was Paolo Freire’s “The Banking Concept of Education” from his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I was a first-year Master’s student preparing to teach my first class, a first-year writing seminar ultimately focused on various ideas of textuality (wow that’s a lot of firsts). Though it was already 35 years old by the time it was assigned to me in composition theory class, it felt fresh and important. In the years since then I have developed as an instructor by reading more and more about pedagogy, and most importantly by teaching. I’ve recently revisited “The Banking Concept of Education” as part of my department’s monthly teaching literature discussion group.
I still find Freire’s work useful, even if I don’t agree with it entirely.  I especially appreciate his breakdown of what is so problematic about the kind of pedagogy he defines as the “Banking Concept” :

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

• the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
• the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly;
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
• the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
• the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
• the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
• the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
• the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

In my years of teaching since then I’ve used “The Banking Concept” as a check on my own classroom practices. As an instructor it can be very tempting to fall into the kinds of paradigms listed above. A particularly easy one is g. “the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher.” This is an easy mistake for an instructor to make because we generally care about what we teach, we enjoy engaging with it and are able in that way to let our own engagement with the material trump the engagement of the students. This is one of the ways in which the teacher becomes “the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.” But g. is also such a problem for instructors because it comes up against one of what I think is a legitimate and important role for an instructor, the role of modeling.

Freire’s a-j breakdown is rhetorically aligned against any classroom practice that utilizes the instructor as centering point, even if that centering point is used for the benefit of the students. His objection to a pedagogy where the “teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher” has no room for a paradigm where the instructor acts as model for the students to begin to emulate. Yet central to my classroom practice and many other excellent teachers I know, is the process of modeling, demonstrating to students what close-reading, textual analysis, and critical thinking looks like. I think modeling is an incredibly important part of instructional processes. At its best it provides students with examples of what complex processes of interpretation look like. It can give students permission to look deeply and critically at the works they examine. The exercise I often do with students on the first day of class is an attempt to model close reading and collaboratively delve deep into the interpretation of poetry.

I think Freire is right, however, that there is the danger of buying into the illusion that students are acting when they are not, but assuming that there is no difference in what the instructor has to offer students and what the students bring to the table is also problematic. And further, Freire’s primary contention, based primarily in his Marxism, that ultimately the liberation he seeks to give students will lead them a kind shift in consciousness that will lead towards an ideological liberation, is far from untroubled. One of the things I’ve come to understand as I’ve been teaching is that I am sometimes (perhaps often) arming my ideological opponents. This might not seem like such a high-stakes game when thinking about my main subject, 19th-century literature. However, as a recent in-class debate about Edmund Burke demonstrated when students began bringing up parallels between Burke’s statement that “men have equal rights, but not to equal things” and Mitt Romney’s refusal to see the institutional advantages his inherited wealth has given him, these texts aren’t as are sometimes thought. I’ve come to understand that it is my responsibility to teach students to think critically, to engage meaningfully with meaningful material, to allow themselves to see alternate points of view as expressed in literature, not matter how those skills will be used or disused. If at the end of the day I’ve just made a better opponent, at least I’ve elevated the debate. Sometimes I think that is all you can ask for.