On Teaching as Midwifery vs. Banking
In his seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, emphasized the difference between the banking method of education and teaching as midwifery. As we’ve seen, it was Socrates who first brought this education as midwifery to our attention. The critical difference between these methods is that, “While bankers deposit knowledge in the learner’s head, midwives draw it out. They assist the students in giving birth to their own ideas, in making their own tacit knowledge explicit and elaborating it.”[i](1971)
Like Socrates, Friere understood “that every human being, no matter how ‘ignorant’ or submerged in the ‘culture of silence’ he may be, is capable of looking critically at his world in a dialogical encounter with others.”[1] And “In this process, the old, paternalistic teacher-student relationship is overcome. A peasant can facilitate this process for his neighbor more effectively than a ‘teacher’ brought in from outside. ‘Men educate each other,’ he said, ‘through the mediation of the world’.”[2]
Unfortunately, “Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, many were [and are still] kept ‘submerged’ in a situation in which such critical awareness and response are practically impossible. And it became clear to him that the whole educational system is one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence.”*
*Richard Shaull said of Friere’s work, that it “represents the response of a creative mind and sensitive conscience to the extraordinary misery and suffering of the oppressed around him.”[3] But is it only those who are miserable who are oppressed in this way? Or is it possible that institutions can impose silence and quiet dissent simply by effective systems of rewards and promotion?
In Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa offer studies that conclude that while college students my develop subject-specific skills, “the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.” This “qualifies today as a significant social problem and should be the subject of concern of policy makers, practitioners, parents, and citizens alike.”
However, as the Chronicle of Higher Education recently concluded: “Limited learning in the U.S. higher-education system cannot be defined as a crisis, because institutional and system-level organizational survival is not being threatened in any significant way. Parents—although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costs—want colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as adults. Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and professional interests. Administrators have been asked to focus largely on external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line. Government funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific knowledge. In short, the system works. No actors in the system are primarily interested in undergraduates' academic growth, although many are interested in student retention and persistence. Limited learning on college campuses is not a crisis, because the institutional actors implicated in the system are receiving the organizational outcomes that they seek, and therefore neither the institutions themselves nor the system as a whole is in any way challenged or threatened.”(Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2011)
Not unlike the banking industry itself, we are apparently more concerned with the good of the institution than in the good of those it purports to serve.
[1] (Friere 1971, 13)
[2] (Friere 1971, 13)
[3] (Friere 1971, 10)
[i] (Friere 1971)