Paulo Freire’s pedagogy to read the word and the world

A teacher walks into a classroom, greets her students, opens a textbook and begins narrating a lesson. Her students sit there in rapt attention, trying, patiently, to absorb the information she delivers. The lesson could be on anything – from Thermodynamics to Polynomial Equations, about which students have no existential experience

Is meaningful learning possible in such a scenario? Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argues that such a system “indoctrinates” students to adapt to a world of oppression. Freire, the author of the highly influential Pedagogy Of The Oppressed (1968), calls the above-mentioned example the banking concept of education, because students are made to mechanically memorise narrated content.