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What does the word curriculum mean to YOU?

Anonymous
University of the People
EDUC 5220: Curriculum design and instructional decision making
Dr. Raymond Cain
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Freire used the term “depositing” in his pedagogy of the oppressed and I will expand this term

here. After studying Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and critical thinking, I have come to

know that Freire was an advocate of emphasizing on creating critical thinking skills in students

and make them active learners rather passing on information to them.

With “depositing”, Freire means the depositing of knowledge. Freire was a teacher himself who

was very critical of teachers who see themselves as the sole possessors of knowledge while they

see their students as empty receptacles into which teachers must deposit their knowledge. He

calls this pedagogical approach the “banking method” of education. This pedagogical approach

is similar to the process of colonization, given that the colonizing culture thinks of itself as the

correct and valuable culture, while the colonized culture is deemed as inferior and in need of the

colonizing culture for its own betterment. He believed that the banking method is a violent way

to treat students because students are human beings with their own inclinations and legitimate

ways of thinking. The banking method treats students as though they were things instead of

human beings.

This term has formed the basis of curriculum reform. It is this term which has drawn the

attention of educators to establish a curriculum in which students are not passive but active

learners. We have studied in the previous learning material about the services of John Dewey in

introducing curriculum reforms and we also know that the basis of those reforms was to make

student as active learners in the process which later took the form of a progressive learning. He

(Dewey, 1897) said that education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the

school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information

is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed.

He said that the old banking method is focused on the child's powers and interests. If the child is
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thrown into a passive role as a student, absorbing information, the result is a waste of the child's

education (Dewey, 1897). Moreover, the term “banking method” gave rise to the development of

a democratic classroom and a child-centered curriculum that best meets the needs of all students.

Freire has basically focused on the achievement of liberation and equality of all people through

dialogues. He has focused on the importance of dialogue in the liberation of people and wiping

out the existence of dominant groups within the society. (Freire, 1970 & 1993) said Dialogue

further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create

and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an

elite, but the birthright of all). He also said that only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is

also capable of generating critical thinking. Without dialogue there is no communication, and

without communication there can be no true education. He further said that for the anti-dialogical

banking educator, the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will

discourse to his students; and he answers his own question, by organizing his own program

(Freire, 1970 & 1993). I found this to be very valid relative to what Freire has tried to convey in

this chapter as this term focuses on eliminating the authoritarian behavior of teacher in a

classroom. With this term, Freire want to convey that critical thinking should be developed in the

students so that they can question the inequality in education and in society and decides for

themselves that what do they want to study rather studying a textbook set by the elites and taught

by a teacher in an authoritarian way. He believed that education shouldn’t be a one way process

where a teacher will keep depositing knowledge into students and it should be as such where

students are engaged in a dialogue with the teacher and through mutual consensus, design a

curriculum.
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I agree with the Freire’s choice of term since I have also been studying in a system where

students had no voice in what they want to learn. The mode of teaching was completely

authoritarian and the mode of learning was textbooks designed by authorities many years ago. I

have witnessed the difference between a school of elite and a government schools. I have seen

that the system is designed in such a way that government school’s students can never come

parallel to the children of elites as the system of government schools is set as such purposely by

elites to draw a line between the two classes. Freire has used such a fine word of depositing as

the general way of learning in my times was to memorize the books. We were not learning, but

memorizing.
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REFERENCES

Dewey, John. (1897). My pedagogical creed. School Journal. 54. pp. 77–80. Retrieved on

November 4, 2011, from 
http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm
Freire, P. (1970, 1993). Chapter 3 In Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: The Continuum
International Publishing Group. Retrieved from 
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/pedagogy/pedagogychapter3.html