Under the Raydar - 9/23/10

I ran into an alum this weekend, and I asked him what he was doing come Monday. He said, “Making money. And making money for other people. Banking. You don’t want to do it.”

While I was in my education class on Thursday, we discussed the “banking method” of education, in which a teacher basically puts “deposits” of knowledge into the students’ minds, and in which there is no real flow of exchange between the teacher’s deposits and the students’.

On Friday, I decided to check my account balance, with all of this talk of banking.

While I was checking my account balance, a friend popped over to chat, and when I asked her how she was doing, she said something along the lines of, “Meh, okay.” I asked her about her night, and she said, “It was fine.” Overall, she had been feeling pretty apathetic.

Well, this chain of banking-related events seemed to come full circle for me, with banking as the starting point and apathy as the endpoint.

I don’t mean apathy in a political sense; I mean it more in a multifaceted lifestyle sense. Apathy comes from the Greek for “without feeling.” I mean it in this sense, of an existence without life.

Why do we get into things that we don’t want to do? Why do we sit back and listen to a lecture in a half-comatose state? Why do we go out and strike social poses at certain parties we don’t really want to be at, just to report back the next day as having an “okay” night?

With a new semester, fresh with possibility, but also rolling into routine, we are at the dangerous point of going with the flow, of sitting back, of banking without exchange.

Paolo Friere, while discussing the “banking concept of education,” writes:  “… the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.”

We have this possibility of “storing the deposits entrusted to us.” In some senses, we are required to store deposits — particularly in an academic sense. Many professors assign reading (with passion) that cannot possibly be critically completed given students’ course load, and this indirectly sends us into “banking” mode. We take what we can and store it for the exam date, stunting ourselves from the possibility of “critical consciousness.”

This academic sense of banking can trickle in to our out-of-the-classroom lives: we have the possibility of adapt[ing] the world as it is” and “accept[ing] the passive role imposed upon [us].” We follow a group to a party in a suite when we really wanted to have couple of beers with our friends, we listen to music when we had wanted to start up a band, we can end up living with and storing a series of jumbled images which we only really feel “fine” about just because the passive role can be the easiest role.

All of this seems theoretical. We can’t get up and storm out of a dry lecture to have a café-chat with a friend about the issues discussed without suffering some kind of consequence. But we can practice passion-filled and meaningful living in whatever ways we can. We can have genuine conversations, we can go where we want, we can call up our friends to enjoy some drinks, we can come into a discussion section all fired up, we can choose what to do next.

We can close our accounts and just enjoy trading and bartering instead.