Education has become an act of depositing in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues the communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorise and repeat. 

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is the gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing, projecting an absolute dominance on to others which is a characteristic of the ideology of oppression. The teacher, by considering the students’ ignorance as absolute, justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance but unlike the slave, they never discover that they also educate the teacher. 

The education should be provided through “problem posing”, a method in which a teacher poses a problem in front of the students. Then the teacher and students do brain storming and dialogue which leads them towards the conclusion. 

ABEER NAZ,  

Karachi, March 28.