When Freire was speaking about the oppressors using the banking education to oppress and dehumanize I immediately began to think about the Holocaust and Hitler's affect on Nazi Germany. He brainwashed millions of people into thinking that Jews and other minorities deserved the fates they met in the concentration camps located through out Europe. It's amazing and sickening at the same time how through teaching young children and even adults his ideas and values, Hitler almost took over the world.
To me this is Freire's banking education concept at its peak. People in this kind of education aren't allowed to really "think" or even "be". That's why problem-prose education is literally so liberalizing because it frees people from these molds and lets them think creatively as actual human beings.
I think it's pretty cool that Paulo Freire developed this idea and put his own philosophical spin on it. He isn't just "some guy" that lived centuries ago, whose works we still study. He knew the majority of the world that we know today, having died only about 15 years ago.
Yep, his work is relatively recent. I think you are right to identify Nazi Germany as an era where the "banking" concept is taken to the extreme. One was not allowed to question the authority of the Reich and everyone believed Hitler when he blamed the Jews for Germany's economic collapse.
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