OWNED.

Americans like to own things. Europeans in the Colonial Era longed to own their own

destinies, so they fled religious persecution in their home countries and colonized in the United

States. After a short-lived respite, the settlers wanted more. They expanded westward and

claimed all of the land that they came across as their own. They decided they needed to own the

culture too, and committed genocide and forced assimilation on native peoples, robbing them of

tradition, family and language. With all this new land, Americans wanted to own crops and sell

their harvests so that they could make more money to buy more things. If they could force other

people to farm the fields, they could make even more money, so they began owning people.

When Americans became more civilized, they realized they could continue to abuse other

humans and desecrate lands. So, they made laws that made it more difficult to exploit people and

take what was not theirs. But even with laws meant to protect its citizens, Americans could not

abandon their appetite for possession. Thus, they developed a new capital that did not require

currency—knowledge.

America is a complex maze of connected ideologies and power structures. The American

education system is a gatekeeper that determines who is allowed access to knowledge, and what

narrative that knowledge will convey. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire delineates the

banking method of teaching which in it of itself is both a gatekeeping device and the

implementation of a power structure. He says, “In the banking concept of art education,

knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those

whom they consider to know nothing.” He continues that the banking method is designed to

imply, “that the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing” (Freire, 1970, p. 72-

73). By denying the student the opportunity to question what she is being told, the teacher claims

ownership of the knowledge, which deters the student from seeking additional learning
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opportunities. Students who have knowledge deposited to them lose the impulse to explore, and

stop questioning the world around them. Freire says, “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 the world” (Freire, 1970, p. 73).

In Women’s Ways of Knowing, Mary Belenky confirms Freire’s sentiment by saying,

“Because they are in positions of power, teachers who speak in their own voices risk turning

their students’ voices into echoes of their own” (Belenky, 1997, p. 215). The operative word in

that sentence is “voice.” The banking model of teaching transforms the power relationships

within society because it dictates who is permitted a voice and who is not. Belenky quotes

feminist scholar Elizabeth Fee and says, “The voice of the scientific authority is like the male

voice-over in commercials, a disembodied knowledge that cannot be questioned, whose author is

inaccessible’” (Belenky, 1997, p. 216). This becomes especially dangerous when those who are

taught that they have no voice are exposed to the world outside of the classroom.

Modern technology has propagated infinite platforms of information sharing. Through

access to advertising, literature, marketing, news media outlets, fake news, peer interaction,

television, and all other forms of visual culture, everyone is receiving constant feeds of

information. In Teaching Visual Culture, Kerry Freedman elaborates, “Currently, students may

gain more information from images than from texts. As a result, [education] is an increasingly

important responsibility as the boundaries between education, high culture, and entertainment

blur and students increasingly learn from the visual arts” (Freedman, 2003, p. 15). That being

said, the banking method and the subsequent lack of metacognition not only blocks students’

access to information, but denies them tools to make intelligent decisions for themselves once
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they leave the classroom. Because students no longer are kept away from information, but they

are prevented the skills to interpret it.

References

Belenky, M. F. (1997). Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice and mind.

New York, NY: Basic.

Freedman, K. (2003). The Professional Field. In Teaching visual culture: Curriculum,

aesthetics, and the social life of art. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury USA Academic.

Newman, S. (n.d.). Money in the Middle Ages | Middle Ages. Retrieved from

http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/money-in-the-middle-ages.html