Bad Metaphor: Bucket Filling
“A concern for the critical and the imaginative, for the opening of new ways of “looking at things” is wholly at odds with the technicist and behaviorist examples we still find in American schools. ”
Fifty years after Paul Friere first published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, too many educators still think of teaching as transaction. What Friere described in his famous banking concept, and what others often call the ‘transmission model’ of education, goes like this:
“The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration -- contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity". (Friere, p.71)
I call this the “bucket-filling” view of education. Others call it the transmission model. In this view, students—empty vessels—receive knowledge from teachers, who are presumed to be wellsprings of understanding. These teachers generously pour their knowledge into the wide-eyed, grateful, capacious receptacles until their buckets overflow with “proficient” performances on standardized tests. (I jest, yes—but only a little.)
This view of teaching rests on several flawed assumptions, namely that…
Reality is static. It ain’t, folks. Even the most solid-looking things—a mountain, a table—are actually composed of atoms in whirling motion. It’s not a stretch, then, to imagine that everything, ourselves included, is in perpetual flux.
Knowledge is a thing that can be owned. But knowledge is relational. It cannot be owned or universally applied. It arises within and applies to particular, temporary interactions of contexts and conditions. This doesn’t mean that all knowledge is relative—far from it—but all knowledge is contingent and conditional. It’s born of exchanges: between people, between people and their context, between people and their ideas. It can’t be poured or passed along like water.
The teacher transfers knowledge and meaning. If knowledge isn’t a thing, it can’t be handed off like a baton. It can’t be given—it has to be ignited and sustained.
If we cast students as buckets, it becomes all too easy to expect passivity, compliance, and reverence. It becomes easy to treat vivacious, living beings as things.
Thankfully, Paulo gave us a better way of thinking about teaching. For Freire, teaching is a praxis—“the perpetual reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire). This way of understanding teaching and knowledge leads us to a more vivid and generous metaphor: fire.
Like fire, knowledge must be kindled. Once lit, its “passing” is more of an exchange than a giving-away of some holdable thing. Knowledge is lit in communion. It is shared in such a way that ignites without diminishing either the source or the kindling. Each flame, when joined with another, burns more brightly—each giving back to the other. And in all true exchanges, teachers and students alike are both source and kindling.
Maybe knowledge is like fire.
So let’s stop pretending students are buckets. And let’s start igniting gorgeous, fiery exchanges instead.
REFLECTION
How would your students describe your view of what teaching is? Is it more akin to ‘bucket filling’ or ‘fire lighting’? Or is it something else?
REFERENCES
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
Greene, M. (1988). Dialectic of freedom. Teachers College.
