I, as their student, simply took what they gave me, believing that it was the teacher's job to provide me with the appropriate amount of information on the topic being studied and unfortunately, I never built upon that information by myself. Although I can provide several examples of the use of the "banking" concept of education in my life, I am going to focus specifically on the learning process that I faced in my Chemistry class, as a junior in high school.
To begin, I had an interest in science for several years and even considered going into pharmacy, so I expected that I would learn a lot of useful information in my first Chemistry class. The teacher had other plans though, and he implemented the "banking" concept every time something new needed to be learned. In class, he read us lists of elements or common compounds and their formulas, and we copied everything down as he said it. He gave us notes sometimes and told us exactly what we needed to memorize and "know" for the exams. When it came time to take those exams, they were straightforward and in agreement with what he told us we needed to know. It became a bad habit over the course of the class to ignore any subject or lesson on which we would not be tested. There were never any in-depth discussions about the subject matter. We never learned what exactly makes the two molecules of hydrogen bond with the one molecule of oxygen to create H2O, or water. It was just given that they would bond when put together; the teacher never explained it any more, and we never asked why. I guess we, the students, were partially responsible for not showing interest and asking questions about the information being handed to us. We never asked why things happen or what would happen if we changed a factor in an experiment. Our teacher was a very intelligent man when it came to the subject that he was teaching, but it seemed that he was not very passionate about his profession or else he would have initiated more discussions about different topics.
