Simmel, The Stranger, and the Banking Concept of Education

  When thinking about the liberal arts education Kenyon claims to provide, Higley Auditorium is perhaps not the first setting that comes to mind when considering the dynamics of an insightful discussion. The idea that education emerges from the dialectic between students and teachers is largely influenced by educator Paolo Freire. This concept can easily be paralleled with Simmel’s sociological paradigm of reciprocity and duality. What is ‘meaning’ for Simmel, something that emerges from individual interactions, is what education is for Freire, which to him arises out of “processes of inquiry” (Freire 72). Similarly, Simmel’s idea of conflict as something positive and as a ‘synthesis’ coincides with Freire’s vision of a student-teacher dialectic.

So, what impedes this process of education? To Freire, it is adoption of the “Banking Concept of Education”, which views students as empty receptacles to be filled by the all-knowing teacher, disconnecting the dialectic. I posit that the teacher as a ‘banker’ has strong parallels with Simmel’s idea of the stranger. The teacher, like the stranger, removes themself from the dialectic to act as an objective middleman between the students and education-as-knowledge. The teacher has general qualities of the in-group, the students, in that they are all tied together by the field of study and classroom environment, yet they are unlike in the difference between their hierarchical roles as it pertains to intellectual ability. Conflict thus no longer occurs as the objective, transactional relationship between actors removes any possibility for it. This teacher is also in some sense mobile; if the teacher truly is a middleman between knowledge and students, any other teacher with sufficient knowledge of the material could replace them with no noticeable difference. One can perhaps feel Simmel’s “remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement” (Edles et. al 312) with a teacher of this kind. For me, it is keenly felt in a lecture hall such as Higley Auditorium, where Simmelian distance mirrors physical distance, perhaps in the context of an introductory science course.

Laura Desfor Edles, and Scott Appelrouth. 2020. Sociological Theory in the Classical Era. SAGE Publications.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.