70 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
When focusing on Flemish deaf education as sketched in the life stories of Flemish
deaf people, Freire’s (2005) banking concept of education becomes applicable. The
teacher deposits his or her narrations on the students, who passively receive the in-
formation, store it in their brains, and reproduce it on command. Education and
knowledge are not perceived as a process of mutual and dialectic inquiry between
students and teacher, but rather as a deposit by people who have knowledge into
people who lack knowledge. Students get used to deposit storing and become passive
acceptors rather than active transformers of the world:The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ cre-
ative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppres-
sors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed.
The oppressors use their humanitarianism to preserve a profitable situation.
(Freire, 2005, p. 73)As Filip verstraete (translated interview, 2003) explained, there was no alternative;
lives and identities were fixed: “That is the way it is.”
of course, oppressors aim to continue their domination, and the combination
of the banking concept of education and paternalism has proved to be a successful
strategy (Freire, 2005). yet there is one thing that bank depositors seem to over-
look: “The deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality” (Freire, 2005,
p. 75) and therefore push oppressed people to reflection. “If men and women are
searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may
perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and
then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation” (Freire, 2005, p. 75).
Edward (translated interview, 2005), another Flemish deaf leader who joined the
Gallaudet trip, reflected on his school time:When I was in the first class in X [a deaf school], I was in a group of peers. There
were six of us. Two students experienced difficulties; they were a bit behind.
I was bored all the time. Then I said, “oh, come on,” and the teacher replied
that I had to be patient, tolerant. It was easy for him to say that, but I was sitting
there all the time twiddling my thumbs. Half an hour later, I was really fed up:
I attended school because I wanted to learn, not because I wanted to sleep. I got
into a serious argument with the teacher. I said, “I’d better stay at home.” The
teacher got really mad and sent me to the director. I didn’t care. So, I went to
X [the director] and he said, “The teacher told me that you have to calm down a
bit.” “Me? Calm down? Why do I attend school?” The director used to say that we
all go to school to learn. So... he couldn’t really say anything.... Then the class
was split up in two groups and then I developed better. oh, that was impossible,
splitting up the class. Until they started to think, and then things changed.As vincent and Edward emphasized, they had a lot of questions before their
awakening. As searchers, they noticed contradictions in the system, and their
“subjugated [deaf] knowledges” (Pease, 2002, p. 33) told them that something
was wrong. yet vincent stressed that he was not able to find the answers himself.