The Bank/Gym polarity has surfaced again among my mental currents.

Metaphors and analogies function as identifiers for ideas which float around the mind, like tags on the fins of dolphins or rings on birdlegs … or perhaps like those little radio devices they put on migrating animals to track their movements, since metaphors are smart and can locate whole flocks of related ideas. The Bank/Gym tag has been in play for some time – probably several years, since I found a scribbled reference to it in a three year old sketch book – and the basic idea relates to education: that there are two underlying models of education which are certainly very different and which may, or may not, be incompatible.

The Bank model says that education involves depositing more and more assets in your permanent knowledge account. These assets certainly include facts, lots of facts, but also involve concepts, which in turn may be extended to include standards and value judgements. Exams are a form of book-keeping which give a precise statement of your current worth. So, the educational process demands that the good teacher lavishes nuggets of knowledge, and the good student concentrates on squirreling away every single one of those nuggets.

The Gym model proposes that education involves modeling and practising skills, and the more vigorously and energetically the better. The mind has many muscles, and each subject provides a different set of machines to tone up the appropriate qualities of strength and agility and stamina. Facts are weights – useful but of no real value in themselves since there will be an endless range of different facts to lift in the future. Exams are a form of Big Game which prove whether you can use the skills in testing conditions. So, the educational process demands that the good teacher keeps raising the bar, and the good student strives to jump ever higher.

The logic of the Bank model is teacher-centred and leads to lectures, while the logic of the Gym model is student-centred and leads to group-work and discussion. More significantly, the Bank model has a static view of knowledge (knowledge is something you acquire and its value is constant), while the Gym's view is dynamic (knowledge is something you handle, because it is permanently changing).

In practice, all educational institutions, I would argue, combine both Bank and Gym – what is significant is the relative proportion of each in the official aethos, and this in turn will be formed by the political stance of whoever decides that aethos. Is it indicative that the Bank model is promoted by conservative/authoritarian politics, and the Gym model by progressive/liberal politics? In both cases, the value of knowledge and the consequent model of the educational process reflect the overall political view of how society should work – for conservatives, knowledge is something you acquire and so control, while for liberals, knowledge is something you handle, and so negotiate.

This political distinction does not have to involve conventional Right-wing / Left-wing positions. I have just got back from doing a teacher training workshop in Kazakhstan (details another day, another blog). The brief was to promote, in effect, the Gym view. In the process of standard Gym-type discussion, older teachers reminisced about the Soviet days when they had to teach rigidly from a Moscow-approved English language textbook, with texts about the Russian motherland and the inevitable progress of communism. Teachers had to issue these nuggets, and students had to accumulate them – classic Bank education.