Paolo Freire's classic work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, outlines two opposing models of education, the banking concept of education and problem posing education.

"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing" (Freire 72).

Freire rejects this model of education as oppressive, and offers what he calls problem posing education as an alternative that enlists students as agents of the their own liberation by helping them to develop critical consciousness.

In problem posing education, students become "critical coinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher" (Freire 81).

Banking education "attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter [problem posing] strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality" (Freire 81; italics in original).

As compositionists attempt to help students see themselves as producing knowledge through writing (rather than merely reproducing the knowledge of others' texts), the idea of problem posing education appears very attractive.

But the problem posing model is also attractive for the teacher who wants students to see themselves as active readers who can critically intervene in the texts they read to construct their own meaning as they read. The instrumentalist implications of Johnson-Eilola's depiction of the hypertext reader as user may dovetail nicely with a pedagogy that seeks to create readers (and writers) who treat texts as tools.

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