94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST teachers. The students' task is to store the deposits and recall when required. Freire's 'banking' concept corresponds to what Sartre calls the 'digestive5 or nutritive concept of education in which knowledge is 'fed' by the teacher to the students to fill them out. One may point out that the conception of knowledge as food of the spirit is fairly ingrained in common imagination. A terse expression of this idea is found in Francis JBacon : "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Freire counterposes his problem-posing method to the banking method. If the banking method suits the manipulative purposes of an oppressor class the former method enables the masses to creatively intervene in reality. In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. ... In sum : banking theory and practice, as immobilising and fixating forces fail to acknowledge men as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take man's historicity as their starting point (p 70-71). The principal mode in which the problem-posing education is carried out is in "dialogue". The concept of "dialogue", with its Christian existentialist associations, is vital to the understanding of Freire's philosophy of education. In this view, dialogue is an encounter between men in order to transform the world. This kind of dialogue obviously cannot exist between the oppressed and the oppressors. It is a relation between the educator and the educated in which the conventional virtues like love, humanity, hope and faith have a definite place. According to Freire sometimes revolutionary leaders commit the mistake of imitating the tactics of the oppressors in order to outwit them. He warns that it would be a self-defeating enterprise. Such leaders employ the banking line of planning the programme content. They are not able to resist the manipulative onslaught of the ruling class. In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power", forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organisation, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls "realism" (p 146). The major difficulty in Freire's literacy method is that it cannot be smoothly implemented in pre-re volution ary societies. Most of the Third World countries are ruled by elites who reproduce themselves in the image of the metropolitan elites despite their socialist professions. They may welcome Freire and arrange for seminars; but it is doubtful wheth( r he will be given chances to practise it. Freire's method has a permanent significance in the sphere of human self-liberation, both in the pre" revolutionary period and in the post-revolutionary situation. It is a continuing cultural revolution and as such is aimed at preventing the