Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
As a scholar who has spent my professional life reading, writing, and teaching university students, I have come to realize how lucky I was to have been fully funded for my graduate studies and likewise received into departments around the world where my scholarship was welcomed by scholars from countries whose compatriots, when they immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the UK, are often not given a reciprocal reception. More than this, however, I have seen how education is so highly prized by students from these very same backgrounds. Although I have taught middle and upper-class Americans and Canadians for whom education is not something you struggle for, it has been challenging to see how so many white, middle-class students have come to regard education as a right unique to their worldview. Compare this to poor Americans and Canadians and most every immigrant student, and education shifts from being a right to a privilege.
In the early 1990s when I taught at the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco, I was stunned initially when I discovered that the students and I all had to share all the texts in the university library for each of the plays I was covering. The course had…