squandered or lost. The process of learning is 'irreversible'; ¹⁷ all
that varies is the amount accumulated and what that makes possible
for the containing subject in a social-cultural context.

It is perhaps time now to begin gathering together the implica-
tions of these versions of pedagogy as hydraulic theory. Nothing
resembles the filling and depositing process, in which something
containable is made to flow into an available container, with results
both unpredictable and unexamined, so much as the act of penile
penetration ending in orgasm--the image with which we more or
less began. In this scheme the teacher must be a physically mature
male. The pupil, whether male or female, one way or another has
been fucked. ¹⁸ What has been put inside him/her will inevitably
affect its container, potentially grow into a child or a disease, and is
certain in its development to produce wasting, wastage, or waste.

If we go on to a third common metaphor, one which interestingly
tends to coexist with the others, we will find what happens when the
one-sidedness of deposition gives way, gradually or not, to the
concept of reciprocal circularity between subjects. This third model
is that of communication systems--with a crucial sub-set, psycho-
analysis as transference. In this image of channelling, there is some
uncertainty about the possibility of flow and some indeterminacy
about the relative activity and passivity of the two vessels. Thus
Freire prefaces his image of banking deposits with one of narration
in which, if we read attentively, no deposition is actually happening:

A careful analysis of the teacher--student relationship at any level, inside or
outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character. This rela-
tionship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening
objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimen-
sions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and
petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness. ¹⁹

Deathlike passivity here becomes the property not only of the
indirect object of teaching, the pupil, but also of its direct object,
the thing-taught. (If you like, a Marxian fetishization of the stuff to
be deposited, from edible to bankable, has taken place here as
Freire follows his mixed metaphor through.) Similarly, Bourdieu

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