Education and Liberation
Education and Liberation
ben sayler
September 9 2020
Painting: Presencia de América Latina by Jorge González Camarena
photo: Anasc
For most of us, our first exposure to formal education is the empty-vessel-to-be-filled-with-knowledge model of education (also known as the banking model of education) wherein we, as students, are told that we are ignorant and to become knowledgeable we must listen and defer to the authority of our teacher. Through this model, we are conditioned to be passive actors in our own knowledge and understanding of the world, taught that our own instincts and minds are lesser than those that came before us and that before we can value our own thoughts, we must learn to mimic and value the thoughts of authority figures in the education system.
Through this model, many of us come to find that we have difficulty engaging with complex internal, interpersonal, and political thought. We seek concrete answers and solutions from others, balking at uncertainty and experiencing a visceral revulsion at the idea of changing ourselves or perceptions in ways not yet proven or tested by figures of authority. This type of thinking and problem solving that runs so counter to the banking method of education can be considered as liberation thought, a term that encompasses liberation on individual, social, and political scales.
If you’re accustomed to accumulating knowledge through direct transfer - a figure of authority bestowing knowledge upon you - then liberation discussions are going to be especially difficult as they require abstract theory and concepts to be applied to real world experiences as well as utilized in decision making around unknowable futures that offer little closure.
Life itself does not provide many certainties - there are rarely any concrete right or wrong answers - yet banking education proposes the opposite: that there are many right and wrong answers and being knowledgeable is a matter of rote memorization of these answers. In liberation thinking, on the other hand, there are probabilities and intuitions and aspirations and values that you work around and factor in as you evaluate each situation on its own merits, seeking a greater truth but not the truth as there is no assumption that reality is static and therefore consistently quantifiable in the same terms.
In sincere and authentic liberation thought, every evaluation of life and the choices that lay before us are approached as unique and exploratory processes. While there is always something to be learned from history and existing knowledge, there are also always variables and circumstances unique to every situation that cannot be resolved simply by looking to what’s come before.
Meaningful and participatory engagement with the world requires generating new knowledge and venturing into unknown and unfamiliar intellectual territory. It requires using what you know and understand of life from your own experiences and knowledge base in collaboration with others as you work to come to novel and uncertain conclusions that cannot possibly be verified because what you’re addressing is something that has yet to resolve. It is a process that by definition lacks authority because it is generative, not received.
Coming from the world of the banking model of education, it’s common to struggle with theory, ideology, philosophy, and liberation thought because these things require critical and independent thought where you must treat your own mind and experiences as authorities, where you cannot and will not receive a conclusive answer from anyone, where it is up to you to evaluate whether the path you are on is the right one for your values, principles, and goals. This ambiguity and self-driven understanding is non-existent in the banking model - in that model, intellect and understanding are measured as matter of how well you can imitate other’s ways of thinking and recall the conclusions others have come to. Your own mind and perspective and experience are treated as secondary to that of authority figures, either present or historical.
Whereas, if you’re accustomed to knowledge being gained as an emergent and generative process of discussion and critical thought, there’s no limit to the scope of conversations or discovery that can happen around the possibilities of the future and changes to be sought. Your way of understanding and experiencing knowledge has been conditioned as organic and fluid, always evolving and growing, with you as an active, not passive, participant in that process. In generative education, you do not need other’s permission to learn and grow nor their stamp of approval to be assured that you are in fact learning and growing.
In a generative model of education, history and existing knowledge is treated as a jumping off point, a place from which to further develop ideas and theories to better fit the world as it is and as you want it to become. You gain knowledge and perspective from reading and studying and listening to others with expertise, but rather than that being where knowledge accumulation ends, it’s where the true learning process begins.
In this way of thinking, education is a collaborative process wherein you value your own mind and experience and hone your thinking abilities in collaboration with thinkers than have come before and thinkers that exist alongside you. You take in the knowledge that others have worked hard to gain and you interpret and build upon it using your own faculties. You contribute to the education process as much as you receive from it.
At the start of this process you likely find yourself being “wrong” frequently, positing ideas and models that don’t hold up under scrutiny or analysis. But these “wrong” ideas are in fact a generative education process - you are learning how to think about things, finding the weaknesses in your critical thinking and strengthening your mind to better analyze and consider and reflect on the world. You are not shamed for this process or made to feel less intelligent because the fact that you’re applying your mind to the best of your ability is in fact a testament to the value and necessity of your mind - only you have your experience and perspective. Whether the conclusions you come to are right or wrong is less important than the fact that the conclusions come organically from your own mind. Your being “wrong” is an educational experience both for you and the person or people working with you to understand the flaws or errors in your thinking - it is generative and educational for all involved as it expands each person’s perspective on how an event, concept, or problem can be understood or interpreted.
When you learn through generative education - through a collaborative dialectic wherein you and the other(s) learn from each other as you build upon knowledge and ideas that have come before - the mercurial process of liberation thought and solution-seeking is one that’s entirely coherent. You can work confidently in unfamiliar and unknown spaces because you have come to understand knowledge as a flowing, evolving process rather than a static state - knowledge is a living entity, not a dead fact.
But this ultimately speaks to a deeper quality that’s required for meaningful liberation thought and engagement with the world: Hope.
The banking model of education annihilates hope. In the banking model, the best you can be is an effective conduit for the work and ideas of others that constitute the entirety of respectable and useful reality. There is no room or need for your own mind or perspective or experience - those things are merely barriers to be filed down or eliminated so that you may be replicate and comprehend the True Reality that is established and unchanging and determined by existing figures of authority. Reality is locked in, the process of change is locked in, history is locked in - all there is for you to do is to familiarize yourself with the already known and the already settled and to build upon it using pre-established methods for pre-established goals. It is, in its way, a mental and spiritual death march away from true knowledge and understanding.
Nature and life are ever-changing and uncertain, the scope of existence boundless, the potential futures before us endless. Yet the banking model prizes constancy and rigidity above all us - two things that exist only in death.
The banking model is also painfully, excruciatingly naive. The idea that the world will continue as it has, that we as people have no say or ability to change the course of things, that what is understood now will remain true indefinitely, is a view that stems from a forced naivete imbued by an education structure that deliberately obscures the fluctuating and mutable nature of reality and history. That things are not set in stone but are always vulnerable to change and alteration, that the course of history is not one merely of inertia but of action and reaction where we collectively as people have a say in how things unfold, that life is mysterious and our perceptions always incomplete when relying on our own experiences and senses - these are concepts that the banking model not only eschews, but actively battles against. It is naive and death-centric in its obsession with stasis and certainty, and it is hopeless in its adherence to a single definable reality of past, present, and future.
The generative model of education, on the other hand, is built upon a foundation of hope. Not to be confused with hopefulness - it does not promise that things will get better or change - but rather a fundamental and unfaltering hope, a recognition that things can get better and can change. The generative model says that the future is not already written, that knowledge is not set in stone, that there is always more to uncover and new perspectives to unearth and new ways of seeing existing truths. That you, as an inherently unique being with an experience and perspective all your own, are a wellspring of knowledge that can brought to the world as you apply yourself to the process of education - both for yourself and for others.
The generative model says that knowledge and reality and understanding are richer and fuller and truer the more collaborative they are, that you are able to bring something to that process that no one else can, and thus that you can contain in yourself an idea or thought that enriches and emboldens and expand the possibilities for the future.
Moreover, and unlike the banking model, the generative model demands that you not hide yourself or relinquish your mind to the will of others, but that you go forth with love for, and confidence in, your own mind and abilities. That you recognize that there is always more for you to learn, always ways to improve your thinking and understanding, but that doing so is not merely about mimicking or reciting the ideas of others, but of uniquely iterating and building upon existing knowledge through your own frameworks and sensibilities and perspectives. And that such a process benefits not only yourself, but everyone else that engages in that process with you.
The generative model, and the process of engaging in liberation thought, is an intrinsically hope-generating way of thinking, not because it is facile or optimistic, but because it aligns with the basic nature of life and existence. Nature is ever changing and evolving and uncertain. It is guided and altered by the behaviors and interactions of all its unique parts. Nature is a generative process whereby the collaboration of different entities expands and builds upon the possibilities for the future of existence. Education that mirrors this process contains within it the same hope that life itself bores.
Hope, in its purest form, is a reflection of truth: That existence, that life, is always full of unknown and unseen possibilities, that there is always room for things to get better, even while things are getting worse.
This fundamental truth, however, cannot easily be accessed if you are conditioned to see the world as a collection of certainties and unshakable facts. The banking model says that the possibilities of life are already known and written and that all that’s left is for you to uncover them. It says that it is possible to reach a state devoid of hope because it is possible to have complete knowledge of a subject or concept such that all possibilities are known and accounted for. This is, again, a wildly naive and flawed understanding of existence, but it is so deeply ingrained in many societies to the point that it feels incontrovertibly true to those who have not been sufficiently exposed to other ways of thinking and learning.
Liberation - individual, social, political - cannot happen from such a place of mental and spiritual subjugation. It cannot happen if we treat the process of learning and education as a hierarchical one wherein figures of received authority bestow truth and reality upon lesser students who must come to understand reality as a single unchanging set of facts and truths as interpreted by their betters.
Liberation is not only about material conditions, it is about valuing and recognizing the full potential and import of our own minds, about taking back our autonomy and singular capacity to think from systems that try to limit and distort our perceptions of self and reality. Our critical thinking, our sense of self, our perspectives and capacity to grow, are singular by definition and our that indefatigable uniqueness must be nourished and supported so that we may all learn and grow from the collaboration of our singular minds.
Our reality and ability to affect our circumstances and futures may broaden and strengthen only as a result of an authentic engagement with the mutability, the uncertainty, the ever-changing nature of existence and life. Our engagement is made all the more sincere and potent when we allow the world to benefit from the application of our own minds and thought rather than allowing ourselves to become supplicants to the alter of inherited wisdom and authority as defined by the minds of the few that came before.
We are, at our best, beings capable of learning from, educating with, and growing alongside each other, where our unique perspectives and experiences enhance and illuminate reality for one another in ways not possible by venturing out alone or as merely stenographers for the truths of others. We cannot liberate ourselves by trusting the minds and instincts of others above our own, by deferring our own judgment to that of authorities, by becoming passive receivers of education rather than active participants in our growth and understanding.
Liberation is not a gift bestowed upon is, it is something awoken and realized from within. Liberation begins with learning to trust our own minds, and with unlearning that which has made our own minds questionable to be trusted.