Education Foundation First Year Students

Majiyd H. Suru 2007-2008

The concept of liberation and the liberation potential of education

To liberate means to set free and to set free from something. It implies impediments to freedom having been thrown off; it can therefore be a matter of degree and of process. Thus, when a man succeeds in untying his wrists and liberating his arms, he can use his hands to liberate his feet from the shackles which bind them. But a man can be physically free from restraint and still be unfree if his mind is restricted by habits and attitudes which limit his humanity.

Education has to liberate both mind and the body of a man. It has to make him/her more of a human being because he/she is aware of his/her potential as a human being, and is in a positive, life-enhancing relationship with his/her neighbour and his environment. Education has therefore to enable man to throw off impediments of freedom which restrict his fully physical and mental development.

Liberation is viewed as an act and process that takes place at the level of the individual, and society at large, in circumstances of setting oneself, or being set free from such oppression. Man frees himself/herself through the act and process of conscientization. Thus liberation and conscientization are closely related and are in many ways inseparable. They are considered to take place chronologically, as a process in a continuum.

CONCIENTISATION

Definition and phases

The term conscientization emerged within the reflections of the Brazilian Institute of Higher studies in the 1960s and was popularized in other countries by Bishop Heldre Camarn. Paul Freire, the Brazilian Educational Philosopher, had creatively explored its significances whose original thoughts are articulated in the Pedagogy of the oppressed (1970), which set the stage for a profound criticism of conventional pedagogy inspired by critical theory.

According to Freire, conscientization denotes the "awakening of consciousness" or a change of attitudes involving an accurate, realistic awareness of ones position in nature and society; the capacity to analyze critically its causes and consequences comparing it with other situation and possibilities and action geared at transforming existing socio-economic conditions.

• Conscientization means raising awareness to higher levels of perception of reality, involving learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions and taking action against oppressive conditions.
• It implies making people aware of their humanity their ability as conscious beings in transforming nature and oppressive elements for their own development.
• It may also means demystifying perception of reality about the world, the people themselves and situation of their oppression, which has been mystified by their own capacity or oppressors.

Types

Paulo Freire distinguish three types of consciousness

• Magic consciousness in which man understands facts and problems, but on account of his inability to explain them attributes their existence to some superior powers.
• Naïve consciousness which operates at a higher level is intellectual and rational. In this level man apparently comprehends facts and problems and assumes that he is able to control them.
• Critical consciousness whereby man tries to judge the situation realistically by analyzing facts and problems in the light of fundamental human values. It involves what he called praxis, which is both reflection and action.

Phases

Conscientization has three phases, namely:

1. Realizing that we are oppressed.
2. Knowing that we can do something about the oppressed situation.
3. Taking action to free ourselves

The concept combines theory and practice in penetrating process of knowing and doing. Conscientization therefore is a process of growing in awareness, through deepening their awareness; people can uncover reality and penetrate history in a critical manner.

Objectives and assumptions

Objectives:

The concept is deeply rooted in a political and social analysis of living conditions of the poor; a class society in while the minority own almost everything and the majority remain poor, hungry, ignorant, disease and illiterate.

• It seeks to develop awareness of marginalized individuals and groups in society regarding their conditions in order to transform them.
• Increasing the capacity and ability of the marginalized groups, the poor as conscious being to analyze critically their conditions, their root cause, their consequences and possibilities of taking action aimed at transforming them.
• It seeks to change the negative psychology of the oppressed, a sense of fatalism, resignation and helpless. The aim is to make the oppressed discover their power and believe that change is possible.
• Utilizing individual and collective previous experience, these approach aims at arousing pride, a sense of dignity personal confidence and self-reliance aim of poor and marginalized groups.

Assumptions

Conscientization is based on the following assumptions:

1. All men are equal
2. All men have right to knowledge
3. All men have the right to criticize their situation and to act upon and transform it.
4. All men have the capacity to develop critical reflection upon their conditions through discovery act dialogue.
5. All men have the right to participate in the creation of their own culture and history

EDUCATION AND CONSCIENTIZATION

Transformation of human being from objects is central concern in the conscientization process. This transformation occurs through educational experiences, involving the learners and the teachers in a simultaneous process of uncovering and acting on reality. These horizontal social relations are intended to project image of the learners as both the learners and teachers.

• Both learners and teacher modify their views through dialogical interaction.
• Utilizing individual and collective experience, conscientization serves serves as liberating pedagogy; both the leaders and people are active teachers and learners; it reflects the banking system of education, where the learners are perceived as empty vessels to fill up by teachers.
• Education develops the power of the people to perceive critically the root cause of their conditions, the way they exist; the world in which they find themselves and realize that the world is not static but reality in motion.
• The more people reflect on reality and their concrete situation, the more they become fully aware, committed and ready to intervene to shape their situations.

Key Principles underlying education for conscientization:

Paulo Freire has identified 6 key principles:

1. No education is ever neutral: Education may be designed and offered to either "maintain the status-quo by imposing on the people the values and culture of the dominant class" OR "to help become critical, creative, active, free and responsible members of the society. The former is education for domestication and the latter is education for liberation.
2. Relevant Education:

   Education should be for liberation. A liberating education is designed to help become critical, active, free and responsible members of society, it is not offered to maintain the status quo by imposing on the people the values and culture of the dominant class.

3. Problem Posing:

   Education and development should be pursued as a common search for solutions to problems whereby all participants are presumed to be creative people with the ability to solve their own problems. The role of the teacher is to assist the participants to identify problems, find the root causes of the problems and devise means and methods of solving them.

4. Dialogue as dominant mode of interaction:

   Education needs to be conducted as a social process, taking place in the context of dialogue, reflection and action.

5. Reflection and Action (praxis):

   Education should provide a moment whereby people can reflect critically about what they are doing, identify any new information or skills which they need, and plan action.

6. Radical Transformation:

   Education has to create a critical consciousness and increase of the learners to transform their lives, their environment their community and the society.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLES AND CASES OF CONSCIETISATION

A:    FRANTZ FANON

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique and studied medicine in France and later specialized in psychology. He published his first book when he was 27. He was assigned to a hospital in Algeria during the rising against the French. His experience and observation there led him to throw in his lot with and her become one of their articulate spokes man.

In the "Wretched of the Earth", Frantz Fanon exposes the evils of colonialism and imperialism, thus calling for colonies to take actions against the colonialists.
According to Frantz Fanon, the world is divided into two parts, the rich and poor. The rich (foreigners) colonizes the poor by imposing their rule by means of guns and machine.

In colonies there are settlers and natives. Natives live in miserable living conditions, extreme levels of poverty and starvation while, the settlers live in high standards of living conditions.

His Ideas on Education

Fanon argued that colonial education system was designed to create exploited persons or colonized intellectuals. The colonialists hammered into the native the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity. In this sense, intellectuals behave like common opportunists.

He also argued that religion was a means of calming natives so that they can continue to be exploited. For him, to wreck the colonial world is a mental picture of action which needs to be assumed by each one in the colonized world.

Decolonization process should be therefore unifying people on a national basis to fight for liberation and national culture and to create a new history of man.

• JULIUS NYERERE

Nyerere was born in 1922 and emerged as national leader in 1960s. He saw in Tanzania, a third world nation, newly independent, people living under the constraints of poverty, technological backwardness, ignorance, hunger, disease, economic dependence as well as exploitation.

   

Early centuries of colonialism and oppression have distorted people's perception and the reality about themselves, the world and situation of the oppression.

The oppressed have been made to accept their inferior position and slavery and made to believe that change is impossible, so they do not desire change.

People were reduced to an object dragged along history for they can not make history.

His Contribution towards Education and Conscientization

His concern was to find a way in which these conditions could be transformed. Adult education was seen as a potent force for conscientizing people so as to understand the root causes of the constraints and how they could be transformed through their own action as no body else will do the job for them.

He believe that the task of adult education was to "shake" people so that they could resign from the constraints of poverty, ignorance, disease and exploitation.

Function of Adult Education according to Nyerere

1. Adult education has to instill in people the desire to change and understand that change was possible.
2. To help to work out the kind of change they wanted and how to create it so as to realize personal and national liberation and development.

He defined development as "liberation" and liberation as "freedom" from the constraints of nature, dependency and exploitation.

Pedagogy of Adult Education

Nyerere argued that, adult educators should first assist people to know and understand their constraints and secondly assist them to work out strategies for removing.

He further argued that adult learners might have background information about that subject matter in which their teachers was unfamiliar. By sharing their experiences and involving them in practical activities, learning could be meaningful.

An adult educator was a facilitator; he/she was therefore not giving the learners something which he/she owned, but helping them to develop their potentialities and capacities.

Adult education served a conscientizing function:

1. To make people conscious about their constraints
2. Persuade them to live and work together in village community
3. To enable them to participate in making plans for eliminating the constraints
4. To improve agricultural and industrial production
5. To make them reflect certain traditional practices which were inappropriate for change

• PAULO FREIRE

Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, a centre of extreme poverty situation of underdevelopment. He was forced to experience reality directly; experience the agony, economic crisis in 1929 in USA highly affected condition.

His ideas as articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in Cultural Action for Freedom and elsewhere are deeply rooted in concrete situations and describe the reactions of workers and members of the middle class in Brazil.

His Contribution on Education:

In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Paulo Freire suggest/propose the methodology and educational philosophy necessary for the dispossessed people in Latin America; for him, ignorance and lethargy (laziness) is product of the whole situation of economic, social and political denomination and of paternalism of which they were victims.

People were not encouraged and equipped to know and respond to concrete reaction of their world. They were kept submerged in a situation in which critical awareness and response were practically impossible. The education system was one of the instruments responsible for the maintenance of this culture.

Education as a Tool for Conscientization

Education should function as instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of younger generation in the login of the present system and bring about conformity. It also was an instrument for conscientizing people to liberate them from the impediments of nature and exploitation.

Pedagogy

He proposed the pedagogy of the oppressed- A Methodology and educational philosophy as a necessary means for equipping marginalized groups with knowledge and capacity to transform the oppressive conditions.

Through education and literacy, people can gradually and critically perceive the conditions in which they find themselves and come to new awareness of selfhood. In this way, they can take the action to transform society that has deceived them this opportunity of participation.

Through the pedagogy of the oppressed, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression, and through the praxis commit themselves to transformation. Once the reality of oppression has already being transformed, this pedagogy cases to belong to the oppressed and become the pedagogy of all men in the process of liberation.

He criticized the traditional literacy training process on various counts:

• The materials which were used in adult education were more just like those which were being used for children.
  • Walter Rodney

Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that gripped the country in the early 1950s.

Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's imagination.

His contribution on education

Rodney argued that, education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives of its members and the maintenance of the social structure. Under certain circumstances, education also promotes social change.

He also assert that under normal circumstances, education grows out of the environment; the learning being directly related to the patterns of work in the society.

He commended pre-colonial education for its relevance to Africans as:

• It has close links with social life, both in material and spiritual sense.
• It was collective in nature
• Its progressive development was in conformity with the successive stages of physical, emotional and mental development of a child.
• There were no separation of education and productive activity or any division between manual and intellectual education

He criticizes colonial education for it:

• Stimulates values and practices which amounted to new informal purpose of colonial education.
• It was not an education system that grew out of the African environment or one that was designed to promote the most rational use of material and social resources
• It was not an educational system designed to give young people confidence and provide as members of African societies, but one which sought to instill a sense of defense towards all that was European and capitalist.
• Colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and development of underdevelopment. "Colonial Education corrupted the thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal complexes".

He suggested education for underdevelopment that is;

• The education system should grow out of the African environment.
• The education system should give young people confidence and a sense of self dependence.
• The education system should liberate its recipients from all forms of subordination and exploitation whether mentally or physically.