By Oliver Mills

Education is an active,
positive process which expands our consciousness, and enhances our
understanding. In this sense, it liberates us from the strictures and
barriers that have been imposed on us by society.

Liberation implies being
unhindered in our movements, not having our thinking being checked in
order to restrict our ideas, and confine them within a particular
orbit. Liberation involves being free in exercising our choice of
what we see as beneficial for us, untampered by others.

This means that the form
education takes, and the strategies it uses have to reflect its
intent and purpose.

During our socialisation
into society’s norms, we acquired behaviours allegedly designed to
help us live harmoniously with each other, show respect, and put
limits on what we could say to minimise conflict.

But in many instances
these apparently harmless precepts have led to us being taken
advantage of, belittled as being too passive, crossed over because of
a lack of assertiveness, and denied opportunities because we did not
stand up for ourselves.

This results from an
inherited way of being which curtailed our emotional and intellectual
development. And the school system re-enforced this ethic. Also the
kind of education we acquired did not help us to find ourselves, know
about our real accomplishments as a people, and help us to be
courageous, and question practices we were uncomfortable with. It was
not education for liberation which opens our eyes to a different
world, a higher quality of life, and restores our faith and
confidence in ourselves and our capabilities.

More broadly, education as
liberation is about restoring our identity and personhood. Our early
socialisation deprived us of this, but a liberation based education
restores it. It does this by peeling off the way we were
indoctrinated, and revealing our true and real selves. We then become
conscious of our unlimited capabilities, develop inner strength and
fortitude, and are able to see and defeat the social forces that
sought to shape us in the image of others so they could control us.

Education as liberation
releases new possibilities, opens our eyes to see a different reality
which we are capable of bending to our will, rather than carrying out
the aims of personalities and institutions which serve the status
quo, and keep things as they have always been, serving particular
interests as opposed to the general desires of the majority.

Someone said that what we
wish for ourselves, we should also wish for others. Education as
liberation makes this a reality, since it is based on fairness
towards all. The liberated mind, once freed of past prejudices begins
to act in ways that realise there is good in everyone and everything.
A poet once said that: “Nothing is good or bad, only thinking makes
it so.”

Education as liberation
frees us from thinking narrow thoughts, and replaces them with those
that are transcendent. We develop open minds, and become more
receptive and understanding about those practices we once thought of
as unbecoming.

An education for
liberation requires a reformulation of the schools’ curriculum to
include our history, culture and traditions. It also involves putting
indigenous persons first, and recognising the accomplishments of
others. Only indigenous persons can psychologically understand where
we came from, and where we should be going. And only these persons
can write our history authentically, without bias, and in ways that
liberate us.

An education with a
philosophy of liberation, awakens us to understand that there are
alternatives to everything, and that nothing is sacrosanct. It
fosters wisdom, and releases us from the shackles that once held us
to the decadent practices of the past.

Liberation as an ethic of education opens us to new possibilities, and releases our positive energies to accomplish things we once thought were beyond us.

ABOUT OLIVER MILLS:

Oliver Mills is a former lecturer in education at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus. He holds an M.Ed degree from Dalhousie University in Canada, an MA from the University of London and a post-graduate diploma in HRM and Training, University of Leicester. He is a past Permanent Secretary in Education with the government of the Turks and Caicos Islands