Education: System of Oppression or Source of Liberation?

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How Might Education Serve as a System of Oppression or as a Source of Liberation?
Education as an Oppressor
The most fundamental objective of education is to instill knowledge and skills to learners, hoping to empower them to become useful to society in the future. The conventional belief is that education is the pathway to progress and emancipation. However true this might be, education can be oppressive to the learners and society in several ways. According to Freire, education is oppressive because the learners often cannot gain creativity, transformation, and knowledge (par.5). Moreover, education can be enslaving, manipulative, and dominating.
Education can be enslaving in that the learners in the banking system are expected to follow a particular monotonous learning process without understanding its significance. In this respect, learners unreasoningly memorize what they have been taught through a rigid and monotonous process. This, essentially, turns them into containers that should be filled by teachers whose efficacy is measured by how completely they fill them (Freire par. 4). In the same vein, the more readily the learners allow themselves to be filled, the better students they are said to be. In such an arrangement, they dare not question teachers for fear of losing grades (Jensen 14). The learners, therefore, have no choice but to patiently accept, memorize, and repeat what the teachers teach them. Further, teachers consider learners to have absolute ignorance, which must be driven out by knowledge. Believing to be ignorant, learners become slaves to education in their bid to acquire knowledge and skills.
Freire regards education as manipulative because the banking concept regards men as adaptable and manageable beings (par 9). This system focuses on filling the students with deposits that make them pliable. In this perspective, the harder the students work at storing the deposits invested in them, the less they develop the ability to understand the world critically. Additionally, the more they accept the submissive role enforced on them, the more they readily adapt to the world (Freire par. 11). Since the oppressors do not wish the world to be clearly revealed to the learners or to have it transformed, they adopt and promote an education system that stifles the students' creative prowess. In addition, some education systems prevent the learners from perceiving reality. They create contradictions that lead formerly submissive students to revolt against their domestication. In turn, the students attempt to domesticate reality. This means that the learners are constrained to readily do what they have been taught without asking questions and understanding its significance.
The banking education concept is dominating because it regards learners as objects. In this view, it asserts that a person is merely in the world and not with the world. Therefore, learners are made to believe they are mere spectators who have no creative or significant role to play. Essentially, the system formulates how the world should enter the learners. As such, they are constrained to fit into an increasingly standardized world through standardized testing (Jensen 16). Addit...