By Cde: Mohammed Yagoub (Zerick)
19th August 2025
Education for Liberation as part of broader liberation philosophy is not like conventional education which is being designed in most cases to serve interests of colonialist, imperialist or internal elitist state apparatus. Education for Liberation as a school of thought within liberation philosophy, anti-imperialist, critical pedagogy and decolonial theory is neither a reformist nor a neutral model of education, it’s an eternal revolutionary process of liberation. It firmly opposes educational systems historically became vehicles of oppressor’s vision of silencing, disorienting and miseducating oppressed peoples.
The conventional educational system is never meant to produce critical thinkers or to liberate minds, it meant to produce submissive workers, passive citizens and loyal subjects who can help the system flourish. The conventional classroom as part of oppressor’s state machinery doesn’t have liberation of the oppressed as part of its goals rather it sees the necessity of continual subjugation. The classroom is never the starting point of education for liberation nor earning piece of a paper titled certificate, degree, diploma or whatever other name given is the end of it.
It begins when a journey towards self-discovery of an individual or a collective self, an inner journey that makes it possible for us to know who truly we are as rational beings and externally go beyond what’s being taught. In other words, education for liberation is about bringing into life part of ourself, history, culture and values which the society or the system have been trying its best to bury into the dustbin of history. As once taught by a revolutionary thinker Paulo Freire true education is a practice of freedom, a revolutionary process that enables the oppressed to get awakened.
This type of education is not about waiting for miraculous or accidental state to make it happen or praying to an invisible higher being to come and instil in us rather it’s about taking conscious efforts to liberate ourselves from the lies which have been repeated to us for so long until they became comfortable lies. Sometimes unlearning ages old lies about our history, cultures and ourselves is the most painful process but we have to go through it so as to build stronger foundation for self-worth, pride, respect and resistance.
Understanding that schooling is not same as education and certification is not same as liberation is key to emancipation, going to school does not necessarily mean you can be able to think critically nor understand your worth as a human, in most cases what we go through as educational journey takes us straight to the gates of conditioning in which we spend rest of our lives defending and trying to fit into the system which we were never been part of its initiation nor those built it had us in their best interest. Schooling trains us to desire for validation from those who criminalize our very existence. A truly liberatory educational environment makes it possible for us to learn together without any sense of coercive act. This understanding can lead us to questions like what type of education can help us get free? Sense of purpose? Fully human? Take control of our affairs?
Questioning helps us dive into Know Thyself philosophy that can help us understand the root causes of moral evils we face, parts of our history and culture intentionally erased by the system and state of our being, as existential beings within larger existence. Questioning makes it possible for us to discover the infinite part of our being and more importantly the system and how it works. This is not an act of intellectual pleasure rather it’s necessary for the survival of the masses specially oppressed masses. It enables them stay strong in the midst of the stormy system that try’s her best to erase them. Not knowing yourself means not knowing your culture, history, community and collective place in the existential struggle which makes you vulnerable to control or even turned into your own enemy. Understanding how our identities have been shaped by the oppressive system is a first step towards eternal process of liberation.
As one of key thinkers in black consciousness struggle Frantz Fanon argued colonialism is not just the occupation of the land but the occupation of memory. It replaces, erases and distorts. The education for liberation takes historical consciousness as a matter that should be taken seriously because only through understanding root causes of issues, we can be able to have clear futuristic picture of matters at hand. Understanding history is necessary because those behind the system have always written versions of history to glorify some and victimize others. Being conscious of the history beyond what propaganda machines of the system teaches is a necessary duty. Liberatory education teaches us to look for who benefits from our ignorance? Who authored the existing books? Whose voices were being silenced? Who is behind the system they want us to dearly serve?
Since the conventional education has never been neutral and operates from biased ground, it gets us to become workers for the system rather than make us think on our own. It praises blind following of the rules of the existing power rather than questioning them. Education for liberation doesn’t teach us to get a room in the unjust system rather it encourages us to study why and how that unjust system was built in the first place, what sustains it? Education for Liberation is not about getting a seat next to the master’s table, it’s about destroying table of the master while coming up with a completely new table that can be utilized justly. Therefore, education for liberation is an eternal process of removing the oppressive system and replacing it with just system. The day we start to ask infinite questions in far realms beyond what we are being taught by the system in search for the truth is the starting point towards real freedom.
Education is more political than merely learning of facts, the type of education we get shapes the dynamics of power, possibility and identity. It determines our future whether we become liberated or remain in the chains of oppression. Without surgical examination of what’s being put forward by the system we can easily be brainwashed to become agents of our own destruction by loving those behind the troubles and hating the victims of injustices.
Liberatory education begins not within institutions but in the soul of the struggle. In self-discovery, historical truth, collective awakening and understanding which are the bases of revolution. It’s grounded in the grassroots efforts of the oppressed masses, informed masses who understand their power are not easy to control or contain that’s what worries the system more than anything else. Getting to know yourself is not just personal discovery, it’s the beginning of change a change that makes liberation possible. Education for liberation is not the way to freedom it’s the freedom itself.
