Reimagining education as the practice of freedom

The absence of "quality" formal schooling is a major root of many of our problems. I vividly remember that I never experienced a joyful school life, neither in primary nor in secondary school. It was largely mechanical, passive, unpleasant, and lacking good teachers, adequate resources, proper infrastructure, and meaningful engagement. Coming from a family that was neither economically nor socially upper class, my parents could not afford to enrol me in elite institutions that offered a different type of education. I believe this was not only my experience; many students in Bangladesh have faced, and continue to face, similar schooling.

Yet, I was fortunate to encounter a few remarkable individuals, especially in secondary school, who nurtured my reading and writing and taught me to question and doubt the world around me. They became my early mentors, helping me develop what I now call epistemic courage—the courage to see beyond dominant narratives. But such experiences are rare. School life is a critical period for forming a child's thought-world. If structural gaps or rigid ideological frameworks dominate this stage, the child will suffer throughout life, since school and family are key sites for reproducing state and social hegemony.

We need a model of schooling based on common cores, along with diversity. This educational philosophy acknowledges that while children require shared foundations, they also deserve the opportunity to grow in diverse ways. In such schools, students from primary to class ten would learn basic science, literature, music, art, physical education, history, comparative religious studies and more. Some subjects would be mandatory, others optional. The current curriculum does not address the deep socio-economic inequalities that divide students into isolated educational categories. These divisions weaken our sense of collective social unity grounded in shared ethical and cultural foundations.

Schools should not produce "ideological robots" of grand state projects. They should give children the opportunity to form their own identities through the practice of freedom. Education as freedom means cultivating the habit of thinking, questioning, and reflecting on oneself and one's surroundings—not merely obeying what is given.

Herbert Marcuse's warning about the emergence of the one-dimensional self is relevant here. We must nurture multi-dimensional selves who can hold multiple perspectives, evaluate issues critically, and take time to think, doubt, and understand. According to John Dewey, school should be a microcosm of democratic life, where students learn to negotiate differences through reasoned communication. Drawing on Walter Feinberg, Humayun Kabir, and Rabindranath Tagore, we may say that true education is fundamentally the nurturing of humanity. Schools should be spaces of communing—where children bring diverse socio-cultural experiences into dialogue, cultivating unity with difference.

How can we imagine a human being without curiosity? Yet genuine curiosity rarely reflects in school-going faces today. Many students appear as though their lives have already lost vitality—no expectation, no spark. We must recognise the long-term socio-cultural costs of producing a generation of vulnerable selves—or worse, human robots. These may serve the needs of a dominating state or powerful social forces, but are destructive for any society committed to collective flourishing.

Freire's distinction between problem-posing education and the banking model is crucial here. Problem-posing education cultivates ethical reasoning, collective problem-solving, and social imagination; banking education turns students into passive containers of information.

Without a significant number of reflective, balanced, and thoughtful individuals—products of good schooling—it becomes impossible to sustain a healthy, independent, and responsible society. Vulnerable selves often cannot recognise their own vulnerability. They struggle with critical ethical grounding and lack the capacity for self-critique, often believing their truths to be unquestionable. In contrast, intellectually mature individuals remain ever-curious, reflective, and socially responsible.

Schools, I believe, should help children become individuals who can observe, think, write, and understand themselves and others with ethical awareness. Even at a basic level, such anthropological practice nurtures tolerance and reflex. Students must also be allowed to make mistakes. As Humayun Kabir, an educator, wrote: "one cannot discover truth without making mistakes, and if these truths are learned only later in political or social life, society pays the cost. Therefore, students should encounter diverse experiences—including mistakes—during their formative years."

We need a generation that loves diversity and life itself; that values music, poetry, nature, and human dignity; that remains sceptical of the known and curious about the unknown; that seeks truth—not absolute truth, but evolving and partial truth. Such a generation must learn to imagine its future, to understand the consequences of present actions. Without knowing history objectively—from social to subaltern histories—how can one envision the future? And without envisioning the future, how can one understand the present?

For Tim Ingold, an anthropologist, education is about maturation, not matriculation. Teachers and students walk together as fellow travellers in the pursuit of truth. The teacher's role is not to make learning easy, but to exemplify generosity, companionship in inquiry, and honest critique.

Freedom, then, is not merely a constitutional or social right; it is a practicable act—something that can be cultivated and nurtured in schools.

No education system is perfect. But acknowledging imperfection should not lead to silence. We must engage in the continuous research of education itself, searching again and again for more responsible ways of pursuing truth for the common good.

SV Anwar Ahmed is a student of anthropology at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. He can be reached at anwarahmedsust@gmail.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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