Freedom and Oppression

I have been thinking lately about freedom and oppression.  I am reading Paulo Freire and I feel my pulse quicken as those revolutionary ideas breathe into me slow, leeching into my ideals like a shuddering irrigation.  Humanity does not merely adapt to the world as it changes, but rather transforms it by the dual processes of reflection of action.  Education is "communion with", not an "imposition of" or a "giving to."  Freire speaks against what he calls the banking concept of education , saying,

"Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.  Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.  This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store.  But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.  For apart from inquiry, apart form the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human.  Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

He goes on to say that, "education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students."

Though I have already been challenging many of my previously held perceptions about education throughout this year, nothing has caused me to pause and question so entirely as these words and the ideas that wrought them.  I am becoming overwhelmed by the task of establishing a classroom environment in which I and my students are co-creators and co-investigators of the language-learning experience.  The difficulties are legion, between the inflexibility of the established routines and procedures of my cooperating teacher, my own inexperience in giving away my power-role as authority or oppressor, and the students' unfamiliarity with an environment in which they are asked to help establish the trajectory of their own learning.  And at an even greater scale, the wider educational climate of testing and measurability of outcomes which attempt to fit every shape into a single-size hole.  Yet how do I interface with this understandable desire to determine whether or not my class is an effective method for developing the capacities and knowledge of children?  How to offer up meaningful results that do not rely on the accepted oppressive methods that see students as passive receivers instead of those who transform the world?