How the Freire’s critical theory can help provide insight into my science

learning: Is it realistic that learners and teachers be liberated from oppression in

China's current education system?

Introduction

China's college entrance examination system has been implemented for several years,
and the effectiveness of talent selection under this system, where test scores are the
only measure, has been widely discussed by the community (Davey, 2007). Among
these, classrooms and teachers, as one of the most important ways to prepare students,
it is necessary to conduct in-depth discussions on their utility. Therefore, this article
will pay attention to two questions: a). What are the causes of the oppressive
relationship between teachers and students in Chinese high school classrooms? b). Are
there opportunities for schooling to achieve Freire’s ‘problem-posing’ pedagogy in
China's current education system?

Guided by these two questions, specifically, this essay will first introduce the different
modes of education experienced by the author in junior and senior high school, using
the physics classroom as an example. Then, the critical theory of Freire is introduced,
starting from the advantages and disadvantages of banking education, to explore the
reasons and effects of the oppressive relationship between teachers and students. The
theme will then be expanded to explore whether Freire's type of problem-posing
education is viable under the current system of exam-oriented education in China, and
whether teachers and learners can really achieve liberation? Finally, some suggestions
will be made for teachers' teaching methods and models.

1. Critical reflection on my experience

I made the choice to study science in my high school, out of my love for physics.
However, what I did not expect was that the subsequent learning experience would
make one of my priorities when choosing a major in college be that I do not study
physics in my major. In this section, therefore, I look back at my physics classes in
junior high and high school. I conclude that, the main reason for this change in my
attitude towards physics can be attributed to the change in the way teachers taught
under the 'pressure' of the entrance examination system.

1.1 Physics in my junior classroom

As a highly practical and applied subject, physics has always been the focus of
teachers on how to show complex principles to students more intuitively. In this case,
my junior school teacher tried to break away from the traditional 'one-size-fits-all'
approach to teaching by filling the classroom with questions and dialogues in order to
enable students to fully understand and relate the principles of physics to everyday
life.
To be specific, I took a classroom lesson on 'Refraction of Light' as an example that
impressed me a lot. At the beginning of the class, the teacher first used multimedia to
show us some common light phenomenon in daily life - the picture of the mirage. By
showing the phenomena, my teacher asked us: Why did this phenomenon happen?
During the discussion, I still can remember that my classmates came up with various
imaginative answers. The teacher told us that these phenomena are related to the
refraction of light, and then enter the new class teaching. In other words, this step
served as a good introduction to stimulate our interest in what we were learning in the
following lesson. Then, in the next 30 minutes, the teacher adopted the experimental
inquiry method, using simple teaching aids, and invited the students to complete
several interesting small experiments on the refraction of light. At the end of the
experiments, the teacher asked us to discuss the observed phenomena in small groups,
summarize them and report the results. Finally, teachers and students worked together
to draw a conclusion for the phenomenon and principles of refraction of light. There
were many other similar classes, and these interesting classes really made the students
the masters of the classroom. In this process, I developed a keen interest in physics,
and in turn, I achieved good results in both the practical and closed-book exams in the
senior high school entrance examination.

1.2 Physics in my high school classroom

However, when I entered high school, everything has changed. My high school
teachers discarded almost all teacher-student interactions in order to increase the
speed of knowledge transfer within the limited time available. For example, the daily
physics class consisted of the teacher presenting and teaching new knowledge
directly, the students doing exercises, and then teachers commenting on test papers.
The students seem to become a container into which the teacher pours knowledge
every day without considering whether the students have actually understood it. It was
so different from my middle school classroom, there was no more discussion, free
exploration, and dialogue with the teacher, which let me gradually begin to lose
interest in physics. To add to my disappointment, marks in various exams became the
only indicator of how well students were learning. After failing a few physics exams, I
completely lost confidence in this subject. Especially in the late high school, the
teacher’s strategy of ‘excessive assignments tactic’, that is, improving students'
problem-solving skills and speed by repeating a lot of exercises every day, made me
suffer even more. Overall, in the constant vicious cycle, I failed in this subject in the
final examinations.

The very different outcomes of these two learning experiences prompted me to reflect
on whether there was really no merit in indoctrination education. But why did some of
my classmates succeed in such an indoctrination mode of teaching? I will discuss it
from critical theory perspective in the next section.

2. Review of the ‘Critical Theory’ framework

Freire's critical theory focuses on the field of education, portraying the classroom as a
microcosm of society to explain this repressive society (Govender, 2020). In
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire presents three important concepts, namely banking
education, problem-posing education, and the oppressive relationship between
educator and educated (Freire, 2005).

Firstly, Freire likens traditional education to banking education. Specifically, he

compares the student to a container, and the teacher is responsible for pouring
knowledge into this container (Dedotsi & Paraskevopoulou-Kollia, 2019). In this
process, students are completely ignorant, and knowledge is 'a gift bestowed by those
who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know
nothing', which implies a vertical relationship between teacher and student (Freire,
2005, p. 72; Govender, 2020). However, the downside of this education model is that
it completely denies students' autonomy in the classroom, suppresses their creativity,
critical thinking, and simply incorporates learners into the current system's logic.
(Spaaij & Jeanes, 2013; Kalsoom, et al, 2020). Further, inspired by Bowdridge and
Blenkinsop (2011, cited in Zhang, 2019), in this highly disciplined and unidirectional
model of teaching, the students cultivated tend to be homogenized and who become
docile and tame individuals.

Freire maps the reasons for the emergence of banking education onto the oppressive
relationship between teachers and students. From the teacher's perspective, according
to Wu (2011), behind banking education lies the question of the identity of teachers,
who are both oppressors and oppressed in the education process. On the one hand,
teachers serve the ruling class oppressors by 'depositing' the ruling class-approved
knowledge into the students' 'bank accounts' through rigid, static 'indoctrination' (Wu,
2011; Govender, 2020). On the other hand, teachers engage in this 'indoctrination
education' without being aware of the oppressive intentions behind such lifeless
educational practices, and thus become oppressed in their own repetitive pedagogical
behavior (Wi, 2011). As for students, they are passive and unconscious individuals
who are oppressed by teachers from the beginning of their education (Kalsoom, et al,
2020). They have no right to speak, and they can only accept everything the teacher
gives them (Freire, 2005). In other words, the relationship of oppression causes the
traditional model of education and what Freire does is to try to defeat this relationship
of oppression.

Specifically, Freire (2005) argues that dialogue is the basis of communication and
communication is the basis of education. In Freire’s ‘problem-posing’ education,
teachers and students are expected to share responsibility for education through equal
dialogue (Govender, 2020). The teacher ceases to be a symbol of authority and the
student becomes a conscious subject (Kalsoom, et al, 2020). Meanwhile, ‘problem-
posing’ pedagogy also emphasizes that this dialogue is an expression of a horizontal
relationship based on mutual trust, love, and humility (Freire, 2005). Therefore, in
view of the current teacher-centered classroom, it reminds people that in order to truly
achieve dialogue education, the transformation of the teacher's role is worth
considering.

Overall, Freire wants to break down oppressive relationships through dialogue

education and thus overcome the disadvantages of banking education. The feasibility
of this model of education in the context of China's current college entrance
examination system will be discussed in the next section.

3. The feasibility analysis of ‘Critical Theory’ in Chinese classroom

3.1 The current state of Chinese education in the light of critical theory

It is undeniable that contemporary education is subordinated to social order and a

narrow system of exam-oriented education (Giroux, 2010), a reality that is difficult to
change as teachers and students. Amongst these, the high school and the college
entrance examination are the manifestation of test-based education in China, which
are also the main oppressive force on teachers in the teaching process (Kirkpatrick &
Zang, 2011). However, this force is determined by China's national context, and it is a
dilemma that schooling cannot get rid of for the time being (Li & Li, 2010).
Therefore, school education needs to focus on how to avoid tragedies like the author's
experience mentioned earlier by optimizing the classroom format within the system of
teaching to the test.

The dialogue-based teaching in the junior high school physics classroom mentioned
earlier is based on the government's training requirements for the compulsory
education stage, that is, to foster students' interest in learning and enhance their
creativity (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2021). This has led to the development of a
variety of forms of senior high school entrance examination, including paper and
pencil tests, open-book examinations, laboratory exercises, presentations of results,
and interviews (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2008). In other words, the rich variety
of examination formats diversifies the teaching tasks of secondary school teachers, so
that they have enough time and guidance to help students develop individually,
achieving the goal of making students the main subjects of classroom inquiry. This
suggests that, the successful implementation of dialogic education in the junior
secondary physics classroom, actually developed within the constraints of teaching
objectives. It is not truly liberating, because the teacher is not completely removed
from the role of the oppressor.

Contrastively, after entering high school, educational goals changed, and entering
college through passing the college entrance examination, which only included
closed-book exams, became the only goal of teachers and students (Kirkpatrick &
Zang, 2011). The strict examination system makes the entire curriculum in high
school show the characteristics of tight time and heavy tasks (Zhang, 2019).
Moreover, the strong accountability system has reduced teachers to teaching tools,
and the teaching process is characterized by teaching only for the entrance
examinations (Zhang & liu, 2020). Under such circumstances, banking education
began to dominate, and the question-based classrooms that were designed to develop
students' creative abilities disappeared. However, it has to be admitted that research
has shown that, the 'sea of exercise' strategy favored by teachers in the later stages of
high school as an adjunct to indoctrination does help students to quickly grasp the
usage of knowledge and improve their test-taking skills through a lot of mechanical
repetitive practice (Li & Li, 2010; Tang, 2011). This proves from the side that, based
on the status quo of the college entrance examination that cannot be changed, the
teaching method under the banking education model has the necessity to exist in
Chinese high school classrooms.

In other words, under the current system of examination-oriented education in China

and affected by the educational goals, it is almost impossible for middle and high
school classrooms to completely break the oppressive relationship between teachers
and students, further to achieve dialogue education. At the same time, the advantages
of banking education are also reflected in the "question sea tactics", which help
students improve their answering-question skills in the exam. Nevertheless, before
adopting the banking education model to consolidate knowledge, it may be useful to
take advantage of questioning-based teaching in new classes to awaken students'
interest. It will be meaningful to prevent students from getting bored with learning
prematurely.

So next, this article will start from the characteristics of question-based education,
take a high school physics class as an example, discussing the changes that teachers
can make in a new lesson.

3.2 The application of ‘problem-posing’ education in high school physics class

Firstly, problem-posing education inspires teachers to reflect during the preparation of

new lessons. Freire (2005) emphasizes that the dialogical nature of education begins
with the teacher-student first asking himself or herself what he or she will dialogue
about with the student-teacher. Reflected in the high school physics classroom, this
requires the teacher to give attention to the content of the teaching project. In the past,
teachers usually prepared lessons carefully as a team, strictly followed the syllabus,
and presented students with a certain knowledge framework based on some specific
clue (Su, et al, 1994). The disadvantage of this approach is that while the teacher is
focused on following his or her own plan, they tend to ignore the students and further
inadvertently create an oppressive force on them. Question-based education,
therefore, inspires teachers to put trust and love for students first (Freire, 2005). In
preparing lessons, teachers should use knowledge as a mediator and treat students as
conscious subjects, focusing on inspiring them to discover and renew their own
knowledge (Freire, 2005).
Secondly, as the class proceeds, question-based education reminds teachers that they
should be mindful of being discovery-oriented, as physics is an applied subject, which
means teachers could enhance student learning efficiency by explaining and
discussing the results of experiments (Buabeng, et al, 2014). Freire (2005) believes
that the role of the teacher in the dialogue is to play a student-led role, presenting
what needs to be learned to students who are exposed to it for the first time in the
form of questions, rather than lectures. Also, according to Shor (1993), in dialogue
education, students should learn to challenge answers rather than simply answer
questions through problem-posing. That is, learners in this method experience
education as something they do rather than something someone else does to them
(Shor, 1993). Hence, teachers can improve in the classroom in the following ways.
Try to replace some of the existing traditional demonstration experiments such as the
law of friction or the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction with student inquiry
experiments in the teaching. Specifically, firstly, students are guided to conjecture by
asking questions, then forming groups to design their own experimental solutions,
followed by organizing student exchanges and discussions, conducting experimental
investigations, and finally drawing experimental conclusions. In general, when
teaching new lessons, teachers and students jointly explore a certain knowledge point
through questions and dialogues, to replace the traditional indoctrination. Such a class
can fully engage students' motivation and autonomy, and further lay the foundation of
interest for the slightly more boring exercise that follows.

Similarly, although the strategy of using the ‘sea of exercise strategy’ after class is
essential, teachers also need to maintain the thinking of question-posing education.
For example, in the process of correcting errors in homework, the teacher should
explore the reasons for mistakes with students through dialogue, in addition to
directly telling them the correct approach. By doing so, it will not only deepen
students' understanding of what they know, but will also enable the teacher to identify
common misconceptions in students' thinking, which will help them to avoid such
mistakes in future lessons by guiding them in advance.

4. Reflection and Conclusion

The conclusion of this article is that, at this stage, Freire's problem-posing education
is only an ideal education model, which is not fully applicable to the current education
situation in China. Specifically speaking, recall the two issues raised at the beginning
of this paper. China's test-oriented education system and teaching goals require
teachers to pass a large amount of knowledge to students within a limited time and let
them use it proficiently in the examination room, which virtually determines the
oppressive status of teachers. At the same time, such an educational system also
proves the existence of the advantages of banking education, as there is no substitute
for its role in helping students to quickly familiarize themselves with the knowledge
and allow them to meet the cultivation requirements. However, the use of
indoctrination education at the outset, which ignores students' autonomy, is likely to
be counterproductive. Therefore, teachers should avoid the overuse of banking
education. Instead, they are supposed to make every effort to use question-based
teaching approach in the new lesson to help students develop their interests in new
knowledge.

Overall, there is still a long way to go to completely break the oppressive

relationships in Chinese classrooms and achieve the liberation of teachers and
students. It requires a joint effort from policy, society, and schools. Therefore, what
teachers can do in such a situation is to change their ideology, balance traditional
education with dialogue education, and find ways to organically integrate teaching
objectives with a student-centered dialogue teaching model to improve students'
ability to cope with the test-taking based on their interest.
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