WW(b)

Last week we talked about the oppressions in education, which can be political powers, social discrimination, or even cultural biases. Different oppressions may affect adult learning experience in a variety of ways and levels. One of the goals of adult education is to raise individuals’ awareness of these oppressions that they may have already been subjected to and try to liberate their thinking from the cage.

From my personal experience, the deepest and most invisible oppression comes from the political power and other powers related to it. The political power has the authority to decide what kind of information the learners will have access to. According to Marx, one’s basic concepts and cognition can only be derived from and be built on what he has been exposed to. By controlling and limiting the information resources, the “power” shapes people’s perspective of view on any subject fundamentally.  

One of the example stands as the block of Facebook in China. Since there is a wide range of information accessible on Facebook, much of which opposes the official voice in China and hurts the profit of Chinese government, Facebook was required to censor this information on the Chinese site. Since Facebook refuse to limit the information, it was blocked by the Chinese government.  Using the political power, the Chinese government eliminates the information that does not match with its interest, silences the opposite voice and advocates its own notions.  People, thus, only have access of one interpretation of a certain event, which inevitably leads to bias. So when discussing what the impact Chinese economic development has on the global economy, Chinese people usually take a positive point of view, regarding it as beneficial to all nations.

But recently I watched a video on Facebook from CNN about how Chinese economic projects in Africa damaged the local economy. The video portrayed a totally different picture of Chinese businessmen in Africa from what I was informed in China. They made the employees work overtime without extra salary. They injected special hormones into chicken so that they grew faster, cost less, but tasted worse. Instead of helping develop the economy of those poverty-stricken areas, they looked out for their own interests.

The tricky thing is that both of the Chinese government and Facebook have the evidence and eloquent arguments to support their notions. When people only listen to one of them, it’s very easy to be misled and fall into the trap designed by the “power”.  It happened to me, and I am sure it also happens to many Americans who only have access to American news reports without realizing the danger of it. That’s why one of the main goals of adult education is to raise people’s awareness of the invisible powers that manipulate their point of view. Since adult learners can hardly be satisficed with one single notion, the instructor is supposed to provide materials from different resources and bring the whole picture to the learners to facilitate a thorough understanding of the issue.