Decolonizing Education Movement

Discussion

Patrick Porter:

"The decolonising movement is a more far-reaching, stark attempt to transform consciousness itself. Its proponents urge teachers to recognise that knowledge can only ever be a product of power relations, that the Enlightenment tradition is defined primarily by its complicity in empire, and that as a way of thinking and educating, it is culturally specific to a privileged Western overclass. Further, as disciplines from political science to archaeology to mathematics are historically implicated in imperial oppression, they are forever tainted and complicit in racial inequality now, and must be overhauled — or dismantled. In order to disrupt inequitable power relations, we thus need different kinds of knowledge.

Consider the assumptions that then rise to the surface. For the Keele Decolonsing the Curriculum Network, the Enlightenment and its values of liberty and reason must always have a white essence: “the content of the curriculum … continues to maintain a colonial legacy through the presentation of a white, western intellectual tradition as not only superior … but universal”. Oxford’s Centre for Teaching and Learning assumes knowledge is the exclusive property of certain groups, asserting (though not demonstrating) that “racist legacies of colonialism have shaped the way we teach and learn in our discipline as well as whose knowledge we value and prioritise”.

The SOAS student union is overtly racialist in its criticism. In our classrooms, it says, there are too many exclusively “white” perspectives, knowledges and histories, which must be corrected by the addition of “indigenous” ones. The suggestion that there are non-European “knowledge systems” is frequent, though opaque, in the rhetoric. In sharp contrast to the “European tradition”, the Open University in its Innovating Pedagogy report urges universities to include “indigenous knowledge and ways of learning”.

To break this down, the “knowledge system” or intellectual tradition often associated with the Enlightenment, which advances the rigorous, reasoned, evidence-based pursuit of knowledge, belongs only to the West, or the Global North, or the Euro-Atlantic. In this view, the idea that arguments should be rational, non-contradictory, and tested by evidence, rather than based on authority or skin colour or feelings, becomes not something that is open to everyone, but something that is culturally peculiar to white westerners.

What are the alternative “knowledge systems”? The manifestos rarely say. But the literature attached to the decolonising movement provides a clue: that the “knowledge systems” of the Global South are inherently different in some essential way — experiential, irrational, or spiritual. The very idea of an independently existing truth, or just Socratic exchange in the classroom, is European, and not for the indigenous. Nods of agreement from the Klan.

Essentialism arises again and again. Consider the revealing statements in David Batty’s Guardian account. A professor at Goldsmiths asks, “Are you including Chinese philosophy or just a white western knowledge you’re imparting in an imperialist way.” Knowledge is inherently ethnic, allegedly, and in place of substantive specifics, accusers are pleased to spray around the terms “imperial” and “colonial”. There is didactic authoritarianism to spare.

For an officer at the National Union of Students, “Decolonising the curriculum means providing an accurate portrayal of history and providing students and staff with the tools to critically identify [how] the university reproduces colonial hierarchies.” Leaving aside the irony that the ideal of historical accuracy is part of the dreaded Enlightenment project, note the purpose: universities are there to empower students to realise that universities reproduce colonial hierarchies. Rather than stimulating them to think for themselves. Pedagogy, we learn, is “rooted in imperial and colonial ideas about knowledge and learning”. British university education, and the idea of it, long predated the country’s acquisition of an overseas empire, and there aren’t many maps painted red in the seminar rooms. But perhaps the request for evidence is itself a symptom of bankrupt imperial nostalgia.

Ironically, assertions about separate ways of knowing resemble the very world view that helped drive colonialism in the first place, that “we” have reason, self-mastery and science, “they” have spirit, superstition and emotions. As Meera Nanda has written, this effectively excludes non-westerners from science and reason, since it treats modern science as a “local tradition of the West, as the indigenous knowledge of the non-Western subaltern is a local knowledge of his culture”. Those who take this view may think of themselves as serving the cause of progress by seeking to subvert power structures. But if there is a form of regressive “colonial modernity” that needs interrogating, it is this.

The net effect of these sweeping utterances is to racialise knowledge and reify race, not as a construct that needs interrogation and argument, but as a fixed condition that predetermines and imprisons people. Starting from a reasonable observation that Enlightenment traditions are historically complicit in empire, decolonisers make an inordinate leap, assuming that such traditions therefore are inherently so.

Because ideas about the world were/are advanced by “white” powerful men, those ideas are condemned to be white and oppressive, permanently. How come? Why can’t ways of thinking be remade into wider traditions, open to all? To show the origin of a thing is not to show its permanent character. Guardian readers will sympathise with this point, given that newspaper’s historical support for the Confederacy and eugenics.

Decolonising arguments usually come bodyguarded by consumerist claims about what students want. Allegedly, BAME students are disenchanted by Eurocentric syllabuses, and want something “relevant” (defined along crudely-drawn, insular lines). They must see “themselves” reflected in the syllabus, even in colleges that otherwise flaunt their credentials as global, cosmopolitan centres that lift up horizons and transcend borders.

Decolonisers uncritically quote students who dismiss the study of “dead white men”. We might think twice about encouraging such attitudes towards Aristotle, Marx, Shakespeare or Hobbes. But to suggest so is to insist that universities should be places of intellectual discomfort, not for a cosy “experience.”

Encouraging students only to identify with familiar people or things will have consequences. Insisting that literature is only relevant to audiences who share the author’s background lends itself to a corollary: that white students have little to learn from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said or Frederick Douglass. Such insularity, such sheer incuriosity, encouraging students only to be open to literature and minds that look like them, promotes the very thing it opposes, a bleak vision of nothing but warring, walled-off identity groups, and the formation of a heightened “white” identity. We know where that leads."

(https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2022/decoloniser-heal-thyself/)