The colonial educational system was inadequate for the creation of a national consciousness, with regard to the Caribbean identity. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer. The ideas and pedagogical methods of education during the colonial period, from 1757 to 1947, were contested terrain. The commercial British East India Company ruled parts of India from 1764 to 1858. A few eighteenth-century company officials became scholars of Sanskrit, Persian, and Tamil and promoted "Oriental" learning, which was classical, demotic learning in indigenous languages.
However, they were outnumbered by "Anglicists,"
those who denigrated "Oriental" learning and advocated the
introduction of institutions for Western learning based upon the British
curriculum with English as the medium of instruction. By the early nineteenth
century, when English was made the official language of government business,
British policy promoted a cheap, trickle-down model for colonial education.
When the British crown abolished company rule in 1858,
government universities existed at Bombay (contemporary Mumbai), Calcutta
(Kolkutta), and Madras (Chennai); about two thousand students studied at
thirteen government colleges in all of British India, and another 30,000
students were in government secondary schools. Direct rule did not change the
decision to deemphasize primary education to provide occupational training for
young Indian men who took jobs both in the lower tiers of the government and in
urban, Western-style legal and medical services.
Nongovernment schools established by Western Christian
missions and Indian social and religious reform organizations provided the only
opportunities for elementary education in the nineteenth century. American and
English missionaries founded men's colleges, and by the twentieth century,
Lucknow, Lahore, and Madras all had Christian women's colleges as well. Foreign
teachers staffed these institutions, offering a Western curriculum in English
with financial support for the children of Christian converts.
The process of colonization involves one nation or territory taking control of another nation or territory either through the use of force or by acquisition. As a byproduct of colonization, the colonizing nation implements its own form of schooling within their colonies. Two scholars on colonial education, Gail P. Kelly and Philip G. Altbach, define the process as an attempt “to assist in the consolidation of foreign rule”.
Colonial education also affected Nigerian indigenous
system of education. This was because the missionaries were after formal
training of the mind, for this reason they encouraged boarding accommodation so
as to supervise, control and direct the learner along proper lines (Nnamdi
2002).
The Purpose of Colonial Education
The idea of assimilation is important to colonial education.
Assimilation involves the colonized being forced to conform to the cultures and
traditions of the colonizers. Gauri Viswanathan points out that “cultural
assimilation [is] … the most effective form of political action” because “cultural domination works by consent and
often precedes conquest by force” (85). Colonizing governments realize that
they gain strength not necessarily through physical control, but through mental
control. This mental control is implemented through a central intellectual
location, the school system, or what Louis Althusser would call an “ideological
state apparatus.” The colonial educational system was inadequate for the
creation of a national consciousness, with regard to the Caribbean identity. Do
you agree? Give reasons for your answer. Kelly and Altbach argue that “colonial
schools…sought to extend foreign domination and economic exploitation of the
colony” (2) because colonial education is “directed at absorption into the
metropole and not separate and dependent development of the colonized in their
own society and culture” (4). Colonial education strips the colonized people
away from their indigenous learning structures and draws them toward the
structures of the colonizers (see Frantz Fanon).
Much of the reasoning that favors such a learning system comes from supremacist ideas of the colonizers. Thomas B. Macaulay asserts his viewpoints about British India in an early nineteenth century speech. Macaulay insists that no reader of literature “could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” He continues, stating, “It is no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.” The ultimate goal of colonial education is this: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” While all colonizers may not have shared Macaulay’s lack of respect for the existing systems of the colonized, they do share the idea that education is important in facilitating the assimilation process.
The Impact of Colonial Education
The colonial educational system was inadequate for the
creation of a national consciousness, with regard to the Caribbean identity. Do
you agree? Give reasons for your answer. Often, the implementation of a new education
system leaves those who are colonized with a limited sense of their past. The
indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away
(see Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic). Growing up in the colonial education
system, many colonized children enter a condition of hybridity, in which their
identities are created out of multiple cultural forms, practices, beliefs and
power dynamics. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult
to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the
formerly accepted native practices.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a citizen of the once colonized Kenya,
displays his anger about the damage that colonial education wreaks on colonized
peoples. He asserts that the process “annihilate[s] a people’s belief in their
names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle,
in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. The colonial
educational system was inadequate for the creation of a national consciousness,
with regard to the Caribbean identity. Do you agree? Give reasons for your
answer. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it
makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want
to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves”.
Not only does colonial education eventually create a desire
to disassociate with native heritage, but it affects the individual and the
sense of self-confidence. Thiong’o believes that colonial education instills a
sense of inferiority and disempowerment with the collective psyche of a
colonized people. In order to eliminate the harmful, lasting effects of
colonial education, postcolonial nations must connect their own experiences of
colonialism with other nations’ histories. A new educational structure must
support and empower the hybrid identity of a liberated people.
The colonial educational system was inadequate
for the creation of a national consciousness, with regard to the Caribbean
identity. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.
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