29 Undoing Education – Learning: Decolonising the Mind

Shalini Suryanarayana

A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Introduction

The wise often say that one must first unlearn in order to be able to learn. The principle involved here is quite absurdly simple. It is like creating space on your computer to save data. If you want your mind to receive and assimilate new knowledge, you may have to make a conscious effort to purge yourself of embedded bits of older knowledge and make a fresh start. If we transpose this to a higher level of abstraction and review the entire philosophy of our education system, we realise that as learners we are recipients of a knowledge that belongs to and is legitimated by a particular class – and through the process of education, layers after layers of this knowledge are plastered on our minds, erased, then re-plastered, and the process continues through our lives. If we pause to reflect, we realise that our mind is constantly being subjected to the dominion of outside forces and our true disposition has been quite effectively quelled. The mind becomes like a colony for outside powers and our own worth and potential is replaced by the needs and yardsticks of those who colonise it.

In this module you will explore this very aspect of the systems of education and learning. If freedom is the ultimate goal of every human, then at some level this freedom has to be experienced by freeing the mind from the shackles of an education that is alien to us. The question of language becomes central to this discourse on education and freedom. We articulate our curiosities, our anxieties, our desires and our aspirations through language. In this module we reflect on how education conducted in a language that does not belong to a people, as it were, can also be a mechanism for domination.

We usually conceptualise colonialism in its territorial, politico-economic, social and cultural aspects, but often tend to overlook that colonial powers, as well as groups and classes within a society, gain stronghold over others through controlling the mental structures of the people that they wish to reign over. The most effective way of gaining control over the mind is through the educational system, and the language in which knowledge is produced and given out becomes the arbitrator of that colonial conscience. The idea of decolonising the mind therefore is to give oneself the chance not only to think for oneself, but to be able to pose questions about one’s existence in the primary language in which one’s thoughts reside.

Language and learning

The human species is endowed with the ability of language. Language is our primary medium of communication. It is the means through which all our learning is imparted. Language is the pivot upon which our ideas and mental constructions rest. The role and significance of language can thus never be sufficiently stated. We comprehend and express our identities through language – be these of caste or race, religion or creed, gender or sexuality. The language in which we think is usually the language through which we conceptualise and make sense of the world around us. Language is thus central to our existence. Acclaimed linguist and psychologist, Lenneberg, popularised the view that there is a critical period usually sometime between shortly after birth till the age of puberty, when children can most effortlessly acquire languages. Beyond this age it is usually difficult to acquire a language and requires much effort and is ultimately less successful.

Education is largely a linguistically driven process. Recognising the importance of language, educational theorist Paulo Freire favoured imparting learning through the medium of one’s own native tongue. In his campaign for teaching older people to read and write, Freire felt that they should be made to relate to knowledge as proximately as possible to their own conditions of existence and this is best achieved through communicating in one’s own language. According to Freire, the tyranny of the educational system reflected the tyranny of society, and the means to decolonisation was the concerted struggle for freedom which included but was not limited to attaining a libertarian education.

The Indian situation

In India, there has always been a linguistic divide between the elite and the masses. In the past, Sanskrit used to be the language of the literati and the interpreters of knowledge became the conscience keepers of society. Throughout Indian history, the language of the court has been the language of knowledge, trends and lifestyles; the poor usually getting further marginalised due to the linguistic gulf – whether between Sanskrit and local languages, or Persian, and subsequently, English. The case of English is the most ubiquitous illustration of colonisation through language. English education came to India during the time of the rule of the East India Company. Thus the Indian educational system had been well and truly colonised even prior to the formal declaration and enactment of the ‘British Raj’.

Lord Macaulay was a strong advocate of the use of English as the medium of education, and his educational proposals got enacted through the English Education Act of 1835 under the tenure of Lord William Bentinck who was then Governor-General of India. This remained the cornerstone of the British-Indian educational policy and in fact also spilled over into the Indian educational system even after Independence. The very stated objective of this educational paradigm was to assist the colonial powers in their rule – that it also produced a class of thinking intellectuals who would eventually lead India to its freedom was verily an unintended consequence of this policy. To quote Macaulay:

It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. 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 tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

–Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Education, (1835).

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

– (Macaulay’s “Minute on Education” arguing for the use of English in India)

But to be fair to Lord Macaulay, as he reasoned for the spread of English education, he mentioned that one of the functions of that ‘class’ of subservient people would also be to reinvent knowledge in the vernacular. Today the term Macaulayism is used for this doctrine of consciously trying to annihilate indigenous cultures through the planned substitution of the alien culture of a colonising power through the education system.

Mahatma Gandhi on Education

Mahatma Gandhi was a vociferous critic of this model of education for Indians. He was not anti- English per se, but more due to the colonial context, in which the language had been introduced as the medium of instruction to be an instrument of British rule in India. Moving amongst the masses, he realised that lack of fluency in English was taking away the self-esteem of Indians. “I find daily proof of the increasing and continuing wrong being done to the millions by our false de-Indianizing education.” … “We seem to have come to think that no one can hope to be like a Bose unless he knows English. I cannot conceive a grosser superstition than this. No Japanese feels so helpless as we seem to do …”

The medium of instruction should be altered at once, and at any cost, the provincial languages being given their rightful place. I would prefer temporary chaos in higher education to the criminal waste that is daily accumulating.

According to Mahatma Gandhi, receiving western education, we grow up in awe of the west and imitating the west. So educated, we lose our capacity for original research or deep thinking, and lack the qualities of “courage, perseverance, bravery and fearlessness”. “No country can become a nation by producing a race of imitators.” For Gandhi, the school itself must be seen as an extension of the home; there must be “concordance between the impressions which a child gathers at home and at school, if the best results are to be obtained. Education through the medium of strange tongue breaks this concordance.”

English is today studied because of its commercial and so called political value. Our boys think and rightly in the present circumstances, that without English they cannot get Government service. Girls are taught English as a passport to marriage. I know several instances of women wanting to learn English so that they may be able to talk in English. I know families in which English is made a mother tongue. Hundreds of youth believe that without the knowledge of English freedom of India is practically impossible. The canker has so eaten into the society that in many cases the only meaning of education is knowledge of English. All these are for me signs of our slavery and degradation. It is unbearable to me that the vernaculars should be crushed and starved as they have been. I cannot tolerate the idea of parents writing to their children, or husbands writing to their wives, not in their own vernaculars but in English.

Among the many evils of foreign rule, this blighting imposition of a foreign medium upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest. It has sapped the energy of the nation, it has estranged them for the masses; it has made education unnecessarily expensive. If this process is still persisted in, it bids fair to rob the nation of its soul. The sooner, therefore educated India shakes itself free from the hypnotic spell of the foreign medium, the better it would be for them and the people.

(Excerpted from: The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol. V – “The Voice of

Truth” Part II – Section XI: Basic Education and Students – Medium of Education)

Decolonising the mind: The Gandhian alternative

The notion of decolonising the mind is implicit in Gandhi’s alternative educational paradigm. His ideas of swadeshi and swaraj are integral to the decolonisation discourse. Gandhi presented a radical alternative for education and freedom that is different from Marxism which is also essentially a Eurocentric ideology of freedom. In that sense Gandhi’s ideas on education were ahead of his times and should be seen in the overall context of the idea of decolonising the mind. According to Gandhi, education is not just to do with knowledge; it is also to do with character building. Gandhi’s critique of western education was a dimension of his critique of western civilization as a whole and of our unfailing acceptance of it. He therefore put forth a radical alternative to it. Gandhiji blamed his fellow Indians for their passive acceptance of their situation. He held that “real freedom will come only when we free ourselves of the domination of western education, western culture and western way of living which have been ingrained in us … Emancipation from this culture would mean real freedom for us”. Gandhi had captured the essence of the principle of decolonising the mind.

Gandhi’s core proposal was to introduce skill development in the school curriculum. Learning of a traditional craft was the centrepiece of his educational programme. This would also alter the social order of the occupational castes where many hereditary occupations belonged to the castes placed lower in the ritual and social domain. Thus education would bring with it social transformation as well. Today skill development is recognised as an important component of overall empowerment of individuals and social groups. Such education, for Gandhi, would help generate and sustain his ideal society consisting of small, self-reliant autonomous communities.

Rabindranath Tagore was another thinker who had a unique non-Eurocentric concept of education. Education was to be pursued being close to nature, the student drawing inspiration from nature in the pursuit of knowledge. Education was a discourse of freedom. His view of education was holistic; it developed the complete person and not just leading to the piecemeal acquisition of knowledge. For Tagore, education was a moral activity.

The scenario in post-Independence India

Language is the fundamental tool for shaping one’s self-identity. In India after Independence, recognizing the importance of language and given our rich heritage of languages and scripts, linguistic states were constituted. The Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution provides the listing of India ’s languages. Our own Constituent Assembly engaged in vigorous debates on what should be the ‘official language(s)’ of India. We have an operational concept known as the ‘ three- language formula’ which includes learning of English, the national language (Hindi) and a modern Indian language, which as the state’s language in many cases could be one’ s mother tongue, given the fact that states have been linguistically devised. This Formula was enunciated in the “National Policy Resolution” of 1968 and reiterated in the “National Policy on Education 1986”, and provides for Hindi, English and a modern Indian language (preferably one of the southern languages) in the Hindi speaking states and Hindi, English and the regional language in the non-Hindi speaking States. This Formula had some difficulties in its working. Over time, there have been many regional movements especially in south India, protesting the hegemony of Hindi and asserting that the language of the region should be made mandatory in the school curriculum. Therefore, there are various levels in the perception of colonisation and not all are seen as emanating from an outside culture. Simultaneously, there has also been the trend of renaming roads, buildings, edifices and entire cities in an attempt to decolonise. Yet, where the actual workings of the educational system are concerned, much of the school and university education across the country is founded on western knowledge principles and English is the most desirable medium of instruction especially in higher learning and in science and technology. Children who do not have access to English education in schools suffer a general language deprivation which often has debilitating consequences for their future careers.

The language of popular culture in India – music, cinema and popular media such as television productions, has Indianised itself in order to gain mass appeal to be commercially viable. Yet paradoxically, the language of education and academic discourse continues to be predominantly English. Those who can afford it do their utmost to get their children admitted into elite English schools. If language is essentially socially embedded and all learning takes place through social interaction, the language of one’s social discourse should be the language of choice for the academic discourse. However, this has seldom happened in the globalised world. Like it or not we continue to remain trapped in a Eurocentric knowledge system communicated through the idiom of a colonial language.

Theorizing the Language Debate

Kenyan novelist and post- colonial theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been an fervent campaigner for decolonising the systems of learning. When English was imposed into the education system of his land, western knowledge was introduced and textbooks and teaching made the local culture look inferior. Ngugi has described how under colonial rule all indigenous knowledge was suppressed, and rapidly replaced by western knowledge communicated through the English language. English was the language of education, and anyone found speaking the native Gikuyu at school was punished. Only those who studied English could continue further studies.

In his thought provoking collection of essays, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called for linguistic decolonisation. The book offers a distinctly anti-imperialist perspective on the future of Africa, and highlights the dual role of language, both as an agent of imperialism and in combatting imperialism. It draws attention to the condition of neo-colonialism in African nations. Ngugi has focused upon whether the African writer’s literary medium should be a hegemonic language like French or English or should one write in one’s indigenous language. He articulates the question, for whom and what purpose is one writing and whether that is served by writing in English. These are fundamental questions which though asked in the context of Africa are equally meaningful for other societies. Africa, unlike mainstream precolonial India, was a largely tribal culture. In India for instance, there was already a rich body of literature in several languages. Literature in Indian languages also suffered the consequences of the colonisation of education.

An alternate view

We saw that the Critical Period Hypothesis with regard to language states that the first few years of life constitute the time during which language develops readily and after which language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful. In the 1960s, American linguist Noam Chomsky put forward a bold and somewhat controversial hypothesis – the Innateness Hypothesis, to explain the apparent linguistic universalities across divergent cultures. According to this theory, there is least some knowledge about language that exists in humans from birth. That is why in spite of what is called “poverty of the stimulus”, that is the fact that children are not exposed to a variety of linguistic formations, yet children not only learn languages, they also seem not to make certain types of errors which might be expected under the circumstances. According to Chomsky, the data that the child has is not sufficient to account for the linguistic ability that a child acquires. Chomsky believes that there must be some rules of language that are innate and embedded in the human mind even before exposure to society. However, although children are born knowing what human languages are like, particular languages are not innate and must obviously be learned. But any child, regardless of ethnic background, will learn perfectly whatever language is introduced, and an isolated child devoid of any exposure to language will learn no language at all.

In a sense this hypothesis is the obverse of the critical period view that assigns a hierarchy among first and second language acquisition. If this were to be true then it would invert the entire argument about the proximity of one’s own language and the remoteness of a colonial language. Much of the debate about decolonising language and learning would perhaps lose some of its edge if language is presumed to be an innate biological quality.

Evaluation

Overall though, it can be seen that the systems established by colonialism have not ended with the political independence of the former colonies. That is why decolonising the mind remains a significant concept even in post- colonial era. The process of decolonisation has to be an ongoing one. It has to be in the form of a motivated and concerted struggle to maintain the existence of traditional knowledge systems and languages; to resist their replacement with new knowledge; to indigenize knowledge and thereby to decolonise. In a multicultural society as is the case with much of the world today, this is a task wrought with challenges.

Decolonising the mind is not just about restoring the primacy of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction; Language remains fundamental to the decolonisation discourse because it is through language that education and everyday life are transacted. But the content of knowledge is also equally important. Decolonisation of the mind is also to put forth a critique of Eurocentric science and a viable alternative to it. Further, it involves aligning different such critiques into a coherent theoretical framework. There are many such critiques of colonial knowledge in existence, such as, post colonialism, orientalism, subaltern studies, critical theory, etc. Gender is an important element of this process of creation of decolonised knowledge. Thinking from the perspective of the woman, freeing knowledge from its male-centric perspective – the concepts of femininity, masculinity and gender identity, are integral to the decolonisation discourse. In the decolonisation paradigm, the production of knowledge and the genesis of alternate theoretical frameworks now rests with activists and leaders of the people, and not academics. It provides practical solutions and mechanisms for social transformation. It is the knowledge of social movements. Decolonising the mind provides an opportunity to experience an extremely appealing alternate world view; it provides for a new way of looking at reality and bringing esoteric concepts to the people.

Conclusion

We saw in this module how through certain twists of history, knowledge became largely Eurocentric and so did its transmission. To decolonise the mind we have to not only bring forth an educational paradigm in indigenous languages, but also to devise curricula incorporating indigenous knowledge systems, and develop non Eurocentric ideologies of freedom. Colonisation drained the resources of colonies but it also sowed its own civilization on the soil of the colonies. In India for instance, English language today after centuries since colonisation, has become fairly indigenised. Today in the Indian context we can truly state that we have a home-grown variant of English that even several decades of freedom cannot really hope to wipe out. It is a fact that the English language is a part of our colonial legacy. But this also means that English is nearly two centuries old in India. In that period the language has taken roots in Indian soil; it is a naturalised language of India. There is now an accepted version of English known as Indian English just as there are American and Australian English. Many Indian words have crept into English language and are used widely. Even though English is not indigenous to India, it is impossible to deny that English is a language of India almost as much as the other modern languages. Linguistic chauvinism cannot wipe out the trauma of colonisation. It is perhaps time to come to terms with our past and look ahead into the future. Real decolonisation will come about not by supplanting the English language but by restoring the dignity of other languages and dialects and bringing into the mainstream people and regions that have been long neglected. Real decolonisation of the mind shall happen through revalidating the systems of traditional knowledge, through veering knowledge notions away from the standpoint of the west, through activism to ensure a gender sensitive equitable social order and an innate respect for all civilizations including one’s own.

References

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