Stepping Outside Our Comfort Zone:
We Can’t Decolonise Education with Compulsion and Compliance
What does it mean, to decolonise education? The much-criticised Sewell report commissioned by the UK government into race and ethnic disparities finds calls to do so ‘negative’ and thinks that it involves ‘the banning of White authors or token expressions of Black achievement’.
The devolved government in Wales, who do accept that the current curriculum takes an unacceptably narrow approach, have concluded that the answer is to expand what is compulsory. All children in Wales are to be taught about racism and the contributions of minority ethnic communities to Wales, starting from next year. The devolved government says this will help young people grow into ‘ethical and informed citizens’.
I certainly have more sympathy with the Welsh approach than with the Sewell report. But they share a common belief — that children must be made to learn. Once that assumption is accepted, then discussion comes down largely to what we should make children learn. Sewell thinks that children must learn about appreciating their ‘British heritage’, the Welsh government think they must learn about racism — but in both cases, adults hold the power. Children’s role is to learn what has been chosen for them.
There’s something particularly strange about this when related to decolonisation. For colonisation is all about power. The power of one group over another and the strategies which are used to enforce this. One of the most powerful techniques is and always has been compulsory schooling.
Colonisers and missionaries all over the world realised quickly on that by schooling children, they could create a population for whom the world view they wanted to teach would feel entirely natural and beyond question. Schools could be presented as a chance for children to achieve and become successful, and so in many cases parents could be persuaded to send their children. This gave schools enormous power, for once the children were there, they could be taught whatever the colonial power wanted them to learn. They could be taught that their own culture was inferior to the colonial one, and that their own language was less valuable. They could be taught a set of religious beliefs, and told that their salvation depended upon it.
In many countries schooling was deliberately used to take indigenous children away from their families and from generations of cultural knowledge. The damage done by this is still ongoing.
This is why decolonisation of education can’t involve tweaking the system whilst leaving the underlying assumptions intact. The system itself is too deeply implicated. It cannot be about replacing one set of textbooks with another, or adding things onto the existing curriculum until the children groan under the weight.
Colonisation is about far more than content. It is about one group of people wielding power over another group, because they think they know best. Without understanding this, we simply replicate the same system, and wonder why nothing changes.
I grew up in two former colonies, Botswana, a former British colony, when I was young, and later the DRC (then Zaire), formerly colonised by the Belgians. The legacy of colonisation was all around us, not least in the schools I attended. These schools catered largely for the children of international staff and missionaries. We were taught a curriculum not far removed from what we would have studied in Europe or America. So it was that I spent my 7th grade year in Zaire studying American History, and learnt more about George Washington and the Boston Tea Party than the history of the country I was living in. ‘World History’ in the 8th grade turned out to mean the two World Wars, the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Berlin Wall came down that year and we watched it on TV. It was a curriculum cut loose from context, with a world view which centred itself in America and Europe. We were mostly, after all, not expected to stay in Zaire as we grew up. We would go back to our countries, or perhaps onto international careers as diplomats or workers for the World Bank or United Nations. My fellow students are now around the world. Many have gone on to the sort of international careers expected of them.
Our library was imported from elsewhere, there were few English language books available in Zaire. I immersed myself in books. Our student body was highly multi-racial, and efforts were made to represent this, meaning that I read The Color Purple and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, both fantastic books about the experience of being young and Black in America. Being Black in Africa? Or even, being white in Africa? There were a few books about the injustices and abuses of apartheid South Africa, but none that I remember about the country we actually lived in. The curriculum we were taught informed our world view, and reinforced the way in which we saw the world. We lived in Africa, but we were learning that American and European history were more important.
So my interest in decolonisation comes from a place of growing up surrounded by the legacy of colonisation. Our very house, by the shores of the River Congo, had been built by Baptist missionaries over 100 years before from prefabricated parts constructed in the UK and shipped out down the river. We shopped in supermarkets which imported food from Belgian and France, we spent our leisure time at clubs with swimming pools where the membership fee excluded the vast majority of ordinary local people. At school we learnt French, the language of the colonisers, but not Lingala, the language spoken by the people we lived among. We learnt that we were different to most people living around us. Our lives would not be like theirs.
When I returned to the UK as a teenager, life was indeed very different. Certainly our curriculum in the UK was different to that we had followed in Zaire. No more American history, instead we did the Blitz. No one was very interested in Africa, except when celebrities flew out for Comic Relief and we were encouraged to raise money. It was, in the imagination of my classmates, a country (not a continent) of poverty, overwhelming heat and wild animals.
But despite the different curricula, there was one thing which was just the same. The way school functioned. On my return to the UK I went into a class of people the same age as me. Each day I would go in, sit in a desk, and be told what to do. Told to do slightly different things, yes, but told what to do all the same. If I didn’t comply, I would be in trouble. My task was to learn what was expected of me, and to show that I had learnt it in the test.
I knew that this was how school worked all over the world. During my school career I went to eleven different schools and lived in five different countries. Some schools were considered to be better than others, and this was largely due to how efficient they were in getting children to comply and how well children then did in the tests. Some schools were harsher than others, and some teachers made more of an effort to be interesting and to get to know us. Some schools I loved, others I hated. Each school taught me that to do well at school made me a better person than those who did less well. In fact, several schools taught me that just being at their school meant that I was a better person than those who were at the school down the road. They didn’t say this explicitly, they didn’t need to. We all knew that passing the exam to get in was better than failing and going elsewhere.
As I became older, I got involved with charities which worked in the countries I had lived in. Much of the focus was on money for schools and education. At university, people would go out in the summers to build schools or to teach. It was talked about as ‘giving something back’. We were the successes of the system, and we were to try and inspire others to do the same. No one ever questioned whether more schools where children were taught to do what they were told was really what the world needed.
Schools are meant to deliver so much. Organisations such as UNESCO promise that they will empower students, reduce inequality and end poverty. Language of religious fervour is used, with slogans like ‘building peace in the minds of men and women’, or ‘bringing light where we see darkness’. What once might have been the language of missionaries is now the language of school.
It never quite fitted with reality. I saw all around me how school made children feel, and how controlling schools were. I myself had hated some of the schools I attended, so much so that I refused to go. How could it be true that in order to transform their lives, children had to sit in rows and do what they were told? Where is the light or peace in forced learning? Why were we saying that empowerment came through compliance?
Schooling gets inside our heads. We stop being able to imagine that anyone could learn in a different way. We assume that without school, there is nothing, and that before school people did not learn. And when we believe this, we replicate the power structure of school for our children. We force them to comply.
We can’t continue to do that, if we are serious about decolonising education.
This doesn’t mean that the curriculum doesn’t desperately need to change. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek out information about the uncomfortable parts of British and World history, nor that adults shouldn’t be reading Black authors and making sure all children have the opportunities to do so. In fact I would argue that adults have a responsibility to do so. There is a lot to learn which many of us could benefit from knowing and talking to our children about. What it does mean is that we can’t talk honestly about decolonisation whilst forcing our children to learn. When we oblige them to comply we take their power away. It makes no difference to the power dynamic if you are forced to learn about racism or the ancient Egyptians, either way, you are forced.
Decolonisation has to disrupt the structures by which power is maintained. Autonomy and self-governance are fundamental to decolonisation, and that includes education.
This is hard, because children will not make the same choices as adults would have made for them. And surely that is exactly the point. Decolonisation should make adults feel uncomfortable, because it shakes what we were taught to believe to the core. It means we cannot continue to behave as if we know best, and that school achievement is the only route to success. It means we have to hear the voices of children as they are right now, rather than seeing them as people-in-prep for the future. We have to open ourselves up to the possibility that our children will go in very different directions to those we had imagined for them.
It is only when that happens can we start to see glimpses of what a decolonised world might look like.
