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| University of Johannesburg |
In 2016, colleagues at the University of
Johannesburg invited me to join their discussion about decolonizing the
curriculum. This has become an important
issue for South African universities, in the context of the Fees Must
Fall movement. I believe it is an
important issue for universities all over the world. Here are some thoughts on the question.
The hegemonic
curriculum
A particular way of organizing knowledge underpins the curriculum
that most university teaching follows. I call it the research-based
knowledge formation. It is usually organized
into disciplines such as Physics, Biochemistry, Literature and Law. But
it constantly evolves, so we also get Computing Science, Climate Science, etc. Depending on
the degree, this knowledge is woven together with the local practical knowledge
that students will need in their future professions.
It’s the research-based knowledge
formation that gives university education its prestige, and is the centre of
the trouble about coloniality. In
many anti-colonial critiques, it’s called “Western” knowledge, and denounced as
something that was imposed by the West on the rest of the world - and needs to
be shaken off.
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| Collecting knowledge: Darwin's ship |
I think that’s a mistaken
view. The dominant knowledge
formation is not so much Western as imperial.
The scientific revolution was interwoven with the expansion of
European empires. Information was collected across the colonized world,
brought back to the imperial centre, processed there and assembled into the disciplines
we know. The knowledge
institutions of the imperial centre became the key sites of theory, method, and
intellectual authority. (They
still are. Just look at the top
names in any league table of world universities: Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge,
Sorbonne...)
The colonized world wasn’t
outside this knowledge formation.
In fact, colonized societies and their intellectuals had a massive
historical role in creating it.
Post-colonial societies are still building it in the neoliberal
age. Think of the role of the
global South in fields like AIDS research or development economics; or think of
the huge investment recently made by the Chinese dictatorship in engineering,
ICT, military and biomedical research.
The basic problem in the
coloniality of knowledge is not a clash of cultures, but the operation of social power. It is power that has allowed unequal appropriations of knowledge, and marginalization of
other knowledge formations. Shaped
into the hegemonic curriculum in a selective education system, it also delivers
privilege. Thus higher education
has been connected with wealth and poverty, gender, racial divisions and
language – all around the world.
The growth of a ruthless transnational capitalism, abetted by neoliberal state elites, is making this worse.
The hegemonic curriculum has
also, paradoxically, been a means of social mobility, and many challenges to
privilege. Research-based
knowledge demands critique of received ideas. Universities are privileged institutions but surprisingly
often have been sites of dissent against state, church and corporate elites.
Other knowledge
formations
Challenges to the hegemonic curriculum often meet the
question, “what can you put in its place?” But we don’t want anything
that goes exactly into that place!
If we look for resources to build a more inclusive curriculum, there are
other knowledge formations of scope and intellectual power.
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| Linda Tuhiwai Smith |
Indigenous knowledges are the locally-based knowledge formations
created by colonized peoples; usually with deep roots before colonization. There is growing appreciation of their
sophistication and scope: for instance, how precise knowledge of the natural world
made it possible for whole societies to live and flourish in apparently very
harsh environments. Indigenous
knowledge is not static, but has always been able to adapt and grow. A classic illustration is Linda Tuhiwai
Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies (2nd
edition 2012).
Other universalisms are systems of knowledge intended to have
general and not just local application, whose logic does not derive from the
imperial knowledge economy. Much
the best known is knowledge based on Islamic culture. This did not stop short with the Muslim golden age in philosophy and science - it has continued to generate new
directions in jurisprudence, sociology, economics, natural science and more. A
fascinating recent example is Syed Farid Alatas’ Applying Ibn Khaldun (2014).
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| Ranajit Guha |
Southern theory is the name I use for concepts generated in the
colonial encounter itself, and from the experience of colonial and postcolonial
societies. Famous examples are the CEPAL school of development economics in
Latin America launched by Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado, and the Subaltern Studies project in history
launched by Ranajit Guha. The
extraordinary research on land, environment and economy by Bina Agarwal and
other Indian feminists is a more recent example.
Curricular justice –
on a world scale
All these forms of knowledge are potential resources for
change; but they can be used in very different ways. We also need principles of justice in education. How this would work in curriculum has
mostly been debated at a national level, but it can be taken to the larger
scale.
Prioritising the interests of the
least advantaged is the basic idea of distributive justice. In education, it does not mean creating
curriculum ghettoes, but is a principle for reconstructing the mainstream. It means finding a place for the
knowledge that least advantaged groups already have, but also gaining access to
powerful knowledges that they need for the future. Globally, that means accessing the resources of different knowledge formations, including the dominant one. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet who actually set up an experimental college (now a university), was clear that multiple 'civilizations', as he put it, had to be drawn on.
Curriculum reform, if it’s not to
be the imposition of an orthodoxy – as authoritarian regimes try to do -
requires us to think hard about the relationship between democracy and
education. In an education oriented to democracy, all learners are advantaged,
not disadvantaged, by others’ success in learning. And that is only likely to happen through curriculum that
emphasises shared knowledges and cooperative learning. Universities often do this better in
graduate programmes than in mass undergraduate programmes.
Education is about nurturing
people’s capacities to act, and the society’s collective capacities to
act. It’s logically possible to
direct education towards the capacities needed to build more equal social
relations. That is actually done, by many teachers in many places. The problem is to make that practice
the mainstream. We need
working models of good schools and good universities, which can appear
anywhere in the world. It’s important to circulate news of good work; I’d be
delighted to hear from readers who have news to pass on.
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These thoughts, I’m aware, are incomplete; but the issues
seem very important for thinking about knowledge, universities, and
research. My paper for UJ is
available on their website here: https://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/humanities/sociology/PublishingImages/Pages/Seminars/Raewyn%20Connell's%20Paper%20on%20Decolonisation%20of%20Knowledge.pdf. The basic ideas about curricular justice are spelt out in my book Schools and Social Justice (1993),
described here: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1067_reg.html.