Decolonial Praxis, Education and COVID-19: Perspectives from India (original) (raw)
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Decolonising education: critical reflections from India
Aula de Encuentro
Educational development within the postcolonial Indian Nation-state is integrally connected with the colonial history. Much like other postcolonial nations, modernisation of Indian society through education is a product of the “local history” and the “global design” of colonialism and contemporary processes of globalisation. The modern colonial imaginary has been predominant in shaping the “subject lessons” learnt by modern Indian elites. Though there were missionaries, some benevolent Europeans, and native intellectuals committed to the cause of education for the uplift of the Indian masses, the British Raj mostly promoted the education for the elites. This modern colonial imaginary also shaped Indian nationalism and the nationalist freedom movement led by the elites of the Indian society. Within a diverse class, caste, multi-ethnic and religious context, often this nationalist imaginary led to the suppression of subaltern voices. The establishment of the Modern Indian nation-state...
Decolonising Indian Education: National Education Policy 2020
Ars Artium, Vol. 11, 2023
Despite their mammoth infrastructure none of the modern Indian educational establishments could make a mark among the top 150 institutions of the world. Nor have they been successful in producing any landmark fundamental or applied research. Even the graduates churned out by them are unemployable, unproductive, irresponsible, self-centred and greedy shirkers with a highly colonial attitude and mind-set. The contemporary Indian education unabashedly and unflinchingly disseminates the colonial conviction that the West is wiser, more just, and more humane and has the panacea for every ill. It being Indian only in its location shows scant respect for Indian culture and traditions. While the system was Anglo-centric earlier, it is Anglo-American-centric now, be it the issue of cultural-ethos, curriculum, medium of instruction, teaching materials and methods, testing methods, qualifications of teachers and learners or funding of education. The modern education creates a mind with the hallmark of imitation and mimicry and it successfully generates a feeling of inferiority, erases memory and cultures, introduces an alien conceptual vocabulary, and produces a shadow/shallow mind whose creativity is smothered with dullness. Through new types of funding/fellowships the Indian minds are being neo-colonised. How the National Education Policy 2020 seeks to transform the imitative mind to a thinking mind rooted in Indian culture and ethics is the theme of this paper. Pros and cons of all the above issues are discussed in the paper with proper reference points from ancient Indian educational history.
Decolonizing Education: Re-schooling in India
Sinéctica, 2019
The industrialization and its consequential imperialism and colonialism have impacted this world for three centuries. India has been a colony of the British Empire for two centuries. These eventful two centuries of Indian history did see the influence of not only the political and economical might of the “great” Britain, but its influence on every milieu of Indian life. India’s indigenous education system was gradually displaced and the colonial model of education pervaded under the patronage from the colonial-state. The language, pedagogy, evaluation and knowledge of the colonizer became naturalis obligato for the population of the colony. India got independence in 1947 and took to the task of decolonizing education immediately. The attempts to decolonize education from various standpoints of political activism, universalism and religious nationalism are charted in this article. What decolonizing education should entail and how India has responded to this question in the last century and how the neo-liberal order has supported a particular ideology to have a dominant say in this process are concerns of this article. We analyse how re-schooling and indoctrination are projected as the most nationalist response for methodical decolonizing of education.
Decolonial Philosophy and Education - Full Text (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education)
“Decolonial philosophy of education” is an almost nonexistent term. Consequently, rigorous intellectual and scholarly conversations on education tend to be centered around a specific set of concepts and discourses that were (and still are) generated, picked up or analyzed by thinkers from a specific geographical and political space, such as Socrates, Rousseau, Dewey, Heidegger, and Foucault. This has led to the systemic ignoring and violating concepts and ideas generated from other spaces and lived through by other people. This legacy can also be related to some philosophical aspirations for gaining total, hegemonic, and universal perceptions and representations often formulated by male Euro-American philosophers; when this intellectual passion for universality becomes coupled with or stays silent about imperial and expansionist ambitions, it can see itself implicated in creating assimilationist or genocidal practices: in education, the manifestation of universality associated with imperialism is observed in Indian residential schools. While the words education, literacy, curriculum, learning of languages, acquiring knowledge, school, school desks, and school buildings might normally echo positive vibes for many, it can make an aboriginal survivor of an Indian residential school shudder. It is furthermore hard to ignore the aspirations for a European/Universalist definition of human and man in the famous “Kill the Indian to save the child” policy of Indian Residential Schools. However, the likelihood of deeming such assimilationist attempts as benign acts of trial and error and as events external to philosophy is generally high. Therefore, the “colonial edge” of these philosophies are, more often than not, left unexamined. This is the plane where decolonial philosopher dwell. They deliberate on essential key moments and discussions in philosophical thought that have either not been paused at enough or paused at all, and thereby question this lack of attention. There is an important reason for these intellectual halts practiced by decolonial philosophers. While these might seem to be abstract epistemic endeavors, decolonial philosophers see their work as practices of liberation that aim beyond disrupting the eminence of mainstream Euro- American philosophical thought. Through these interrogative pauses, they hope to intervene, overturn and restructure the philosophical, political and social imaginations in favor of the silenced, the ignored, the colonized, and the (epistemologically and physically) violated. This article engages with certain key decolonial theses and is concerned with the hope of initiating and further expanding the dialogues of decolonization in the philosophy of education. The article will, however, stay away from adding new theses or theories to decolonial education. The author believes that this field, much like other paradigms, either can or will at some point suffer from theoretical exhaustion. Instead, it directs the readers to pause at some of the decisive moments discussed in decolonial theories.
2023
Despite their mammoth infrastructure none of the modern Indian educational establishments could make a mark among the top 150 institutions of the world. Nor have they been successful in producing any landmark fundamental or applied research. Even the graduates churned out by them are unemployable, unproductive, irresponsible, self-centred and greedy shirkers with a highly colonial attitude and mind-set. The contemporary Indian education unabashedly and unflinchingly disseminates the colonial conviction that the West is wiser, more just, and more humane and has the panacea for every ill. It being Indian only in its location shows scant respect for Indian culture and traditions. While the system was Anglo-centric earlier, it is Anglo-American-centric now, be it the issue of cultural-ethos, curriculum, medium of instruction, teaching materials and methods, testing methods, qualifications of teachers and learners or funding of education. The modern education creates a mind with the hallmark of imitation and mimicry and it successfully generates a feeling of inferiority, erases memory and cultures, introduces an alien conceptual vocabulary, and produces a shadow/shallow mind whose creativity is smothered with dullness. Through new types of funding/fellowships the Indian minds are being neo-colonised. How the National Education Policy 2020 seeks to transform the imitative mind to a thinking mind rooted in Indian culture and ethics is the theme of this paper. Pros and cons of all the above issues are discussed in the paper with proper reference points from ancient Indian educational history.
Education in many African states is comparatively characterised by inadequate availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of education. Nevertheless, evaluations focusing on lack of educational infrastructure and personnel usually ignore the contextual inadequacies of educational provision in the region and the inability of such education to equip its citizens to fit in with and benefit the societies they live in. This educational incompatibility has led to a significant level of unemployment/underemployment, underdevelopment and 'brain-drain', as well as some erosion of languages and cultures. The colonial experience reduced education to a tool of communication between the coloniser and the colonised. Emphasis on the individual and de-emphasis on community and culture resulted in ideological dissonance. Despite post-independence attempts to reverse this, vestiges of postcoloniality in contemporary education remain and perpetuate a myth of inferiority of indigenous knowledge and methods. This deprives the world of a wider range of ways of knowing, pedagogy and epistemologies. The CESCR envisions education for the full development of the human personality of all people all over the world. Therefore, international initiatives promoting the right to education in Africa should take into account the particular positionality, historicity and needs of populations. Using theories of deconstructive postcolonialism, this article will examine Africa's education narrative and suggest a critical Freirian approach for decolonising education in Africa. This article contends that un-decolonised education results in epistemic violence/injustice and is thus pedagogically and ethically unsound – violating the right to education.
2022
Despite the official end of physical colonization across the planet, the systemic, epistemic, and ontological impact of colonial ideologies through the Eurocentric parameters of knowledge production continue to regulate the habitual existential patterns of individuals and institutions in the contemporary era. The impact can be very well observed through our verbal language, body language, behavioral patterns, curricular structures, pedagogical practices, fashion ethics, economic practices, and many other aspects. With respect to the theme of this seminar, the lecture will focus on how colonially-shaped pedagogical practices continue to dominate and dictate the higher education system in India. I have chosen India to weave my arguments in this lecture because I am from the city of Kolkata in India. Most of the arguments in this lecture will emerge from my personal experiences as a student, researcher, and teacher across diverse schools and higher educational institutions in India. The Indian education system continues to be haunted by the specter of the 1835 Macaulay’s Minute on Education that expropriated the native indigenous systems of teaching and learning and appropriated the Eurocentric knowledge disciplines. Within India's Eurocentric education knowledge systems, the parameters of intelligence, intellectuality, and knowledgeability are interpreted based on one’s knowledge of specific Eurocentric sciences and literatures. To elaborate further, individuals, who do not possess knowledges about certain European sciences, technologies, histories, literatures, languages, and other disciplines are dehumanized; their intellectualities are dumped as stupid; they are demarcated as individuals who lack common sense, and they are convicted for not being enough vocal and aware about the modern (also read as colonial) knowledge frameworks. Based on these arguments, the lecture will unfold how the pedagogical patterns in the higher educational institutions in India continue to preserve the hierarchical, dictatorial, and violent pedestals of Eurocentric knowledge systems and how the pedagogies of stupidity, common sense, and silence can generate collective networks of resilience against such violent teaching-learning practices. The arguments about these pedagogical practices, which I celebrate as fractured pedagogies, will be widely shaped from a set of case studies across different higher educational and alternate educational institutions in India, which I have conducted for my ‘trilogy of fractured pedagogies’ – ‘Pedagogy of the Stupid’, ‘Pedagogy of Common Sense', and ‘Pedagogy of Performative Silence’.
Echoes of ‘Coloniality’ in the Episteme of Indian Educational Reforms
2020
The international education project that drives neoliberal reforms is entwined with ideas of modernity and development embedded in coloniality. Instead of learning from decolonized and subaltern knowledges, what we see is a disruption of diverse post-colonial processes via a reform policy transfer – constructed in decontextualized abstraction, rationalized by a target driven universal agenda. This paper draws attention to a possible continuity between colonialism – viewed not just as a geopolitical reality located in the past but an organised epistemological order – and the neoliberal agenda of internationalising education. Control over knowledge production and practices have characterised processes of colonisation that used education to subjugate people of the colonised world. It is suggested that a ‘coloniality’1 characterised by patterns of power “constituted in culture, inter-subjective relations and knowledge production” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 30) has striking similarities ...
Dis-orienting Western Knowledge: Coloniality, Curriculum and Crisis
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2018
The decolonization movement is a knowledge project insofar as colonialism was an epistemological form of imperialism. As such, curricular change in the primary grades to university life requires a fundamental reworking of theories of knowledge, if not knowledge itself. To interrogate this problem and pose possible interventions, this article explicates Edward Said’s conceptualization of colonialism as taking place on an epistemic level that orients western knowledge towards non-western ways through a will to dominate. Extending beyond the administrative colonial era, coloniality in the modern era, more appropriately called postcoloniality, transforms as a knowledge relation. Decolonization requires dis-orienting this relationship through Said’s methodology. Finally, the article argues that a ‘travelling curriculum’ poses an alternative against the dominant mode of knowledge that aims to fix and essentialize people, ultimately opening up the known world towards processes of co-existe...