Morris D.C. Komakech
28 July 2008
opinion
I have so far established that education and religion, have subjugated us, deprived us of being innovative, insistent, just, creative, progressive, transformational, liberated and above all, accountable to our own kind and continent.
In this piece, I now turn to examine the inadequacies of the education system from varying angles. I will present the prevailing traditional pedagogy as a debilitating methodology in our education system and will argue that it is this pedagogy which is a recipe for our gloom.
In the pursuit of my objectives, I hope my readers will accept my early denunciation of colonial education system and religion as the matrix upon which persistent oppression and exploitation of the black man thrives.
I intend to achieve one particular good, which is, evoking epistemological skepticism by heightening the possibility of greater engagement in the efforts to transform our daunting concrete, objective realities. Such stark realities that confront us daily in our societies manifest as exploitation, injustice, oppression and the violence of the oppressors. These are the factors that the education process prepares us for.
The forceful introduction of education as a colonial policy was to hasten the process of acculturation of indigenous people who were determined as sub-humans, uncivilised and different from the Victorian standards prevalent in Europe at the time.
From the onset, missionaries were lead persons in spreading these Eurocentric ethnocentrisms in the form of Western education and religion - one reinforced the other. This process was primarily to enhance the process of exploitation of the indigenous people.
Paulo Fereira (RIP), one of the leading intellectuals and a professor at Harvard School of Education, who authored three very important works; Pedagogies of Oppression; Pedagogies of Hope; Pedagogies of Freedom and Pedagogies of Indignation, did make very interesting summation of the nature and purpose of the colonial education.
Pereira posited that, this form of education has over the years, reinforced the unrestrained desire to over power not only the physical space but also the historic and cultural space of the invaded people. The colonialists carried an unbridled ambition to destroy the cultural identity of those indigenous people regarded as inferior quasi - beasts.
Several authorities in the history of colonial atrocities such as David Basil, George Noblit and Van O. Dempsey et cetra, have validated Pareira's observations by stressing further that the sole aim of the colonial education which many Africans have inherited, and continue to service, was to exploit and oppress.
Basil goes further to state that one of the failures of the so-called liberation leaders during independence struggles was to retain these colonial structures, education and religious institutions, which continue to perpetrate the interests of colonialism. Education and religion informs all other aspects of our lives including estranging us from our cultures, traditions and customs, thus the notion of lost identity.
Graduates of these systems are expected to aid in the process of cultural genocide, which was the primary objective of mercantilism. This would make indigenous people governable and exploitable in their primitive accumulation of wealth.
With enhanced understanding of taxation, labour, production, laws and consumption, the indigenous people would be subdued forever. To the contrary, education systems that liberate would compel its recipients to appreciate the precarious state of their existence and seek to creatively find new intriguing solutions.
Pareira observed that liberating pedagogy permits "...the understanding of our unfinishedness and encourages us to hold to our unity and identity in regards to others and to the world as a constituency of our essential and irrepeatable way of experiencing ourselves as a cultural, historical and unfinished human being in the world".
In other words, Pareira urges that education system should empower us to constantly seek and produce knowledge by questioning and exploring status quo while evaluating our own learning -thus the notion of epistemological skepticism. I must at this point recognise the works of Mr Tegulle Gawaya on education reforms.
Those numerous issues he raised in his articles in Saturday Monitor herald the micro-challenges that have persisted and dysfunction the system in its current form. Harry Brighouse, himself frustrated with contradictions in the British and American education system, wrote a book, On education in Action - 2006.
Brighouse stated that children do have the right to learn a wide range of ways of living through education system. This will enable them to reflect on their own life in light of the available alternatives and ultimately, to enable them reflect, revise or reject the way of life they find themselves inheriting.
These rights, he argues, must be applicable to both religious commitment and to cultural mores. Such education system is the one that empowers citizens to become self-sufficient transformational agents in the economy they enter into as innovative managers.
To conclude, education does not simply involve experiences of deconstructing complex text terminology or concepts and passing exams. Rather, to provide a possibility for exploration of ideas; construction and production of knowledge.
It transcends the overly indulgence in interpreting, transferring and digesting knowledge produced from outside the continent. Such are the influence of the malignant traditional pedagogy - the pedagogy of oppression.
Mr Komakech is an African scholar, social critic and political analyst based in Toronto
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