Post-Colonialism and Education

Having already discussed Gandhi’s criticisms of modernity and his basic approach to schooling, as well as Said’s critique of the power relations inherent in depictions of the

“other”, it is now necessary to shift focus to the ways in which post-colonial social issues – not least of which is education – have been imagined. The first name that pops into a scholar’s head when discussing post-colonialism and education is probably Paulo Freire, and for good reason. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he (2014) lays out a set of arguments detailing the ways in which the oppressed remain just that through education. To sum up the ideas briefly, the dominant parts of society actively employ education as a tool for keeping

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the oppressed down in order that they can be exploited in a colonial or industrial setting.²⁶ The oppressed can be described as those whom are subjected to underdevelopment.

What is more, the logic behind capitalism all but requires formal mechanisms which allow for oppression and, in turn, for the flow of capital to have as its destinations the metropoles of the Global North. Education serves just this function by regarding the oppressed as: “…the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these

‘incompetent and lazy’ folk to its own patterns by changing their mentality” (Freire 2014:

74). This is not too far removed from the idea of organic solidarity, at least in its relation to the idea of socialization. Durkheim, of course, would argue that socialization via education is a net positive as long as it contributes to the social whole; Freire, on the other hand, is quite clearly arguing that this socialization process is linked to a pathological system which, while creating the appearance of solidarity, is premised first and foremost on the propagation of oppressive relations and is therefore toxic.

Freire’s solution is a humanistic, revolutionary approach to education whereby the traditional line of authority between teacher and pupil is eroded. He argues, “The solution is not to ‘integrate’ [the oppressed] into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’ [as opposed to ‘beings for others’]”

(Freire 2014: 74). Interesting here is a comparison to the worst alternatives to liberal democracy as envisioned by Dewey and Arendt. While the bogeymen for those two were feudal oligarchy and totalitarianism, respectively, for Freire the principal problem was the capitalist system itself, its contradictions and its reproduction of oppression through a particular approach to education, namely the treatment of the pupil as an empty vessel needing to be filled by an authority figure. The humanistic and revolutionary teacher would nurture critical thinking so as to allow pupils to: “perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation” (Freire 2014: 75, emphasis in original). In order to not fall down the slippery slope of rehashing well-worn

26 This links up nicely with Andre Gunder Frank’s (2009) study of capitalism in Latin America, in which he posits that underdevelopment is linked to capitalist development and its own internal contradictions and that this underdevelopment is not a stage of development but is rather a pathology of the capitalist system;

therefore, with regards to Chile, he argues: “Structural underdevelopment will continue to be generated and deepened in Chile until the Chileans liberate themselves from capitalism itself” (Frank 2009: 3).

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clichés (i.e. “pupils need to be taught how to think, not what to think”; “knowledge is power”; etc.), this notion needs to be understood in the larger context.

With that, it is important to note that Freire’s contribution to the field of pedagogy has been immense, and this helps to explain the ramped up focus on “critical thinking” in schools and universities. Be that as it may, the structural problems to which he alluded have not been addressed with the same degree of success. This is likely connected to the fact that, like Marx, his understanding of social structure was not broad enough to allow for the interrogation of particularities as particularities and not merely as symptoms of a universalism. While Freire did recognize the logic of oppression – namely “divide and rule”

(Freire 2014: 141-142) – the dividing line between the oppressors and the oppressed is entirely unclear. For example, he argues: “To the extent, however, that the elites oppress, they cannot be with the oppressed; for being against them is the essence of oppression” (146, emphases in original), a tautology if there ever was once. He further rehashes the point by arguing: “In order to divide and confuse the people, the destroyers call themselves builders, and accuse the true builders of being destructive” (146). Complex layers of human relations cannot be deduced from a binary logic. One can be “elite” and still share qualities with the oppressed, just as the oppressed can also be oppressors, a point which becomes even more viable when one considers dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, etc. What is more, Freire’s insistence on using psychoanalysis to come to terms with the relations between the oppressed and the oppressors (146) stretches the imagination, at least insofar as psychoanalysis itself is predicated on a kind of highbrow manipulation.²⁷

27 All of that being said, Freire’s understanding of the transformative power of education is much more appealing than, for example, Frantz Fanon’s (2004) idea that only violence can be transformative, can lend a voice to the oppressed, and can overturn the old colonial order in a post-colonial society (6). This idea, pounded into the ground to an obscene extent by Sartre (among others), presupposes a cynical idea of authenticity.

Violence can only be the midwife of more violence; at least a critical pedagogy, an approach that provides a link between humanism and revolution, leaves open the possibility of the good life. The chimera of freedom from the shackles of the past through violence in the present is a dangerous one. Fanon’s and Sartre’s ideas carried currency during the euphoric period of decolonization, but they have little enduring value. There are many ways an actor can shape the world, but the goal here is to orient action – or at least outcomes – to the good life.

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That social actors can shape the social world through critical processes of understanding is an important and highly appealing idea, an idea which Söyler (2015) referred to as the nurturing of “moments of epistemological understanding” (140). Central to this idea is that the social world cannot be broken down into two or three “objective”

categories, something which Gandhi, for example, understood well, as evidenced by his concern for the English working classes (Huerta 2009: 47). Binary concepts such as oppressed-oppressor, colonized-colonizer, good-bad, bourgeois-proletarian, etc., do little to aid understanding and, what is more, share a certain family resemblance with symbolic liberalism, at least insofar as binary concepts work to obscure the machinations of how society reproduces itself. To state simply that the oppressors remain oppressors through education or credentialism, while perhaps true, does not explain how this process takes place and how, short of revolution, it can be altered.

Subaltern studies, which seems to represent some kind of middle ground between social constructivism and neo-Marxism (or better yet, objectivism and subjectivism), is of interest to the extent that it endeavors to unveil social processes without simply deducing everything from some sophisticated notion of “false consciousness”. The idea that the subaltern is deprived of a voice by the dominant society is one that has been transferred from the post-colonial, South Asian context to the Global North (for example, Rodriguez and Steyerl 2012). While the approach ostensibly relies on binary categories, the focus on the ability of the subaltern – as opposed to the elites – to shape the social world allows for a more nuanced understanding of action within structure. The voicelessness of the subaltern has its roots in colonial projects. Partha Chatterjee (2000) points out that while “the institutionalization of a modern regime of power” was associated with the annihilation of the peasantry, an idea explored in brief above: “In agrarian societies of the colonial East, peasants of course became the repositories of all of those cultural presuppositions that allegedly made those societies incapable of modern self-government and hence justified the paternal authoritarianism of Western colonial rule” (8-9). This colonial relationship persisted after the formal fall of colonialism and has been allowed to persist, namely through modern strategies of power. Education plays a role in this, as well.

The solution, roughly speaking, is to provide the voiceless with a voice, a task for which education has some redeeming potential. This assumes, of course, that the conditions of voicelessness can be comprehended. Spivak (2012), for example, sees some hope in an

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“aesthetic” education: “We must learn to do violence to epistemo-epistemological difference and remember that this is what education ‘is’, and thus keep up the work of displacing belief onto the terrain of the imagination, attempt to access the epistemic” (10). In a sense, this is similar to what Freire was writing about with regards to changing the structure as opposed to further integrating the oppressed into an oppressive structure. While Freire called for the development of a new pedagogy and the abandonment of the old, Spivak’s suggestions represent tweaks to the extant pedagogy. She argues:

If by teaching ourselves and our students to acknowledge our part and hope in capitalism we can bring that hope to a persistent and principled crisis, we can set ourselves on the way to intervening in an unfinished chapter of history which was mired in Eurocentric national disputes. False hope (143).

By this logic, capitalism is merely an extension of colonialism, and while the exclusions and lines of demarcation are murkier, critical education can lift the veil and expose the pathologies of the system. Teaching pupils to place hope in the system will result in a kind of existential disappointment, and this disappointment can serve as a profound, even transformative learning experience.

The criticism that post-colonial studies rely on a static, dualistic conception of power requires a further explanation of what power is and how it functions. This is where critical theory can be of great help. This will allow for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms which reproduce social inequalities through education in Germany and India.