Knowledge Imperialism

April 12th, 2008

An essay by Dr V Ramakishnan, Emeritus Professor, Eastern University

It is about time education is elevated to centre-stage as the main focus of the national debate. A regular review of what goes on in our schools and universities will have healthy implications for the long term well being of the larger community we live in - the future of our children and of generations yet to come.

Education is a future oriented activity. The schools report card or performance at public examinations could hardly prove to be the measure of a child’s potential to perform in later years. It is we older ones as parents and community leaders who could piece things together in broader canvas to assess the value or otherwise of the education we once received in our schools and universities.

Let’s Recall:

All of us could easily recall the explosion of our pent-up energies into sheer un-orchestrated noise when the bell rings announcing school is over for the day. It is with the feeling of liberation we would dash towards the main gate. And life and learning for us as children would only begin thereafter.

It is mothers’ love for her little ones as core-centre, expanding in a concentric circle that promote a sense of intimacy with all those we relate with which constitutes the civilising role of the home and the community.

All learning is by way of emulation of the way adults around us would perform and not the lecture and giving of notes. The efficacy of the socialisation process is governed by custom accorded the status of law because it carries the guarantee of a binding in conscience. It is custom as the cementing link that makes society an organic whole where every institution would also play a role in the education of the young. Here education is a form of initiation to help everyone play a productive role as citizens. Development of the child’s personality to be creative in its efforts would become integral to the overall aim.

For Public Good?

On the other hand, the present institutionalised system sees children herded into large buildings for good part of the day. As they grow older they are detained much longer and thus denied the civilising influence of the home and the community.

At school, specialist trained teachers walk in and out of classrooms delivering what they know with little or no knowledge of the long term impact on the personality development of each child and the well-being of the community we live in. And yet, we persist in believing that the education is aimed at public good, as an act of faith.

As the child moves up the ladder at school specialisation gets intensified. Passing three subjects would do to enter the university. But the inter-relatedness of knowledge seen in its totality to gain an insight into its relevance and meaningfulness is denied or overlooked. It is like dissecting a fish to study its parts. Later, when stitched up and released into water, the fish would fail to swim. If this analogy were accorded some degree of credibility, it is likely to reveal the fate that awaits the larger community in an increasingly competitive world.

The most disastrous outcome of the present system is the plight of neglected youth, be it the finished product or the drop-outs. They are neither willing to go back and come to terms with their homes nor are they willingly received for employment for which they were trained for.

While at school our kids have become increasingly demanding of their parents. And worse is their refusal to acknowledge the sacrifices made. With colonial education now given free it becomes pain that afflicts almost every home right across the country transcending the great race-divide. But media differences in education, allowed to mature for more than half a century, has brought into being several generations that cannot communicate their pain across the well entrenched language-divide.

Obstacle to Reviews:

True, we have arrived at a stage to realise the need for a review and the need to ask the more basic question “What are we educating our children for?” We need to rub clean the accumulated muck to conceive a system that is relevant and meaningful for every citizen to play a more productive role. But the problem is “Can we?”, for we ourselves are artefacts of the very system we seek to review. Even if we are to break through what lies encrusted in our own minds, would we be allowed a role to play in determining aims and objectives and monitoring it up to its delivery end?

Invoking indigenous educational psychology in tracing the source of our ignorance (ajnana, avijja) is likely to incur the wrath of those in authority. It might be dismissed as an act of lunacy, by those who define the limits of discourse among department officials, teacher training colleges and university departments of education. This would not go beyond the Anglo-Saxon “stimulus-response theories of conditioning” as defining educational basics -prospects of a comfortable job as “stimulus” demand for education in “response”.

Even if it be within the existing conditioning theories, call for a dialogue by parents and other informed citizens may not be welcome. Education of our children is a highly centralised operation exclusively by department officials and teachers appointed and supervised by them. They merely continue from where their predecessors left with little or no knowledge of basic aims and objectives. We have therefore to trace its origins to discover when and why it was introduced.

Relict of Colonial Times:

Institutionalised education in its present form would link us powerfully to the British period of colonial rule (1796-1948). The British had, by 1830, introduced a unified administration headed by their Governor assisted by civil servants and a law enforcing agency for the effective Colombo-centric exercise of power right across the country.

English being the language of administration English-medium schools were established to train a local elite that would willingly collaborate with them at the lower levels of the administration. Jobs with guarantee of fixed income and bits of power to lord over their fellow men as the stimulus a cosmopolitan grouping was at hand ready to respond. Some among them were even rewarded with land to help farm, taxes. (This later helped them as absentee landlords with families firmly rooted in the power centre found mini-dynasties, to respond and dominate the Westminster style of government). Two hundred years gone, this ideological alliance has helped them emerge as a formidable establishment resisting all attempts at change as education remains loyal to its colonial heritage from Point Pedro up to Kataragama.

Excepting Royal College, management of English schools was sub-contracted to the Anglican clergy. Along with government grants they were also allowed to charge fees to make English education a monopoly of the affluent classes.

The British also proceeded to establish Vernacular (Sinhala and Tamil) schools for the lower strata of the population to be trained for minor employment in the administration. But more importantly it was an attempt to wean them away from the monks and pundits as communicators of what was once a rich and eventful cultural history.

Indigenous Aims Sidelined:

More vulgar and atrocious was the decision to deny recognition and funding assistance to what remained as formal in indigenous education.

But, what was to go unnoticed was the gradual disintegration of the community. Four centuries of European colonial rule and its persistence in the form of unchallenged colonial education did see society wilt into a motley collection of individuals and lose its educative role. With that goes knowledge of agriculture, fishing and all other forms related to our food heritage, our pure and applied sciences - in particular indigenous medicine, our commitment to custom as source of law and social justice and hence an identity to be proud of. (This was the home grown concept of the nation state.) Society
loses its disciplinary rigour and its capacity to resist colonial intrusion aimed at destroying the spiritual strength necessary to stand on its own legs. Independence granted becomes in the circumstances no more than change of the name-board.

Even after a period of two centuries intervening, it is the same old structure and content that remains to characterise our educational system. This education given free (1944) spread countrywide and the schools take over (1960) sees the bureaucrats return in full force to announce that they and they alone are to control the education of our children. Tutory mudalalies and foreign funded NGOs also come into help detain our children a little longer before they go home.

English schools have returned re-christened as International schools never to be questioned by public authority on aims and objectives. They are to be accorded a near monopoly of placement in the university’s professional course programmes conducted exclusively in the English medium. Many would also find it possible to enter foreign universities. Together, their alumni are now ready to grab key positions in the country’s executive cadre and shape its destinies.

Nationalism’s Limits:

State schools were to become the vernacular schools of old and condemned to remain sub-standard forever. Some effort was made at reform, but with little or no effect. Buddhist and Hindu schools were being founded with state grants-in-aid from the latter half of the nineteenth century. But they were more concerned with arresting the proselytising activities of the Christian missionaries than challenging colonial intentions.

CWW Kannangara, as Education Minister and member for Galle in the state council introduced free education (1944) aimed to deny the Missionaries the right to charge fees over and above state grants. This was intended to curb the proselytising activities of Christian missionary schools. But it was never meant to be a direct onslaught colonial intention.

It was Handy Perinpanayakam the Gandhian and founder of the Jaffna Youth Congress who championed the cause of the mother tongue medium to guarantee relevance and greater efficiency in the early phase of the English schools programme. The mother tongue medium was to ensure accommodation of the cultural heritage within the schools’ teaching programme. This was ridiculed and sidelined by influential sections of the Jaffna intelligentsia for fear English schools going vernacular.

In the meanwhile, those opposed to Kannangara’s onslaught to open the gates of opportunity to all hypocritically succeeded in getting defeated in the general election (of 1947) that followed. The central schools he pioneered were soon ordered to switch over to the swabhasa medium, citing the mother tongue advantage. Several other measures also followed to keep the central schools sub-standard for ever. To conceal all this was the great hoax of naming all central schools as temples of great learning (Madhya Maha Vidya Alaya). And the universities too kept the Arts faculty gates wide open to accommodate their alumni in large numbers. But the victims of open discrimination were kept divided among themselves up to the university end with a
mediation-curtain imposed from above.

Efforts were also made at a multi-lingual approach by Swami Vipulananda, Wilmot Perera, AMA Azeez and others. But their efforts were brought to nought with the take over of all schools by the state in 1960.

But the greatest effort at radical change was when SWRD Bandaranayake obtained an overwhelming mandate to initiate what he called was to be a “period of transition”. He attempted to give rural youth a chance, people to conduct business with government agencies in the language they understand, to give swabhasa teachers a status-boost to guarantee quality input and the Buddhist monks a role to play in public affairs. In seeking to revive native medicine and explore prospects for research into the history of science and culture, he was also unwittingly opening a battlefront against the well-entrenched Allophathy medical system and the more powerful pharmaceutical giants of the west. He was got rid of by an assassin’s bullet (1959) and with that all talk of radical reform ceases.

Universities-Colonialism Entrenched:

It is the University system at the apex that have turned out to be the biggest offenders of justice and fair play. Discriminatory policies stealthily introduced have succeeded in preventing students from the provinces entering the more established universities. Nor has the system opened out to accept the claims of the indigenous thought heritage.

Pressure of numbers sees the tightening of admission procedures to the more prestigious professional courses and containing the flow of Arts students from the provinces. Universities are founded in the provinces with admission determined on the proximity principle. With limited resources, qualified teachers and cash, they are destined to remain second-class for good, mediocre at the beginning, stunted for ever. This arrangement enables the privileged class to be skilfully steered to retain the monopoly enjoyed in the power establishment.

But most meaningless and wasteful was the content and teaching methods adopted at the university. Undergraduate studies and research was to be circumscribed by knowing more and more of less and less. Ideally, it was aimed to know everything about anything and nothing of anything else. As end-product, he or she could drift to any part of the world that’s in need of their skills. To the employers abroad it was cost-free for training them, was to be a charge on our tax payers.

It was Sir Ivor Jennings, specially introduced as the first Vice-Chancellor who successfully steered the smooth transfer of the obnoxious colonial system in its entirety, as the much cherished feature of the new independent state. He drafted the first constitution that would accord it the status of a “Nation-State” where colonial style bureaucrats and law enforcing agencies remain to have the final say in matters affecting people’s well-being. Want of respect and commitment by the people to accept, the new arrangement becomes the source of much corruption and many institutions have now become dysfunctional leading to the breakdown of law and order.

It is Jennings who was also responsible for weeding out many brilliant minds in the Arts and Social Sciences who were making a substantial contribution in reviewing the damage done in the colonial era. This was to synchronise with the views of the bureaucrats in the Education Ministry to keep swabhasa education sub-standard and intake confined to the rural district.

Saratchandra by-passed the campus tsars in carrying theatre to the villages which helped creative writers flourish and some Sinhala films attain world class. (So too, with the arrival of rural youth in cricket).

By retaining the English medium in professional studies, the course programmes of the Jennings era continues without any significant change to adjust to national aspiration and needs.

It is the legal system introduced by the British that continues to define the administration of justice in Sri Lanka. Once a military law enforced in England soon after the Norman Conquest, it was soon presented as Common Law later refined and perfected to govern the colonies of the British Empire. In Sri Lanka it helped to bolster the Colombo-centric exercise of administrative power. It is this system that constitutes the hard core of course programmes in our law faculties.

Our customary laws that upholds property as trust available to successive generations and as cohesive factor welding a matriarchal society defining the native conception of a state hardly attracts our researchers’ interest. Thus on the knotty problem of justice, we have to rely on a system that prevailed in colonial times of divide and rule.

The science based faculties in all our universities also continue from where the British left. To date we are yet to see a standard work on the history of indigenous science-as the knowledge base of a civilisation that remained vibrant in pre-Portuguese times. It is difficult a task that would defy an easy solution. Five hundred years intervene to see us spiritually eroded without a living tradition to inform linkage.

The West has now begun to talk of an East Asian miracle. But one significant factor stands out prominently that separate South Asia from the East. The East was never subject to West European rule to the extent we were subjected to. Hence the need to assess the damage done for a near five hundred years, especially in the field of our thinking on basics.

Indigenous medicine is the one area of professional activity that survives to highlight the cultural context essential for an exposition of aims in education. The emphasis is on the preventive as a complex of the ethical, psycho-physical and the spiritual-the discipline essential to stay focussed on the task undertaken. Knowledge is not to be isolated from human action integral to community living. And the physician has a role in the education process to guide his patient perform to his creative best. Diagnosis consists of an honest dialogue between the two and an intimate knowledge of the genetic history and the mystic physiology the human body (sarira) bears within it. Schooled in the guru-santana tradition the physician belongs to, his perceptual powers are cultivated to know what is specific to the patient. The medicine prepared and administered has to be patient specific. Fees charged is no more than what is offered as an act of gratitude. And this on a sheaf of beetle leaf.

In contrast, western Allopathy medicine relies heavily on the Empiricist method of statistical probability with likelihood of error in diagnosis. Yet our medical education remains exclusively committed to Allopathy and the culture associated with it. Pharmaceutical giants concerned with profit would by-pass regulating authority and conduct clinical experiments in poorer countries and even corrupt practising doctors into prescribing their drugs. Lobby power within Sri Lanka prevents a healthy attitude towards integrating indigenous medicine into the teaching programmes of our universities.

It is unfortunate that we have yet to come up with a way out of the crisis that afflicts our society. All that we can do is to point at the damage being done thus far.

We have neglected our agriculture, fisheries etc. and substituted them with apples, oranges, canned fish and fancy items and would not hesitate to teach development theories recommended by their producers. We have embraced the sciences and legal systems the colonising power introduced and have them taught in our schools and universities without examining their aims. We have sidelined indigenous medicine and allowed Allopathy culture to take absolute control of our hospitals and medical faculties. It appears we have given the colonial powers assurances that we will be producing generations of young men and women made in their image. By way of new knowledge, we are totally dependent on their knowledge industry-in short victims reliant on their thinking.

Can this be called “Knowledge Imperialism?”

In essence it’s a conflict of civilisations-an ideal symbolised by a prince renouncing palace power and pleasures to remain focussed on the universal and assure rigour of discipline in society. This gets displaced by a governing ideology the English trader introduced in 1796. Institutionalised as education factories to spread across the country, the purpose remains unchanged till today.

Education as a mental discipline and culture now makes way to training and indoctrination for assigned roles in return for wages. We are to think and act the way the colonial power wanted.

Ivor Jennings’ constitution of 1947 allowed the entire colonial outfit framed for the centralised exercise of power to pass off as the new Sovereign “Nation State”: This sees the departmental bureaucrats, tutories and NGOs gain monopoly of the education of our young as the mother is pressurised to join the workforce to meet costs.

What is taught in our schools and universities remains what it was in colonial times. By way of new knowledge to meet current challenges we are called upon to rely on what is there in their books and research journals that crowd our libraries – to be forever dependent on their knowledge industry.

Even years after independence, colonisation stays put to manipulate and shape contemporary events by defining the parameters of the national debate. This, we would call “knowledge Imperialism” making it a mockery of a sovereign “Nation State”: Imperialism via its knowledge industry could even engineer mini-wars and yet claim to manage the peace process.

Entry Filed under: Federalidea