Decolonising
SL universities
By Kaushalya Herath
Recent socio-political debates in Sri Lanka on
higher education suggest that universities are being viewed as neo-liberal
institutions set up to produce human capital for the market. State imperatives
to produce employable graduates with the desired mix of knowledge, skills, and
competencies to serve the (global) economy have translated to a growing
marginalisation of the arts in favour of science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM) programmes at universities. How come our universities have
uncritically embraced this approach to higher education? Is there still
potential to shift the vision of higher education to one that envisages
universities as places of critical learning, that produce passionate thinkers,
as well as contextually relevant knowledge, in the service of humanity?
Colonial knowledge systems
Movements to decolonize universities are spreading
across both the global North and South. When it comes to the Global South,
however, the education institutions, and structures that continue to date are a
legacy of cultural colonisation under western imperialism. As Edward Said
argues In Orientalism, what we know and understand about our histories and
ourselves has been constructed through Western epistemologies and lenses.
Post-development theorists, like Andre Gunder Frank and Arturo Escobar, further
point out that the development process that created underdevelopment in so
called third world countries, has also marginalised other ways of imagining
those countries and their knowledge systems.
Our universities currently follow deductive
approaches to producing knowledge. Our undergraduates are taught theories and
models developed in the West with little regard to their relevance to the local
setting. The gaps and epistemological power hierarchies we experience in our
higher education institutions and in society at large when we bring these
knowledge systems to practice, could be also due to such cultural irrelevances.
As Nihal Perera discusses in Transforming Asian Cities, we try to understand Asian
cities through theories developed to understand cities elsewhere. This is
common in most disciplines whether in the humanities or natural sciences. We
seem to be unable to free ourselves of the colonial knowledge apparatus that
continue to inform and shape our educational institutions, including the
universities.
Today, many degree programmes include practicums or
internships to sensitise graduates to corporate work. While such training
opportunities do enable students to obtain hands-on experience, and “learn by
doing,” this should not permit industry/corporate actors to dictate what they
expect of graduates or influence the curriculum. The requirements of the
corporate sector are not limited to the knowledge and skills to perform the
work but also include “soft skills” to fit the neoliberal workplace.
Universities, once the executors of cultural colonisation, are being colonised
by the corporate sector, where the university must produce an employee to match
the corporate culture.
Inciting passionate and critical thinking
Universities should be places where individuals who
already have certain types of knowledge and sensibilities can come together to
dialogue and build on their knowledge. Yet, this is not what is happening in
most universities today. Most often it is assumed that undergraduates enter
higher education institutions possessing zero knowledge on a subject. From this
perspective, the sole purpose of a degree programme becomes support for
students to stock up on knowledge. Overlooking or dismissing experiential
knowledge as irrelevant is oppressive and even violent.
If we are to ignite passion in our undergraduates to
explore and understand societal problems, we need to make pedagogical processes
more relevant to their histories, experiences and aspirations. Developing
vernacular epistemologies to read our own spaces and society is critical to
developing grounded solutions to address societal problems. Critical pedagogies
that employ bottom up or inductive approaches towards understanding local social
processes are crucial, especially in the current moment when we are seeing
devastation unfolding before our eyes with no foreseeable solutions in sight.
Universities should develop mechanisms to understand and theorise local
knowledge systems. How the universities can decolonize and indigenize knowledge
production without going into the other extreme of nationalism is a bit tricky
and will require dialogue and reflection.
Instilling in students the idea that they can
collaborate in knowledge production processes, and be designers of their own
theories and knowledge, is a responsibility universities hold.
The prevailing examination system at our
universities values individual achievements over collective efforts. The closed
book examination system and individual assessments reinforce and entrench
individualistic ideals of achievement. Shifting towards collective approaches
to knowledge production may create spaces that help undergraduates to grow into
passionate and critical thinkers. While there are some informal systems and
collective efforts led by students, it might be worthwhile to brainstorm how
classrooms can adopt such methods, understanding that some of these may
themselves be marginalising or violent.
The social sciences and humanities must necessarily
play a role in this huge undertaking. However, as discussed previously in this
column, the arts are increasingly being discredited and delegitimized at
multiple levels. While the hierarchy between the natural sciences and the arts
is pushing students to select STEM streams, this means that young people often
select subject streams without passion or a sense of purpose.
Education for work?
After the Advanced Level exams every year, I receive
calls from numerous young people hoping to enter a state university from
different parts of the country. A common question, whether from district firsts
or those with marginal marks, is “which degree programme will get me a job
quickly?” Often the question is not even about what kinds of jobs they will get
after their degree, but rather how soon they will get a job and how much it
will pay. The passion to do something other than pursuing materialistic ideals
of individual ‘success’ seems to have got lost somewhere along the way in the
process of being educated.
The separation of passion and employment is also a
form of divide and rule. Your contribution to the economy in terms of work must
remain separate from your passion and other interests, which you are expected
to pursue when you are no longer working for the neoliberal market. The
separation of work and passion, like the separation of work and vacation, is
happening through forms of coloniality.
As much as arts and humanities education are
disdained in Sri Lanka for producing “unemployable” graduates, STEM education
is also narrowing down to a technical orientation to produce graduates who can
fit into the capitalist economy. While higher education as a whole is losing
its humanity as well as philosophical touch, this power struggle is also
leading to increasing compartmentalisation of STEM and arts education.
The multidisciplinary approach in STEM degree
programmes is withering away to only accommodate more technical modules that
will enable specialisation in specific tasks, but not enable critical
intellectual readings of larger contexts. For example, this year, the BSc
(Hons) in Town and Country Planning programme at the University of Moratuwa has
changed the entrance criteria for new applicants. Earlier, students who
fulfilled the required cut-off mark from any stream could enter, but now
applications are entertained only from students from the natural sciences. The
decision to restrict a multidisciplinary degree programme to students who took
natural sciences subjects at the Advanced levels speaks to the hierarchical
understanding of natural sciences and humanities, and the increasing
compartmentalisation of degree programmes more broadly.
In a time when multidisciplinarity,
interdisciplinarity and/or transdisciplinarity are being promoted worldwide,
our higher education institutions are applying more and more restrictions and
compartmentalising programmes to be free of the social sciences and humanities.
The Moratuwa example is just one example among many; recent curriculum changes
in STEM programmes in state universities display a similar trend. Adopting
“employability” as a benchmark, and marketing degree programmes on this basis,
could be a key driver of developing arts-free technical curriculums in STEM
education.
In conclusion, colonisation of the university system
is ongoing with various pressures to conform to utilitarian approaches that
seek to create employees for the global economy. To decolonise the
universities, and create critical thinkers and passionate scholars, it is
imperative that we make university curricula more relevant to the sensibilities
and experiences of our undergraduates and indigenize knowledge production
processes. The social sciences and humanities would necessarily play a major
role in this undertaking.
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the
margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously
reaffirms social hierarchies.
(The writers is PhD student, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK)
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