© Leon Tikly
In this article we consider the implications of decolonising knowledge in the field of education. It is important to note that education is both a field of inquiry and a field of practice. Education theory and research can inform and influence policies and interventions in educational systems and institutions. For example, global education policy, often under the umbrella of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4, draws on an industry of education research produced by universities, government and non-government agencies, multilateral bodies, and for-profit consultancies…….Continue reading…..
Source: Future Learn
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Critics:
Decolonization is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. The meanings and applications of the term are disputed. Some scholars of decolonization focus especially on independence movements in the colonies and the collapse of global colonial empires.
As a movement to establish independence for colonized territories from their respective metropoles, decolonization began in 1775 in North America. Major waves of decolonization occurred in the aftermath of the First World War and most prominently after the Second World War.
Critical scholars extend the meaning beyond independence or equal rights for colonized peoples to include broader economic, cultural and psychological aspects of the colonial experience. Extending the meaning of decolonization beyond political independence has been disputed and received criticism.The United Nations (UN) states that the fundamental right to self-determination is the core requirement for decolonization, and that this right can be exercised with or without political independence.
A UN General Assembly Resolution in 1960 characterised colonial foreign rule as a violation of human rights. In states that have won independence, Indigenous people living under settler colonialism continue to make demands for decolonization and self-determination. Although discussions of hegemony and power, central to the concept of decolonization, can be found as early as the writings of Thucydides, there have been several particularly active periods of decolonization in modern times.
These include the decolonization of Africa, the breakup of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century; of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires following World War I; of the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian, and Japanese Empires following World War II; and of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Early studies of decolonisation appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. An important book from this period was The Wretched of the Earth (1961) by Martiniquan author Frantz Fanon, which established many aspects of decolonisation that would be considered in later works.
Subsequent studies of decolonisation addressed economic disparities as a legacy of colonialism as well as the annihilation of people’s cultures. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explored the cultural and linguistic legacies of colonialism in the influential book Decolonising the Mind (1986). “Decolonization” has also been used to refer to the intellectual decolonization from the colonizers’ ideas that made the colonized feel inferior.Issues of decolonization persist and are raised contemporarily.
In the Americas and South Africa, such issues are increasingly discussed under the term decoloniality. In the two hundred years following the American Revolutionary War in 1783, 165 colonies have gained independence from Western imperial powers. Several analyses point to different reasons for the spread of anti-colonial political movements. Institutional arguments suggest that increasing levels of education in the colonies led to calls for popular sovereignty;
Marxist analyses view decolonisation as a result of economic shifts toward wage labor and an enlarged bourgeois class; yet another argument sees decolonisation as a diffusion process wherein earlier revolutionary movements inspired later ones. Other explanations emphasize how the lower profitability of colonization and the costs associated with empire prompted decolonization.
Some explanations emphasize how colonial powers struggled militarily against insurgents in the colonies due to a shift from 19th century conditions of “strong political will, a permissive international environment, access to local collaborators, and flexibility to pick their battles” to 20th century conditions of “apathetic publics, hostile superpowers, vanishing collaborators, and constrained options”. In other words, colonial powers had more support from their own region in pursuing colonies in the 19th century than they did in the 20th century, where holding on to such colonies was often understood to be a burden.
A great deal of scholarship attributes the ideological origins of national independence movements to the Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment social and political theories such as individualism and liberalism were central to the debates about national constitutions for newly independent countries. Contemporary decolonial scholarship has critiqued the emancipatory potential of enlightenment thought, highlighting its erasure of Indigenous epistemologies and failure to provide subaltern and Indigenous people with liberty, equality, and dignity.
The engine of economic well-being was now within and between the advanced industrial countries. Domestic economic growth – as now measured and much discussed – came to be seen as far more important than the erstwhile colonial trade…. The economic effect in the United States from the granting of independence to the Philippines was unnoticeable, partly due to the Bell Trade Act, which allowed American monopoly in the economy of the Philippines. The departure of India and Pakistan made small economic difference in the United Kingdom.
Dutch economists calculated that the economic effect from the loss of the great Dutch empire in Indonesia was compensated for by a couple of years or so of domestic post-war economic growth. The end of the colonial era is celebrated in the history books as a triumph of national aspiration in the former colonies and of benign good sense on the part of the colonial powers. Lurking beneath, as so often happens, was a strong current of economic interest – or in this case, disinterest.”
In general, the release of the colonized caused little economic loss to the colonizers. Part of the reason for this was that major costs were eliminated while major benefits were obtained by alternate means. Decolonization allowed the colonizer to disclaim responsibility for the colonized. The colonizer no longer had the burden of obligation, financial or otherwise, to their colony.
However, the colonizer continued to be able to obtain cheap goods and labor as well as economic benefits (see Suez Canal Crisis) from the former colonies. Financial, political and military pressure could still be used to achieve goals desired by the colonizer. Thus decolonization allowed the goals of colonization to be largely achieved, but without its burdens.
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