Imani Tafari-Ama | Consensus on decolonising education

It is not often these days that feminists and economists agree about educational practices and transformational politics. However, having attended the “Decolonising Education” conference in the first week of April at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and having read the March report produced by the Caribbean Policy and Research Institute (CaPRI), I was struck by this rare convergence.

Feminists at the UTSA conference explored how to transcend borders to ensure that like-minded scholars and activists network across borders to decolonise pedagogical practices. On the other hand, the CaPRI report issued a call to the powers-that-be to implement urgent measures to transform the education system. This call came on the heels of the study’s finding that the artificially low employment rate in Jamaica was not addressing the poverty of education and employment systems. It pointed to the absence of a sustainable development agenda, reflected in cosmetic rather than enduring attempts to tackle chronic underdevelopment in societies like Jamaica.

The UTSA conference was facilitated by Scholar-Activists Profs Linda Carty and Chandra Talpade Mohanty from Syracuse University, who addressed their political methodology in the subtitle of the encounter, which called for “Building Antiracist Feminist Networks Across Borders”. This call acknowledges work being done to counterpoint, continuing, and revived racist practices that threaten to undermine the educational targets of encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving skills in students. The current impetus to reduce access of students in some states in the United States (US) to critical race theory materials sounds alarm bells for the building of educational capital.

On the other hand, the CaPRI report provided a scathing critique of the special economic zones (SEZs), which have not only perpetuated the colonial character of educational curricula but also reproduced employment practices reminiscent of colonially constructed social hierarchies. This latter outcome has resulted from successive government’s’ intentional employment of workers at the lowest end of the educational and skills spectrum. This has ensured that the phenomenon of “growthless jobs” suffices for substantive improvement of pedagogical practices, matched by robust employment standards for ensuring the improvement of individual well-being and social development.

COLONIAL PAST

The problems of education and employment today have deep roots in our colonial past. During the Maafa, the Holocaust of African enslavement by Europeans, the law was used as a terrorist shackle. This ethic still informs how people from underserved communities access the dual systems of education and employment. For example, it was illegal to be literate on colonial plantations. This law was enforced by the amputation of the arms and legs of transgressors of this dictate. The thinking behind this prohibition was that if people are educated, they can emancipate themselves from enslavement. Philosophers and Emancipation educators like Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Heywood Cooper, Paulo Freire, and bell hooks realised, however, that the relinquishing of physical shackles was not sufficient to realise freedom.

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind,” was how Garvey framed the dilemma of the postcolonial African condition in the Fall of 1937. He realised that mental slavery was even more lethal than its physical counterpart. Bob Marley archived this thought in his iconic solo rendition, Redemption Song.

The impetus for this emancipation has been urgent for decades. However, successive governments have adopted a dawdling dynamic when it comes to fixing the problem of mental enslavement. Instead, they have adopted what economist Damien King describes as a strategy of employment without growth. Speaking recently on Television Jamaica’s Smile Jamaica programme, Dr King elaborated on the findings from the CaPRI study, titled Growthless Jobs: The Paradox of Rising Employment and Stagnant Output. This research revealed that the deceptively low 6.2 per cent unemployment rate masks the fact that Jamaican policymakers preside over a system of offering incentives like tax deductibles and compliant labour, due to absence of union representation, for investors who employ persons with minimal skills and education.

DUMBING DOWN

Dr King, astoundingly, admitted that since Independence in 1962, there has been a consistent practice of dumbing down the population through the systemic rewarding of those with minimal education levels. You would have thought that those with the power to do something about countering the inter-generational exclusion of the poor from participation in the economy would have been eager to take affirmative action to ensure that the quality of education available to the majority class would guarantee personal and national development. But no, the elephant in the room is that the governing class has abdicated its responsibility and made what was a bad situation under enslavement worse under independence.

Paulo Freire and his black feminist (womanist) disciple, bell hooks, offered substantial critiques of the “banking method” of education, which is the popular approach adopted in schools today. This model of education presumes that students should cram their brains with information, which is regurgitated in examinations to determine their success or failure. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are skirted by this strategy. The outcome is that many students sail blissfully through, from elementary to tertiary levels, without even having a through sense of who they are and the multiple intelligences that they embody. Instead, as the CaPRI report shows, for decades, learners have continued to be alienated from quality education and employment, which improve quality of life and not just artificial growth numbers.

The CaPRI report also drew an ominous connection between low education levels and the incentives used to attract investors to the SEZs:

“Resulting in part from a weak education system and emigration, the low-skilled labour force has lowered growth potential because of its low productivity and, therefore, low economic growth. The obvious solution is to improve Jamaica’s education and training levels; this is underway, but slowly, and from a low starting point. An adjacent policy concern regards the incentives that were introduced to attract labour-intensive investments, particularly through Special Economic Zones (SEZs). They have been successful in reducing unemployment. However, since employment expansion in these industries has not been matched by increased output, and given the current tightening of the labour market, it is appropriate now to reassess the net benefit of retaining these incentives.” (CaPRI March Report, page VI).

Promoting a politics of transformation for practitioners who operate within and beyond the classroom is no walk in the park. To respond to the use of miseducation and underemployment as weapons of mass destruction, educators, students, parents, and the general public should be prepared to participate in the potentially painful process of transformation. Of course, decolonising education and employment also requires the routing of calcified racist, classist, and sexist ideas, which muzzle the political will for change.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com.