Decolonization(s) and Education. Daniel Maul

When, some 150 years earlier, the Venezuelan educator Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) published his considerations about the new “American societies” emerging from the fallen Spanish colonial order after 1808, he followed a similar rationale. Rodriguez, an early liberal and socialist thinker and one of Simón Bolivar’s most influential teachers, expressed the same sense of newness in dramatic words in his discussion about the future of politics, culture, and education in Latin America: “Where should we search for models? Hispanic America is original; her institutions and governments have to be original; and the means for establishing both have to be original as well. Either we invent something new, or we will fail” (inventamos o erramos).³

To be sure, there were significant differences between the processes that led to the independence of the Latin American Republics in the early 19th century on the one hand and the liberation struggles surrounding the dissolution of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa after World War II on the other. ←7 | 8→What Nyerere and Rodriguez shared however, was the project of creating new societies ridded of all remnants of the colonial past and in the key role they attributed to educational practices as a tool to reach this goal.⁴ Nationalist leaders in both cases placed education at the heart of their quests to construct a new political order from scratch. In this sense, the following collection of essays tries to address this nexus by establishing a dialogue over time and across the space between these two historical experiences with a focus on its educational implications.

      Locating educational discourses in decolonization – Building new polities and new men

      Many nationalist leaders portrayed the necessity of a new political order as the culmination of the struggle for independence, and in doing so, they surpassed the mere political concept of decolonization and expanded the project of decolonization to the social and cultural realms. A quest for radical changes in politics and culture emerged after independence and fostered a sense of novelty and innovation with regard to education. The break with the colonial past was not only to be a political one. The break with the colonial political order would rather necessarily, as many independence leaders agreed, have to lead to new forms of education and schooling which, for their part, would have to be accompanied by and embedded in a profound revision of inherited institutions and practices. In many respects, new men had to build new polities and both, in turn, would be the result of educational practices. This sense of newness was by no means exclusive to utopian socialist thinking after World War II. Rather it was embedded in the particular dynamics that the quest for a post-colonial order unleashed, across geographical as well as ideological boundaries.

While conventional wisdom defines education as a field of action reproducing society in time, decolonization places broader and more radical demands on the field. New states perceived themselves as having a special need for education: given that independence and decolonization invariably implied to some degree a delegitimization of the existing social and political order, the reform of education was intrinsically connected to ideas of “revolution” and/or deep-running ←8 | 9→“modernization” projects.⁵ When “new societies” had to be designed, established and consolidated, education acquired the role of a tool to both speed up and deepen these processes. Education had to do many things at the same time: it had to bridge the uncertainty associated with the new time, it had to strengthen the acceptance for new polities - often frail and contested - among its citizens. The need for such stabilizing practices was apparent. On yet a different level, education was also regarded as a major tool of emancipation in an international context. From the perspective of post-colonial elites, the building of new educational systems held a very practical meaning: the purposeful (re)integration of ex-colonies as independent states in the world market required at the very least well-trained citizens fit for competition.⁶

The outcome of these struggles that affected the educational sector – the primary institution of particular new polities – was neither evident nor necessary. On the contrary, it was to a high degree historically contingent. Even where nationalist movements had a clear ideologically founded concept of political independence, some of the basic features of the post-colonial societies remained highly controversial. Fainthearted attempts to build up a Spanish American confederation of republics well into the 1820s, later Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism and Pan-Arabism signaled that issues such as common identities and shared political projects, at least within some elites, were powerful forces in shaping decolonization(s).⁷ This however did not necessarily unite those same elites in the nation-building process. In sum, during the process of decolonization, the very emergence of new polities had to be managed through measures of state building. Accordingly, education had not only a ‘reproductive’ function but also a ‘productive’ one: the invention of new polities. The urgent task of contouring ←9 | 10→new political entities and giving them new forms of government invested education with an almost Messianic significance.

      Focusing on the creation of new polities addresses an extremely important concern for actors at that time: It brings to light the hopes and anxieties by which people react to political and territorial rearrangements and the shifting societal patterns that accompany them. In a last grip on power, colonial powers often depicted autonomist and national liberation movements as a threat to security and prosperity and to associated independence with chaos and disorder. And indeed, in many cases, these dystopian views turned into threatening realities for the masses, when changing borders, loyalties and alliances marked the decolonization processes. We can see how the frequently traumatic experience of decolonization became in itself a powerful determinant in the elaboration of new educational policies. It was here, within the often-painful transition, that concepts of “liberation” and “self-determination” gained broader meaning, reaching far beyond mere political independence from the respective colonial powers. Whereas colonial education related to territory it had to stabilize, preserve and pacify, a new kind of social regime demanded cultural transformations of the utmost importance, such as general literacy, the creation of a modern citizenry, the imposition of new institutional rules, the contouring of a new kind of public sphere, etc. Education added substance and support to the lofty rhetoric that carried national liberation struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries. While phraseology of the most exalted liberalism accompanied the Latin American declarations of independence, socialist representations of society marked many of the liberation fights in the period after World War II. What both shared was the experience that proclamations were not enough: in order for the projects of liberation to succeed, the vocabulary had to take root in popular cultures. Educational efforts to make this language accessible and understandable affected both the education of the elites and common people.

      Closely associated with polity building and societal change, the issue of the cultural and ethnic plurality of some of the new countries should also be taken into consideration. Many of the new polities faced the challenge of populations widely differentiated along ethnic, social or other lines. Post-colonial elites acted with a sense of urgency, launching ambitious programs of political and cultural homogenization in which education once again occupied a central role. While colonial rule had often privileged certain ethnic groups over others, the aspiration of the new political order was to re-shape collective identities under the new imperative of the “people”. In the beginning an educational optimism dominated, and the redemption of certain groups within the new polities by means of the universal remedy of education was repeatedly propounded.

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Although there is a consensus that post-colonial educational systems followed a path of institutionalization that in many ways resembled the Western and colonial approaches to schooling,⁸ transformations in post-colonial education were by no means insignificant.

The noticeable focus on mass literacy was not the