119. DECOLONISING DECOLONISATION - Why Diversifying Reading Lists Isn’t Enough
As the finale of the hit TV show, Derry Girls, culminated in a reminder of the hope spawned by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, many people on this side of the Irish Sea reflected on how they had learnt more about Irish history from watching Derry Girls over the years than they had ever been taught either in school, or on the news. The show was a stark reminder for many both of the reality and the everyday tensions of what life was like under an occupation that many did not see as an occupation, and the tenuousness of a difficult and hard-won peace, currently threatened by a careless, unilateral Brexit.
Later in the week, a Race and Education and film club I am part of spent an evening discussing Femi Nylander’s excellent documentary about French colonialism in Niger, African Apocalypse. In the movie there is a scene were students in Niger learn about French imperialism and the atrocities committed in their country against their people as part of a planned school history curriculum. A question was asked in our group about whether a similar openness about what happened is taught today within the French school system. I found myself asking the obvious next question: is our own British colonialism taught openly and honestly in British schools? In fact, would Nylander’s documentary have been supported by institutions like the BFI and BBC if it was exploring our own imperial monsters across the riven border in Nigeria instead of French colonial killers like Paul Voulet?
For many years now I have been a part of efforts to improve equality, equity, diversity and inclusion in schools - my own and others. (Indeed, this website is a small part of that effort, attempting to remind people that “philosophy” takes many forms and does not have to conform to the established norms of a problematic academy. It was my hope from the start that more marginalised voices would take the opportunity to write for us given that relative looseness. While that aspect of Philosophy Unleashed has been fairly unsuccessful, and week after week I seem to be the only writer here, the few students who have sent in work that we have published over the years have, in fact, mostly been students from various groups historically marginalised within philosophy. Though I wish more diverse voices would take part and get involved, and submissions remain open, I am happy to have given a space for those that have taken up the opportunity and feel more venues like this should exist for philosophy, as broadly construed as possible, to take place outside of its institutional norms. But I digress…) A big part of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work in recent years has been on “decolonizing the curriculum”. However thoughts this week about both Derry Girls and African Apocalypse make it clear to me that the current efforts continue to remain far too superficial.
Current interest in institutions diversifying and broadening inclusion, after all, is happening not because such institutions decided it was high time that they changed after a good deal of soul-searching and acknowledgement of past wrongs. It is occurring mainly in response to the perfect storm of the #METOO movement combining with increased LGBTQ+ visibility and acceptance, and the uprising of anger that came in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. As people took to the streets to remind us that #BlackLivesMatter and expose the structural oppressions at work in a range of intersecting ways, institutions realised that they could no longer ignore the wide range of deficits that were baked into the very structures in which they operated. Not because they wanted to change, but because not changing within such a climate would look to the public as if they didn’t care. Women, LGBTQ+ people, people of colour, people with disabilities - all these different groups experiencing systemic inequalities for generations were finally being listened to as a world grappled with a pandemic that reminded us that the way things had always been did not have to mean they were the way that things always would be. Although work for greater equity, diversity and inclusion was taking place long before the pandemic, that particular historical moment amplified the radical possibilities for change as the world experimented with wholesale radical change to fight the rampaging coronavirus and people began to realise that we could fight other things equally radically if the will was there. However, while institutions started to acknowledge structural inequalities and biases both conscious and unconscious that might have been causing them, those same institutions - and the people running them - still wanted to maintain their privileged status within our unequal world. The need to seem concerned about DEI combined with the more dominant need to keep things as relatively unchanged as possible. Wanting to have their cake and eat it too, institutions, such as schools, began to talk seriously about DEI, train colleagues about DEI, explore policies which might be amended to increase DEI, but usually this was limited to expanding DEI whilst not making any radical changes to the institution itself. Indeed, DEI itself could be seen as a watered down and neutered understanding of what was explicitly not a demand for more diversity, equity and inclusion into fundamentally flawed institutions, but a demand to tear down the institutions that created such homogeneity, inequity and exclusion in the first place and replace them with something better.
Which is why, when people speak about “decolonising education” or “decolonising the curriculum”, we need to ask what exactly this means. While increasing visibility and representation in resources, displays and examples is undoubtedly a good thing, and recognising that reading lists and “canons” suffer from cultural myopia is important, without the wider context of what caused that myopia and exclusion being explicitly articulated and taught it is entirely possible that diversified curricula become nothing more than an empty tick-box exercise. A student could go through school taking in a wide range of diverse ideas and voices, seeing all sorts of fantastic representation, and never learn the ways in which those ideas, voices, and people were, and continue to be, historically excluded. Colonialism as a concept, as a history, and as a continuing lived reality for many, could remain happily unscathed even within a “decolonised curriculum”.
To truly “decolonise” our minds and our institutions, colonialism needs to be confronted and addressed in all its difficult complexity. Culpability should be a key part of what is taught instead of the tendency to absolvement and disavowment, not to shame people born into something they had no part of and make them feel bad, but to give appropriate acknowledgement to the continuing legacy that, without significant transformation and even, perhaps, reparation, will continue to undermine serious efforts at both international and domestic equity and inclusion. Without understanding our actual role in shaping the current world how do we expect young people to have the tools to make it better? Without fully understanding how the country they are growing up in has come to be the way it is, how do we expect them to fully understand themselves and the role they want to play in shaping the country’s future?
People in government have explicitly opposed young people being taught our country’s true history. They believe that acknowledging our atrocities and recognising that we are not always the “good guys” is unpatriotic and somehow damaging. Far from it. I believe that until we seriously confront our legacy of brutal Empire, our historical and continuing cultural elitism and its racist, sexist, heteronormative and ableist blind-spotting of marginalised voices, we will be doing our children a massive disservice. To ignore the bad and rose-tint and reframe the context in which our country has developed is to miseducate and misinform. It is to leave students with holes in their understanding, gaps in their knowledge, and lacking the tools with which to make sense of their current situation. A true decolonising of the curriculum means confronting all this. Having those big conversations. Sitting with the discomfort and facing up to reality in all its shades of grim grey. It is not merely about diversifying reading lists and widening access. It is about explicitly remembering why those reading lists were so undiverse in the first place, and why so many people in our shared society had doors closed to them instead of opened. It is about ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.
Leaving an explicit and sustained confrontation with our colonial legacy out of our education system sadly entails the following:
That students educated within such a system leave their formal education with significant gaps in their understanding of the world, and the country in which they live, which leave them unable to make sense of their own experiences, the situation of others they share a world with, and the contemporary situation in which they find themselves living. This is a form of hermeneutical epistemic injustice towards citizens and a gross dereliction of the government’s educational duties.
That a government wilfully committed to (1) in its National Curriculum and educational policies must be a government who therefore see no inherent moral wrongness in Britain’s legacy of colonialism. To not endorse the necessary open confrontation with that past and an explicit condemnation of certain acts is to suggest that those acts were permissible and even desirable and to endorse the historical approach rather than reject it.
A government who believes (2) is a government that will never truly be able to decolonise its educational system because it clearly has no interest in it being decolonised. It is a government still committed to colonisation in principle and unable to divorce itself from its colonial legacy.
A government committed to (3) is therefore also a government not truly committed to DEI as diversity, equity and inclusion as social objectives are objectives at odds with the objectives of colonial hierarchy, homogenisation, containment and control.
Therefore, so long as such a government (4) controls national education policy then it is unlikely that a nation’s educational institutions will ever truly be able to promote diversity, equity and inclusion or completely decolonise their curricula.
We thrive today because of the bondage, exploitation and murder of entire continents. We suffer today because of the consequences of that bondage, exploitation and murder. We ignore that bondage, exploitation and murder at our peril. Without context of where we are and how we got here - true, bloody, awful context - we fall victim to delusion and falsehood and live trapped in a dangerous ahistorical fantasyland. We repeat history rather than learn from it. We perpetuate further bondage, exploitation and murder. We carve borders and erase communities. We exclude instead of embrace. We keep the world as it is instead of making it what it could be.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com