Research through imperial eyes
By: S. Jeyasankar - Focus
Northeastern Monthly November 2004
“Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits, which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, and have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is men themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system” (Paulo Freire 1973: 58).
The system of education in Sri Lanka today is mostly theory-oriented, didactic and problematic on several issues, namely gender, ethnicity, caste etc. and education is treated as ‘knowledge and information packages’ not as a process of identification of problems, search for solutions, or invention of solutions.
Education today could be described as a tutorial-loaded and competitive examination-oriented system, conducted in class or lecture rooms that are matchbox-like wall-bound spaces, where the teacher or lecturer stands on an elevated space in a position to ‘give’ and the students are in a position to ‘take.’ In brief, the current education system is a monologue of the teacher and not a dialogue with the students.
“In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as process of inquiry” (Paulo Freire 1973:58). The relevance of the subjects and information imparted in most formal curricula is remote from the practical life of students and to the day to day life of Sri Lankans especially the Tamils. This type of exclusion and alienation from the environment will not allow the teacher and the student to imagine, to think or to create. To make a success of the current system of education we harness ourselves like racehorses. The image of racehorses is well suited to our students who are in schools or in the universities. Preparing for the exam is a penance. Like a saint, a student must shed off all his or her connections with the outside world where he or she is living.
The purpose of the current system of education is to produce service personnel because it is not an organic system. It was a system designed and imposed directly by the colonial powers when they were ruling this country, and later by neocolonial powers indirectly through ‘loan schemes’ and ‘aid programs’ aimed at a developing country.
In Sri Lanka, though we have considerable experience in running a ‘modern’ education system and despite a number of reforms to it, acute and unresolved problems remain in every sphere of life in the country. Dependency on aid and expertise from overseas should spur us on to reflect on the crises in the system.
Most of the people in power often boast of the country’s high literacy rate but they do not connect it with the problems in this country. What do they mean by “literate?” A person who can write his or her name on a piece of paper is literate, while someone who has skill and knowledge but without letters is illiterate!
The important questions are: what are we learning? And what is happening around us? This will lead to another question - why are we learning or what is education?
“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (Paulo Freire 1973:58).
History and our experience with education systems and reactions to education reform in Sri Lanka will reveal to what extent we are genuinely liberated from colonial and neocolonial hegemony. The statement, “we will produce nurses and develop tourism and let them send satellites” made by a top person from the Education Reform Program, guided by the World Bank, at a meeting of the community of the Eastern University, Batticaloa, is a typical example of current thinking in the country. We are totally under the control of western and now American cultural imperialism.
If we scrutinize the writings, statements and the speeches of the people in power at present, we can realize to what extent we are part of a liberated education system or in the process of creating an organic education system.
A person with only a basic degree from a university can function as an adviser to people with a long experience in their profession or field. “We will teach them” is the motto of their mission. This motto informs academic forums so pervasively that there is no space for the motto “We will learn from them” or “We will learn from them also!” We academics listen to them only when they answering our questions. This is the irony of the modern education system.
Academics in universities doing research are mostly influenced by conventional ‘scientific research methodologies’ without questioning their validity and applicability to particular situations; they practice it as a mere intellectual exercise. The amount of unproductive research work in university libraries and the unresolved problems of the outside world clearly reveal the relationship between creative and productive academic work and society at large.
“Disciplines are based around a framework for understanding the subject matter of the field. Students are trained in the standard way of thinking. If researchers work in a university setting, they are influenced by colleagues. If they want to publish scholarly papers, they have to get referees, who are usually established members of the field, most of whom expect research to follow the standard patterns.
“Referees and editors expect authors to be familiar with standard ideas and publications in the field, which requires a considerable investment of effort to comprehend. All this prevents outsiders from waltzing in to make a contribution to the discipline. To use another metaphor, disciplinary expectations operate like strong tariff barriers against moving very far from one’s own training and previous research output” ( Martin Brian 1998).
For the intellectuals in our society, methodology is an unchangeable and eternal thing! They are bound and determined by ‘international research standards’ and ‘requirements.’ Their ultimate aim is to publish a research article in an internationally refereed journal in an international language that is, presumably, in Standard English. It’s very rare to hear a voice about the usefulness of such research to society.
“Social activists often express great frustration and annoyance with academics who are in such a good position to help a cause, but do so little. A tenured academic has job security, a good salary, flexible working hours and a great deal of control over areas to research, not to mention, in many cases, specialist knowledge and considerable skills in writing and speaking. Such a person could be a tremendous asset to a hard-pressed activist group dependent on volunteers and without the capacity to carry out in-depth investigations. While quite a few academics sympathize with environmental, peace, feminist, antiracist, and other social movements, very few become heavily involved. Hence the frustration” ( Martin Brian 1998).
In my considered view the faith in ‘scientific research methodologies’ is merely a barrier to look into matters around us in depth and to evolve solutions. This is due to the university system, the education system and research methodologies that are practiced by us being constructs of the colonial establishments; they are not organic forms or structures designed by the people who live and struggle for the betterment of their day-to-day life in their own spaces.
Colonial construction of the education system and neocolonial impositions and influences on educational reforms have led to the alienation of the people, especially the intellectual community, from their own environment. If we study the syllabuses of schools, teachers training colleges, colleges of education and the universities, we could verify the truth of this statement.
In the various aspects of research, intellectuals treat the local environment and local people merely as resource bases but not as problem-solving spaces or spaces for change. These resource bases are not the beneficiaries of conventional research or academic work and in most instances are not even aware of the final product of the research.
This is due to researchers being usually unwilling to take back the final outcome of their work to the people who are subjects of the research, or the final product is in a language that cannot be easily communicated to ordinary people. The language, the size and format of books, journals or academic papers, footnotes, references, academic jargon, quotations etc. are tedious and sometimes overwhelming for the ordinary reader to understand the work.
For example the academic work on kooththu performances in Sri Lanka has a history of at least 50 years but the people who have been performing the dance for generations have very limited knowledge of it. Any person who works or at least speaks to kooththu artistes will acknowledge the truth of this reality.
Why is the relationship between academic work and the performers or practitioners so weak? It is because if the relationship between them was strong the authority of the academics to make pronouncements on kooththu would diminish to a position equal or inferior to that of the performers. They must share their authority with the performers. How could an ‘educated’ person share authority with the ‘uneducated’ one? How could a ‘literate’ individual share his authority with an ‘illiterate’ one? These are the politics of a colonial system of education. Segregating theory from practice is the consequence of introducing theories of the conquerors or the colonialists as ‘modern’ theories. The introduction and influence of colonial theories of imperialist conquerors, the segregation of theory from practice, treating theory with reverence and honoring research paper oriented academic works over all others will lead to a gradual death of practices of ordinary people and the vacuum filled by colonialist practices labeled as ‘modern.’
The other question is to what extent the academic works on kooththu genuinely represent or reflect the kooththu performances and the community that performs it. A person whose familiarity with kooththu is confined to merely reading about it faces strange and incomprehensible experiences at a kooththu performance set in a kooththu community theatre. It is like the depiction of traditional doctors as witches in colonial descriptions. The politics of this kind of depiction and description is obvious – it is another type of aggression or conquest.
Imperialism works by conquering or colonizing the land first and with help of the colonial establishment conquering or colonizing the mind. Conquering or colonizing the mind will pave the way for a long rule of the conqueror or the colonizer.
The regular arrival of experts from the outside world to solve domestic problems is a clear mark of our position in our own spaces. We were designed and are being designed by colonial and neocolonial powers as subjects and consumers. A clear proof of this argument is to look at contemporary development programs planned and implemented by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith identifies and critiques the intersections of imperialism, knowledge, and research. According to Tuhiwai Smith, dominant, mainstream, western cultures conceive of research as intellectual activities grounded in broader, popular and legal discourses that distort or silence other ways of knowing and being. One consequence of such research for indigenous peoples is what she calls “research through imperial eyes” – knowledge largely useless for native kinship communities and too often useful for further colonization.
In this background we have to raise questions regarding the purposes and functions of research: Why do we do research? Who benefits from it? Who uses the information we gather and what for?
