Creating Forgetful Citizens: Kenya and Forgetting in the Curriculum

• In Event: Certainty Amid Uncertainty in the Future: Making Kinds of People

Abstract

Objectives
This paper will discuss Kenya's recent curriculum reform through the lens of Nietzsche's concept of forgetting to analyze the types of Kenyan citizens aimed to create. A dual theoretical lens will be applied, 'forgetting' as supplied by Nietzsche and 'forgetting' in a political-science sense. For Nietzsche, living unmindfully of the past can bring happiness and take it away. He terms this the liberating power of "active forgetting," which is a willful abandonment of the past. In political science, forgetting is considered an essential part of nation-building (Renan, 1882). A curriculum is a way of reasoning essential to a state's political socialization. Using these notions, this paper takes them up in an examination of Kenya's curriculum reform regarding its history of political violence surrounding presidential elections. The paper will look at the historical roots and modern motives for the curriculum's reform.

Perspectives
The paper aims to understand why a curriculum may 'forget' certain past events and future curriculum plans. Combining Nietzsche's thoughts from forgetting in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (2007) and well-known political science notions, such as Billing’s Banal Nationalism (1995), the paper analyzes how Kenya's new curriculum works to 'forget' its violent, sectarian past by acting un-historically in the creation of a new curriculum.

Data and Methods
Using data coded from the Kenyan curriculum and policy reports on the reform, the paper analyzes how the curriculum conceptualizes Kenyan education's past and social present. Using predetermined codes, I look at how often words such as peace, citizenship, tribe, and ethnicity are used in the documents, among others. The data brings this together to infer prominent themes and omissions.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
My data shows that curriculum documents emphasize social cohesion, peace, unity, and patriotism while excluding any mention of past, tribes, violence, or ethnicity. In this active forgetting, the past that created Kenya is forgotten but also now, it will not be generated in its youngest citizens.

Author

• Meredith Whye, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author