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Session Submission Summary

The Imperative of a World Curriculum for the Masses

Wed, February 15, 7:45 to 9:15am EST (7:45 to 9:15am EST), On-Line Component, Zoom Room 116

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Recent developments in some parts of the world have accentuated the need of a world curriculum that is easily accessible worldwide, affordable, and balanced in delivering knowledge from all over. The case in Afghanistan needs special and urgent attention: after the Taliban takeover of the government there on 15 Aug. 2021, girls are not allowed to go to regular schools, women cannot work anywhere, and the female population overall is prohibited from traveling without a male ‘guardian’ beyond a few miles, even while strictly wearing all the paraphernalia to hide their face and whole body. Is this the end of the road for the females in Afghanistan?

Another example is that of the Rohingyas displaced from Myanmar to various adjoining countries due to persecution in their own country. Education takes a back seat when people are migrating along with children to unknown destinations, new culture, new language, and are generally unwelcome anywhere. Can there be an education option for such people on the move?

International curricula are available generally to the elite people, especially expatriates from the Western countries working in other parts of the world. Schools following such curricula charge exorbitant fee, which only the affluent families can afford. For the poor, even having a single option of education like the state curriculum delivered by a local school is a privilege, especially in the developing part of the world.

Creating a new world curriculum that is easily accessible and affordable for the masses requires balancing knowledge from the world over. The hegemony of the West in international curricula will automatically be disrupted in this process. In order to understand the roots of this Western dominance, we need to revisit the history of the colonial education system instituted during the British Rule in India as a case in point.

The architect of the mass education system in British India, Thomas Babington Macaulay (Minute, 1835) saw India as an uncivilized country that needed to be civilized. No branch of Eastern knowledge, according to him could be compared to what England had produced. Who could deny, declared Macaulay, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives ... of India, contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them ... ”. He concluded, “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Wood’s Despatch (1854) argued that European learning would improve the moral character of Indians. It would make them truthful and honest, and thus supply the (East India) Company with civil servants who could be trusted and depended upon. The literature of the East was not only full of grave errors, it could also not instill in people a sense of duty and a commitment to work, nor could it develop the skills required for administration.

Mahatma Gandhi, born in 1869, experienced this colonial education system first-hand as a child in Rajkot English School (later renamed Alfred High School), and went on to acquire a degree in law at the prestigious University College London Faculty of Law in England during 1888-1891. He argued that colonial education created a sense of inferiority in the minds of Indians. It made them see Western civilization as superior, and destroyed the pride they had in their own culture. There was poison in this education, said Mahatma Gandhi, it was sinful, it enslaved Indians, it cast an evil spell on them. Charmed by the West, appreciating everything that came from the West, Indians educated in these institutions began admiring British rule (NCERT, 2021).

Gandhi’s contemporary Rabindra Nath Tagore (1861-1941) had a terrible stint with the colonial education system so much so that he dropped out of school. Later, he said, "The child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead." He acquired education at home from his family, and subsequently, emerged as one of the most prolific poets of South Asia, and went on to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1913. He established a unique school at Shantiniketan and a world-minded university Viswa-Bharti with an amalgamation of the knowledge of the East and the West. However, his successful experiment of creative freedom for the learners remained largely confined to Shantiniketan in West Bengal (India) with rest of the country continuing to largely embrace the colonial education system with little cosmetic changes even after independence from the British Rule in 1947.

Continents apart and half-a-century later, a similar observation was made by the great Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire (1921-1997) on his experience during the rule of the Portuguese in Brazil. He said that the oppressive colonial masters intentionally created the "pedagogy of the oppressed" to not allow them to think critically and keeping them engaged in memorization by rote.

This panel will discuss three dimensions of the imperative of a new world curriculum. The first dimension accentuates the need to formulate a holistic curriculum that enables one one to think intensively and to think critically so as to achieve intelligence plus character - the goal of true education according to Dr. Martin Luther King rather than just fundamental literacy and numeracy. The second dimension is the need to inculcate virtues of peaceful and harmonious coexistence in the globalized world through the African philosophy of uBuntu. The third dimension involves the comparison of various national and international curricula by a comparative education society to create a new world curriculum.

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