Decolonising education – a few critical thoughts

For many postcolonial societies education has historically been one of the primary sites of decolonisation. This is not accidental, since education was a key instrument of colonisation - particularly British colonisation.

- BY HARSHANA RAMBUKWELLA

However, as I argue below, while we pursue decolonisation in its broadest sense as priority in reimagining education we must also be critically cautious of how the idea of decolonisation can easily tip over into parochial nativism that is intellectually debilitating rather than liberating.

In the colonial context, policymakers, like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was part of the colonial government in 19th century India, held strong views about using education to 'modernise' what they saw as backward colonial societies. Macaulay held particularly strong views about the relative value of providing education in English as opposed to vernacular languages and infamously claimed that a single shelf of a good European library held more knowledge and value than all the learning in local languages, like Sanskrit. Similar views about the value of English medium education and the necessity to use education as a tool for social and cultural modernisation were influential in Sri Lanka as well. Sri Lankan historians, like G.C. Mendis, saw the policy changes implemented by the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1831, which also included proposals about anglicising the medium of instruction, as vital to Sri Lanka's future and modernisation - though, in practice, English-medium instruction in colonial Ceylon was limited to a few elite schools. But the fact that G.C. Mendis, writing in the 1950s, well after independence, held views like this, suggests the deep and pervasive influence of colonial education in Sri Lankan society.