The colonial education system is imposed by the colonial powers on the colonized nations, who produce only ‘puppets’ or ‘robots’ when any student passes from its process. Giving such a colonial education system, the colonizer throws a cultural bomb on the colonized which affects all walks of life of the oppressed, either that is culture, language or history.
According to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, when discussing colonized Africa, he narrates “the effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, language and environment and further also affects their heritage of struggle, unity, capacities and ultimately in themselves”.
This is to be noted that colonizer doesn’t colonize only through force or at gunpoint, but they colonize your minds, making you think that you have no history back or have a very bad history where no such events remain that you should be proud of. During colonization, your language is downtrodden by colonizer’s language and they make you feel that your culture is worst, trying to show theirs the best.
In the book “Decolonizing the mind” Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes: “Colonial alienation is ultimately an alienation from one’s self, identity and heritage, vis-a-vis linguistic oppression to be imperialism’s greatest thread to the nations of Africa.”
Colonizer always gives you a “banking education system” in which the teacher is considered the depositor and students as the receivers. In such a system, they transfer certain facts (as of colonizer’s demand) to the students’ minds so that they memorize and recall them which would ultimately shape their psyche accordingly.
This colonial education system is a long term policy of the colonizer to create puppets or robots in future as whatever the colonizer wants or orders, such colonial-educational products do without having a critical view.
The colonial education system, as a long term policy, was observed in the sub-continent during the British rule. The oppressors imposed their language (English) on the sub-continent. By doing so, they planned several changes in the region which they succeeded. Because language is not just about words. As Ngugi says “language is a powerful tool that carries a people’s culture, history and identity.” And he believes that foreign invaders often used language as a tool to maintain their subjugation or their power further on the indigenous masses.
From the very beginning, I am stressing more on language as a tool for furthering the oppression. Ngugi, like several other post-colonial writers, emphasizes on language in his book mentioned above: “In our school if any child was caught while speaking any local language of Africa, they were canned or punished by being made to wear a metal sign around their neck with inscription such as ‘I AM STUPID’or ‘I AM A DONKEY’.”
We can feel by these words of Ngugi that how the exploiters are in need of devaluing the colonized language, for which they kept the people in such an atmosphere that they themselves feel ashamed of following their culture or language. This is a colonial policy to degrade the native language while elevating the colonial tongue.
Banking education system, in actual sense, is a source of producing puppets, in which the students are considered as passive recipients of knowledge that is deposited and never let to be an active participant in this process of learning.
Some key features of the colonial education system include:
1: Deposit and withdrawal:
It is such a policy that whatever teacher (depositor) puts or transfers, students (withdrawer) receive them as it is. It is a 2 plus 2 is equal to 4 (2+2=4) game. The same are then memorized and rotted by the students. The concept is driven from the banking system of deposit and withdraw.
2: Passive Learning:
In such an environment, the students are not encouraged to question or criticize, rather they are taught to recall or memorize what is presented to them. This is what kills the students’ questioning sense and the ability of critical thinking. The policy is designed in such a way that the colonized should not raise questions or criticize the works or policies of the outsiders.
3: Devalue culture and language:
The foreign rulers are always in practice of showing the colonized that they have no such history that they should be proud of; rather they devalue their culture, language and history, which is a colonial source to step the colonized from moving forward and being a hurdle in front of them in the future. They kill a nation’s critical point of view so that they lose the courage to resist in case they know their language, culture and history are older and better than the colonizers.
In the colonial educational institutions, they do not teach the students a single event resembling their historic past or anything else related to their culture or language. In case they tell the students something from their national past or history, they distort it in such a way that it becomes so mutilated: the same is being practiced today in Balochistan.
To cut it short, a colonial education system is a way to further continue the oppressors’ exploitative policies in a colony. It helps them in sustaining and justifying their stay in the colony to loot it as much as possible. Waja Professor Saba Dashtyari once said: “This (colonial) education will only make us impotent.”
