Toward a New Education for a ANew Century [Archives:2000/45/Reportage]

Reports to the Nation:
Report #1: Education for Independence
Dr. Abdulmageed Ghaleb Almikhlafi
Lecturer,
Sanaa University
Colonialism and Education
Colonialism (old and new) plays a very important role in perpetuating retardation and delaying transformation of the Arab nation. Through various cultural and educational means, imperialism dominated the minds of the Arab peoples and thereby subjugated and retarded their personality. Education was used as an effective instrument of economic and cultural imperialism. The colonialists organized their own system of education to meet the needs of trained people who could carry out the functions allocated to them by the colonialists. After World War II the industrial scene witnessed the phenomenon of decolonization of production by the multinationals; and national executives were now needed to support such decolonization and to provide, as well, the nucleus of the administrators for the newly independent Arab countries. At the level of knowledge also, the same phenomenon of decolonization could be noted: The orientation and contents of the syllabuses were heavily foreign and so were the teaching staff. Added to these factors was the impact of higher education of Arab students in western Europe and the USA, since 1960, in socialist countries, brought in its wake the problem of brain drain, which the Arab countries had not been able to overcome. Even after the independence of Arab countries, the situation hardly altered. The Arab university, which continued to be the major center for training the cadres, also continued to be largely a copy of the western university and it became a basic problem to develop an independent culture under these conditions. The psychological impact of western imperialism and colonialization, particularly on the younger generation, was profound and incalculable in its effects. By controlling language, education, and culture colonialism tried to influence the intellectual and political orientation of the younger generation. On a more general level, western domination gave rise to a feeling of inferiority and frustration which expressed itself in nihilism and despair. Western colonialism, supported by the tacit or active collaboration of the older generation, served further to widen the gap between the generations and to create a humiliated and alienated youth.

Independence and Education
The construction of ones own history is a necessary condition of emancipation. It is also a necessary condition for the possibility of contributing toward the gradual formation of world history. The need for independence, which is also a necessary condition for the construction of transformative culture, becomes particularly relevant when the forces that are to emancipate the Arab nation are themselves uncultured, uneducated and retarded. They have been systematically socialized to remain ignorant of their own history. They have been barred from freeing themselves from privileges, and idolatries. They do not exercise all the efforts to free themselves from the false ideologies that they have absorbed and unreflectively made their own. How can they emancipate themselves if they are not independent intellectually, ideologically, and politically? How can they contribute to the emancipation of people if their own nation is not independent. The emancipation of others, challenges one to emancipate oneself from privileges, prejudices and idolatries. One has first to delink oneself from the spell of the dominant retardation and engage in the self-imposed task of participating in emancipation by transcending and transforming the actualities of the unexamined retarded life.
The Arab nation has been inserted by the industrialized capitalist nations in a world system whose rational was shaped of values, norms, and principles called ideology. This ideological package directed thinking, as well as determined the whole course of events in the Arab nation, in favor of the already advanced segment of the world. Thus education in the Arab nation must contribute to the building of cultural, political, and more importantly, ideological independence by creating new sets of values, norms, and principles, a new ideology, a coherent system of emancipatory ideas and political thought. Before and after independence, the Arab s were and still are fighting themselves in the defense of one or another part of the colonialist society. They fight ideological, cold, and hot wars which they do not have to fight in the first place. Now the Arabs must move to cleanse the Arab movement of foreign control. For, if they copy today the foreign ways of politics, tomorrow they will copy the foreign ways to govern. The Arabs must, therefore, stop repeating foreign ideas, cease to consider the foreign society as the only manifestation of human civilization or as the model for other societies. Once the ideological independence is achieved, the current fragmentation among the Arabs would come to an end, and this would allow them to get organized around their social and historical demands. The right place to fight the foreign sources of retardation, is to fight the retarded elements in the Arabs.
The concept of ideological independence, then, essentially illuminates what the emancipatory ideas are, and how these ideas are channeled through TVs, radios, newspapers, political party platforms, journals, mosques and church meetings, social clubs, schools, universities, army, etc. Peoples private and public spheres should be permeated by emancipatory ideas, which give meanings to their lives and enable them to emancipate themselves and enhance their own independent world outlooks. There is a close interconnection between ideological independence and development and a close link between the ideas of individuals, class and society and socio-economic interests, ideals, norms, and beliefs which influence decisions, among others, about the choice of development programs, on distribution of benefits, as well as what political and cultural institutions ought to be doing. The transformation of the Arab nation has to be conceived within an ideological context that would define in an explicit and comprehensive way the desired emancipatory state of affairs and the best possible means of its realization. Through various cultural, educational, and ideological means, imperialism dominated the minds of the Arab peoples and thereby subjugated and retarded their personality. Ideological independence, therefore, is a protection against theories of domination which sought to explain the retardation of the Arab nation in racial and mythical terms. A new understanding must be established, and arising from this new understanding, a sense of purpose would obtain; and this would orient the whole Arab nation towards new goals and aspirations. Only an independent Arab ideology could be a vital instrument for mobilization and unity in most of the Arab world, where cleavages and conflicts extended along class, economic, tribal, and religious lines. It is a must that such a transformative and independent ideology has its basis in the social classes that are at grips with the actual struggle against domination and retardation. For an ideology to bear any legitimacy and win the participation of the masses in its implementation, it has to take account of the legacy, symbols and enlightened traditions of the laboring and oppressed masses. It has to have the drive to bring about new transformation of the entire social, economic, cultural, educational, and political structure, in order to bring about new emancipatory relations.
Education, thus, must foster independent thinking, free from any political bias or bigotry. Education must contribute to the self-confidence of the masses within their culture. Education, culture, and the organized dissemination of knowledge constitute the independence of the masses from the corruption of the dependent and ivory tower intellectuals. Education could be an effective instrumental condition of cultural and ideological independence only if it enables the Arab nations to view its historical reality and its transformation in terms of its own critical interpretation of history. Arab education in general and socio-political education in particular, must assess and evaluate liberal and Marxist conceptions of the world history and human civilization. It must identify the justified and the unjustifiable prescriptions of liberalism and Marxism. In the process of doing so, Arab education must demonstrate that both liberalism and Marxism have their own eurocentricity and their own points of strength and weakness. Arab education must contribute to the establishment of an independent, emancipatory, and democratic conception of the world. Such a conception may take the enlightened Arab-islamic traditions (not ignorant traditionalism) as its starting points of departure but must assimilate and surpass the achievements of liberalism and Marxism so as to contribute to the whole human intellectual production. The Arab choice is not right or left but forward or back, up or down, emancipation or retardation.

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