Pitfalls of postcolonial education and child policies in Africa

With 70 per cent of people under the age of 30, more than 450 million children and adolescents under the age of 18, including approximately 150 million children under the age of 5, Africa is the ‘youngest’ continent. Research on children and childhoods in Africa has rarely addressed post- and decolonial issues. Contrasting the common picture of Africa as backward, disaster ridden continent, this chapter outlines how the situation of children and the characteristics of childhood in Africa are influenced by postcolonial power and childhood policies. It concentrates on three aspects. On the one hand, it discusses the changes that follow the establishment of schools according to Western patterns. Secondly, the debate on the appropriateness and implementation of children's rights, especially with regard to particularly marginalized groups of children in precarious living conditions. Thirdly, the relationship between children and adults and their limitations and opportunities to play an equal and participatory role in their societies is considered.

Introduction

The introduction presents central debates about postcolonial education policy in Morocco and Algeria. It focuses, in particular, on the transition to using Arabic after years of French colonial domination. Arabizing education was considered a fundamental act of decolonization, yet it also rendered education a flashpoint for bitter controversy, and left many questions open for debate. What elements of historical memory would be sacrificed in order to shape a new national identity? Should education systems reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of students, or work to shape a unified nation? The Introduction lays out a methodological approach to examining these questions both through the literary depiction of the school, and the teaching of literature in the classroom, seeing novels as not only objects of literary analysis, but also as products of an education system and materials that could, eventually, form a part of that system’s curriculum.

Medium of Instruction Policy

This chapter traces the main pedagogical and political agendas that are implicit in medium of instruction (MOI) policies. It begins with an important worldwide effort to promote mother-tongue MOI: the Education for All initiative. Although this initiative has gained wide support among education scholars, MOI policies that privilege former colonial languages remain dominant in many contexts. The second section focuses on colonial and postcolonial contexts. In recent years debates about MOI in postcolonial education have focused on the spread of English MOI under globalization. The third section examines globalization, specifically with the examples of Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, and European higher education. The fourth section examines a major counterforce to English MOI: the language rights movement. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of explicit efforts to use MOI to reduce inequality.

Postcolonialism and Education

Education was a strategy in the colonization of large parts of the globe by European colonial powers. Postcolonialism, a diverse school of thought, demands that the ongoing destructive consequences of the colonial era be exposed, analyzed, and addressed through action. Postcolonial literature, while illuminating the dehumanizing effects of colonization, has understandably focused on the hegemony of Western culture and its effects on education, but it has been vulnerable to criticism that it ought also to pay attention to colonialism as the capitalist exploitation of colonies and former colonies, for their wealth and labor and as markets for manufactured goods. Postcolonial education addresses cultural imperialism by recognizing and unsettling its legacy in the school curriculum and the Western assumptions about knowledge and the world that underpin it, fostering a pedagogy of critique and transformation in the metropole and the periphery. Globalization in the 21st century has intensified interactions between the metropole and former colonies, in an increasingly integrated world system in which neo-liberal influences have created a new form of empire that embraces education. While demands for the restoration of indigenous forms of education are understandable as a response to cultural dispossession, new directions in postcolonial educational thought will also need to accommodate hybridity and to attend to the material conditions of global inequality.

Hong Kong's Postcolonial Education Reform

The Hong Kong education system is at a crucial point in its trajectory, and changes to public education also reflect broader social, economic and political changes within Hong Kong and globally. Since the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from British control to China, Hong Kong has struggled to develop its own identity under the One Country, Two Systems premise. One of the compulsory courses in the Hong Kong curriculum known as liberal studies, introduced in 2009, provided a useful departure point for exploring many social tensions occurring in Hong Kong. Exploring education reform through liberal studies explains how these social tensions manifest within education, and how these educational tensions manifest within the broader society. Contemporary trends in Hong Kong's education were examined, including the public exams, the proliferation of shadow education and the expansion of self-financed tertiary education options for Hong Kong students. Tensions in Hong Kong are further explained through the notions of post-colonialism. The liberal studies debate mirror aspects of the broader economic, political, and social tensions as they relate to Hong Kong youth, and Hong Kong society at-large, and this article endeavors to explore these tensions through the lens of liberal studies as it relates to education discourse in Hong Kong. Through a combination of literature review from academic and mainstream sources, the article establishes the groundwork for further empirical work in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of the issues and tensions in Hong Kong.