Lessons from the global South One of the most articulate spokesmen of the epistemic violation discussed above is Ngŭgĭ wa Thion’go, who claims that the cognitive conquest was more important than the military: According to Ngŭgĭ: “its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves” (Ngŭgĭ 1981, 10). Ngŭgĭ wrote on the basis of personal experience about what can be termed epistemic genocide in school, where he was not allowed to speak his mother tongue, not even in the school yard. Ngŭgĭ claims that the mind of the subaltern has been colonized.
Colonizing the mind: South Africa and Australia It is my contention that the classroom as well as the adult learning spaces are the most important sites of knowledge production. In school more or less the whole population are exposed to a specific type of epistemological ‘indoctrination’. Similarly the adult learning spaces are also influenced by a specific epistemology, seldom adjusted to the culture and epistemology of the local context. In other words: these learning spaces are perfect spaces for the consciousness building (conscientization) or the colonizing of the mind. In line with the radical school and Ngŭgĭ, my claim is that the colonial Western school system, the global architecture of education, causes alienation, demotivation, learning problems in the global South. South Africa is a case in point where pupils move between different knowledge sys-
22 / Education policy
tems or world views in a day. As Curriculum 2005 states: “the existence of different world views is important for the Natural Science Curriculum. (…) Several times a week they cross from the culture of home, over the border into the culture of science, and then back again. (…) Is it a hindrance to teaching or is it an opportunity for more meaningful learning and a curriculum which tries to understand both the culture of science and the cultures at home?” (DoE 2002, 12). The results in South Africa are devastating. Clearly there are multiple factors, that can explain the situation, but the imposition of Western epistemology is an important explanatory factor. According to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (2008) only 1 out of 29 matriculates (3.5%) are functionally literate after matric and the drop-out rate in South African schools is 77% over 12 years of schooling. Functional literacy is defined as reading and writing skills necessary to everyday use, which alone is not enough to compete in the demanding economic landscape. This literacy rate has not improved substantially even though multiple interventions have been made. As Curriculum 2005 states, the students move from different world views, i.e. epistemologies in a day. The worldview, the perception of the world and how knowledge is produced at home differ substantially from what is produced in the learning institutions for both children and adults. Local knowledge production is based on everyday activities, is oral, is not compartmentalized into different knowledge units (is more holistic), is primarily communitarian and has a strong spiritual element. Western epistemology is primarily individualistic and written, is supposedly rational and universal, is compartmentalized, is