Education is generally defined as the process acquiring knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that enable individuals to develop their full potentials and lead successful and fulfilling lives. However, the best definition of education would be, “The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning, and judgment and generally of preparing oneself and others intellectually for mature life. It is also the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.”
In other words, this is what we know as the modern definition of the purpose and objectives of education, this is also a rather elastic definition that displays esoteric notions of individual-centered objectives. This definition of education therefore varies from continent to continent and from country to country on the basis of past history, cultural and traditional diversities and social and economic policies. The notion or the content of educational philosophy has undergone changes in accordance with changing times and circumstances starting from the time of Greek philosopher Aristotle to modern day thinkers.
Aristotle believed that “education was crucial if man was to achieve fulfillment of the possibilities of one’s character. He believed that the supreme good to which we all aspire to is happiness but the happy man is neither a noble nor a savage but instead he is an educated man.” Aristotle may be the first philosopher who understood the centrality of education in human life because he repeatedly warned that the fulfilled person is an educated person.
This Aristotelian notion of the “educated person” has been interpreted differently by other educational philosophers who agreed or disagreed or still produced variants of Aristotle’s views throughout history. they have produced tons of literature on the philosophy of education and the debate is still continuing either overtly or most of the time overtly centuries after the formation of what we know as the Western notion of education. “Western education encourages individualism and creativity towards the practitioner. Since students are given freedom to express their creativity, they are not afraid to be different or make mistakes, as the Western education looks at students’ mistakes positively and the way to learn.”
The African philosophy of education is therefore different from the Western counterpart in many ways. While Western education emphasizes on the individual as the main focus of education, African philosophy on the contrary stresses on the communities within which the individual is only a member and not an elite person who aspires for superiority over the other members of the groups.
This philosophy is best summed up in the following quotation. “Simply put, an African philosophy of education explores the lives of African communities and their situations in the same way that an Islamic education examines the lived experiences and conditions of Muslim communities.”
Another elaboration on the same theme maintains that, “Put differently, an African philosophy of education is primarily concerned with an analytical interpretation of the reasons that constitute the indignity, inhumanity and exclusion to which people may be subjected on the African continent , and then to proffer ways how such dystopias could be brought into conversation.”
According to the above view, the philosophy of African education deals with the task of exploring the lives of African communities but is also concerned with the reasons why the exclusion of people is the key to understanding their dystopian situation and that this philosophy aims at critically examining the reasons behind this dilemma.
The notion of exclusion is key to understanding this dilemma and a critical understanding of the reasons behind it is a key objective of African educational philosophy. The African philosophy of education can thus be summed up by looking at these two strands, namely community focus and an analysis of reasons of exclusion of Africans on the continent.
The fact that Western education is based on the success of the individual while African education is centered on the communities is a basic variation that has shaped the two educational systems based on their social organizations and the ideals of their societies and value systems they espoused for a very long time as well as the divergent directions they followed in their evolutions.
The community, communal life and common past, present and future is the cornerstone of African philosophical categories while the individual looms large on the horizons of Western philosophy since the times of Aristotle and even earlier. This may only be natural that there are basic dissimilarities in world views and life objectives of different societies.
Chinese philosophy of life is not similar to that of the African view of life and death. The same can be said about their education philosophies that are shaped by earlier traditions and world views. it is obvious Confucianism played a big role in shaping the Chinese views on life while Africans depended on the ancestral wisdoms to interpret and understand the world around them and beyond the earthly realms.
There may be nothing wrong with these differences as they are natural. However, the attempt by Westerners, i.e. colonialism and neocolonialism, to impose their world views in general and their educational philosophy on Africans was the “original sin” that generated all the other sins that were committed against Africans since the dawn of colonialism to the present.
In a study entitled, “French and British Colonial Education in Africa” Remi P. Clignet and Philip J. foster summarize the aims and objectives of colonial education in Africa as follows: “since the end of the nineteenth century, various commentators emphasized the contrasts between French and British colonial policies in education.
Generally speaking, they have characterized French policy in Africa as assimilation in character and aimed at the creation of an elite cherishing metropolitan values -Black Frenchmen, if you will. Conversely, practice has allegedly emphasized the notion of “cultural adaptation”, the adjustment metropolitan institutions to local political and social organizations and the creation of a group of educated African, who at the same time would be “rooted in heir town culture.”
In other words, as Algerian-French philosopher Franz Fanon would say colonial education philosophy in Africa aimed at creating a black man with white masks or a man with black skin and white mask, a man who is African in the exterior while thinking and doing things in the European or the colonial way. Thus colonial or Western education is aimed at creating a black man who is his worst enemy because he resembles his fellow black men on the surface while deep down he is a duplication of the European master. This is akin to what Malcolm X once said about the field Negro versus the home Negro.
Colonial education policy in Africa has indeed produced a group of educated elites who speak the language of their peoples while they are alienated from their true identities on the spiritual level because they cherished individual success over communal wellbeing and harmony as the purpose end result of education.
The contradiction between appearance and essence is here most evident than anywhere else. And this is the basic contradiction that has shaped the destiny of millions of Africans on the continent who were subsequently reduced to mass alienation from their history, cultures, values and traditions and were forced to embrace the educational and cultural values of the European masters.
This contradiction is continues to shape their destiny by producing and reproducing the same conditions that were prevalent during the colonial era. What is worse, they are told about their present condition as the phase as well as that of the master of modernization while they are still languishing in the same old neocolonial realities.
For the new generation of Africans, educational philosophy should be recalibrated on the basis of a philosophical or spiritual return to their roots while selectively adopting what is good and relevant to modern African realities. As the world keeps on globalizing no continent or country can live as an island in the big sea of humanity. Interaction, and cross fertilization of values, philosophies and cultures is inevitable.
In the midst of all the chaos, the sound and the fury of our times, Africans should return to ancestral values and predicate their modernizations on the authentically African past in order to embrace both the present and the future. The alternative would only be to keep on living and thinking like Fanon’s man with black skin and white mask.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 21 JULY 2023
