This review has been accessed  times since January 1, 2005
Willinsky, John. (1998).Learning to Divide the World:
Education at Empire's End. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press
304 pp.
$22.95 (Cloth) ISBN# 0816630763
(Paper) ISBN# 0816630771
Reviewed by Roger Deacon
University of Natal
Durban, South Africa
First, I was excited.
The title and first chapter of this book promised to
examine the influence of empire on education, situating the
enterprise of schooling within its truly global historical
parameters. Then, I was disappointed. The accounts offered
of imperialism
itself as well as of its effects at a scholarly level
seemed too commonplace, too unoriginal and at the same time
too ambitious. Finally,
though, I have come to the more sober if critical
conclusion that, for all its inadequacies, there is a need
for a book of this sort, a book
which neither dismisses the legacies of Western imperialism
and its educational project nor shies away from confronting
the paradoxes
and tensions built into any attempt to reflect upon the
manner in which modern subjectivity is manufactured.
John Willinsky's
Learning to Divide the World asks us to think, and
re-think, how "five centuries of studying, classifying, and
ordering
humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar
and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were,
in effect,
conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up
and to educate the world" (pp. 2-3). Drawing upon postcolonial
and
postmodern ideas interspersed with a fair smattering of
left-liberal and Marxist beliefs, Willinsky wishes to make
sense of our "divided
world"—"beset by struggles of ethnic nationalism, hardening
of racial lines, and staggering divides between wealth and
poverty"
(p. 1)—and to explain this emphasis on difference to the
young. Consequently, the three chapters that make up the
first part of the book
examine the "adventure in learning" that was European
imperialism, along with some of its more glaring effects
both in Europe and
abroad. On the one hand, for example, "the expansion of
experience and conquest educate[d] the conqueror" (p. 55): the
conscious
imperial self-display through the media of museums and
expositions, public gardens and zoos, encyclopedias and
travels "educated the
eye to divide the world according to the patterns of
empire" and in the process informed and civilised the
populations of the imperialist
countries (p. 57). On the other hand, the establishment of
schools throughout the colonies brought indigenous
populations directly into
contact with Western beliefs and values, teaching them too
to identify and divide themselves and the world in terms of
the categories
of primitive and civilised, Oriental and Occidental, and
black and white. The second part of the book, consisting of
five chapters,
begins the task of rethinking our educated imaginations—since
"what has been learned can be learned again" (p. 2)—by
investigating
ways in which the teaching of history, geography, science,
language and literature in schools can and should take the
opportunity to
reflect upon their place in the imperialist educational
project.
"What comes," then,
"... of having one's comprehension of the world so directly
tied to one's conquest of it" (p. 3)? As Willinsky makes
clear, schools have offered little which might help to
explain why differences are treated as having such profound
consequences. And
it is no doubt important for students to be made aware of
differences and to learn to appreciate their effects (p. 5).
Yet in the process of
developing his argument—which is in part an ideology-
critique—and claiming that "educators owe those they teach
some account—if
always partial—of what we have taught them about the world"
(p. 16, emphasis in the original), Willinsky appears to find
it difficult to
avoid implicit references to a rather idealistic, even
ahistorical, conception of education. While Willinsky's
conscientizing project is
commendable, even despite being unable to avoid repeating
and reaffirming the differences that it wishes to expose
and overcome, it
verges at times on an apologia, as if those who have
relayed imperialism's educational project (regardless of
whether they have done
this deliberately, unthinkingly or critically) "owe
students an account" of what they and their predecessors
have done (and as if
students are themselves merely innocent victims and not
implicated participants), and must somehow explain "why
education has not
done more good in the world" and has "not done more to
realize fully [its] democratic promises" (p. 16). It is only
in the light of a (never
defined or delineated) ideal of what education ought to be
that it is possible to suggest that "colonial education ...
did little for the good
name of education ..." (p. 103). In the face of the vacuity of
this ideal, it would be more realistic to try to explain
how and why learning
appears to be "dependent ... on taking possession of the
world in this [encyclopedic] way," given, as Willinsky
himself notes, both that
"any work that aspires to encompass the known world could
be said to suffer from imperialist aspirations" (p. 73), and
that the
supposedly uniquely European thirst for an all-encompassing
knowledge and mastery of the world also accompanied the
imperialist
aspirations of ancient China, Greece and Rome.
This misplaced
educational idealism—which contrasts education as it is
(imperialist) against how it ought to be (democratic)—is
also
apparent when we are told that not all educational
interests are inherently imperialistic (p. 40), but we are
offered no criteria with which
we might identify and distinguish between those interests
that are, and those that are not, "imperialistic." It
appears again in the radical
commonplace that "although colonial education was dedicated
to extending the regulation and usefulness of the
colonized, it also—the
human spirit being what it is—contributed to the empire's
undoing" (p. 89). For example: in India and Malaysia (and, by
implication, in
many other colonies), schools were set up to provide local
civil servants for the (in this case British) empire (p. 99),
but also, ironically,
trained the earliest statesmen. Similarly, Western
education is said to be both about cultural domination and
a resource for resisting
that domination (p. 109). But how far can educational theory
be said to have got when we can do little more than tiredly
repeat how social
reproduction through education inevitably meets up with
resistance? We are told nothing new when the relatively
insignificant efforts
of a few (usually Western) women who campaigned against
"the slavery of the harem" (p. 103), thus "confound[ing] the
roles of
submission and domination" (p. 104), can only prompt the
conclusion that, "fortunately, colonial forms of education
were not fully
determined in their application or outcomes" (p. 105).
To repeat: the
intellectual legacy of imperialism is certainly a topic
worth addressing in schools (p. 18), since the West did take
an
intellectual as much as a political and economic hold over
the world (p. 24); and yet, ironically, in so doing the West
also constituted itself
in new ways ... indeed, it became the West. It is thus
exceedingly odd that the establishment and expansion during
this historical period
of state-run schooling systems in Europe itself is barely
mentioned in this book, whereas the establishment and
effects of colonial
schooling are accorded an entire chapter. (Is this an
example of educating the conqueror about his far-flung and
heterogeneous empire
while assuming the unquestionable value and validity of his
supposedly homogenous heartland?) Willinsky, concerned with
what
remains of the "crime" that was Europe's imperial
accumulation of learning (p. 17), does not appear to even
contemplate the fact that this
"crime" might in part have made modern education possible,
in the mother country as much as in the colonies. There is
thus too much
of a sense in which this book deals with the educational
project of imperialism, in which learning and knowledge
supplement imperial
conquest and expansion, rather than imperialism as an
educational project, in which learning can dominate and
divide in its own right.
A certain nostalgia
and romanticism also finds a place in this book. Arguing
that "the world was assumed to be a tabula rasa that
awaited inscription by the West and its soldiers,
administrators, scientists, and educators ..." (p. 36),
Willinsky relates with a sense of
solidarity how certain communities in Canada are "refusing
this naming and returning to their original, native names"
(p. 37 n9). Despite
referring in this context to Derrida's critique of the myth
of the origin, however, Willinsky fails to reflect on the
extent to which the
"original, native" name was itself no less than an(other)
inscription of the world. Willinsky also advocates an
educational collaboration
between students and community members in order to
"compile, organize, preserve and present different senses
of the community's
experiences" (p. 158), as if who "the community" is is
unproblematic and as if a community's representation of
itself is necessarily more
accurate than how it may have been represented by others
(not to mention that this "remapping" of a community will
unavoidably
repeat elements of imperialism's prior mapping).
Perhaps the
greatest strength of the book is that it does not dismiss
imperialism or wish it away, but grapples directly with its
effects:
"[W]e have to work with this [imperialist] knowledge of the
world ... for this knowledge is all that many of us have of
the world ... by
understanding the cost at which it was achieved and the
ends to which it was exhibited." Such a perspective,
Willinsky contends, may
enable us to disable some of our all-too-ready assumptions,
and "[i]f we cannot go back, perhaps we can go forward"
(p. 87). Yet this
strength is constantly being dissipated by formulations
which seem to appeal to something outside of history. "The
lion in the zoo is no
less real or true for all that the forces of imperialism
did to make such a spectacle a part of our lives, but when
we stare into the lion's
eyes, what is it we see that has not been touched in some
way by the colonial adventure that we have, through myriad
forms, learned
so well?" Here again, the assumption that there is
something pure, innocent, untainted and free in the lion's
eyes belies the degree to
which the world was remade in the image of imperialism.
Like it or not, the mass educational project of Enlightened
imperialism has
made us what we are, and to question it is to attempt to
ask of our institutions, practices, fellow practitioners
and, not least, our very
knowledge, what one can know about them from the inside, as
it were, from within their bounds, limits and limitations.
While Willinsky
does ask, "What impact did this colonial exercise have on
the emergence of public education during the same period in
the West?" (p. 90), his "three-chapter review of imperialism's
educational influence on the world" (p. 109) never answers
this question. (Is
the West, and education in the West, somehow not of this
world, otherworldly, an Archimedean point, perhaps, or just
too obvious to
mention? Chandra Mohanty's important argument that "[i]t is
not the center that determines the periphery, but the
periphery that, in its
boundedness, determines the center" (quoted in Willinsky,
p. 106) is noted but not followed up: if it is only through
its definition of the
Rest as peripheral or other that the West can confirm its
centrality and quiet its own anxieties, surely this has
implications for the
nature of education in the West as much as elsewhere?) If
"[t]he aim is to hasten and focus changes that are already
underway in
creating a multicultural curriculum" (p. 18), the book in fact
makes little attempt to delineate further what such a
curriculum does or
ought to entail, let alone to address the fact that
multiculturalism is a product of the very same historical
process and educational
project that is imperialism.
This fundamental
lacuna aside, in the remainder of the book Willinsky
usefully examines the changing content of various school
texbooks with the intention of "identifying the colonizing
aspects of various educational domains" (p. 108): for example,
"science's
confounding role in maintaining ... [racial] divisions"
(p. 186), the use of English as language and as literature as
an instrument of
domination and silencing, and history and geography as
mechanisms for learning about, and subordinating, others.
Even where such
texts prove to be largely uncritical of their complicity
with imperialism, as in one American world history
textbook, we are enjoined,
pragmatically, not to "think about abandoning existing
resources" given the limited funding of public education
(p. 129). Fortunately, there
are other textbooks which reflect a more postcolonial
influence (p. 129) and allow for a more critical understanding
of what historians
make of history, for "a state of permanent revision ...
drawn from among the redeeming features of Western
knowledge" (p. 132);
unfortunately, these redeeming or not-so-redeeming features
are nowhere spelled out. All we are left with appear to be
personal
predilections, for "critical self-reflection" (p. 151), for
"turning the gaze back onto itself" (p. 153), and for creating
in classrooms "a critical
space ... that allows students to stand apart from ...
representation[s] of the world" (p. 155), as if criticism is
Archimedean. Granted,
though, "we need not forsake that experience [of attempting
to stand apart from the world]", even if it is implicated
in the imperialist
project (p. 239), since in order "to move forward", we must
perforce first "understand what education has already made
of difference
and diversity" (p. 244). And to Willinsky's credit, his
conclusion reflects the journey that he has made in the
course of writing this book:
"more or better history teaching, including the history of
imperialism, does not in itself point the way forward"
(p. 245), since there is "no
place to be found outside this
[imperialist] history of history" (p. 246). He acknowledges
the paradox of continuing "to count on the educational
system to make us free,
even as I question its entrenched complicity with
imperialism" (pp. 247-48), and ends with the suitably "modest
proposal"—"the best that
we can hope for" (p. 263)—that we must "supplement our
education with a consideration of imperialism's influence
on the teaching of
history, geography, science, language, and literature in
the hope that it will change the way this legacy works on
us" (p. 247).
Learning to
Divide the World, like the educational ramifications of
imperialism which are its focus, contains much about which
one
can be critical, but also much from which one can learn
and, indeed, much even to be admired. Falling somewhere
between a
textbook, with its concluding "snappy student activity
sheet" (pp. 255-56), and a treatise, between something
practical and useful and
something historical and critical, it challenges educators
and students alike to attempt to re-think how they think.
Finally,
notwithstanding its self-limiting frame which wishes to
believe that critical reflection upon our imperially
educated imaginations may
somehow bring us closer to freedom, or harmony, or
toleration, or justice, it displays the productive
paradoxes, twists and turns of a
personal trajectory of learning which has come to educate
itself.
About the Reviewer
Roger Deacon is managing editor of Theoria, a
journal of social and political thought based in South
Africa.
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