Unschooling The African. Tuesday, 4 June 2013

In their process of civilisation, the Europeans would educate and better behaviours of the savages. What did the savages learn? To speak English, eat, dress, talk, live, build houses, conduct marriages and prayers just like Europeans. Africans were ignorant and needed formal education.

Why don't you say education, plainly? The Africans already had their informal education where knowledge and skills of survival were passed on to the young by the elders around the fire place.
Like specimens in laboratory experiments, the Europeans mixed up an African with their own lifestyle, modes of thinking and behaviour.

Don't be alarmed when the elites tell you that they "think in English". When they trained clerks, messengers and guards, it was because they needed them to run their errands, write down the racist prejudicial observations and protect their lives from the "barbaric native" who could drink their blood anytime chance presented itself.
They trained teachers and catechists to help them indoctrinate and brainwash the natives. They largely succeeded in this: producing parrots called interpreters who went around bleating messages of a messiah from the land of milk and honey or SugarCandy Mountain in George Orwell's witty allegorical fable Animal Farm (1945); things they were not sure have ever existed. True, an African is gifted when it comes to what Ngugi terms as "parrotology".

The word "teaching" as applied in our European-modeled schools is subject to scrutiny. Let us say teaching means the systematic presentation of facts, ideas, skills, and techniques to students. What were the facts, ideas and skills in question here? That the white race was born to dominate other races? That the Africans had to turn their left cheek as well after being smacked on the right one? Or the fact that they had to give away their wealth to secure themselves places in paradise? Is teaching the same as diverting people from their ways of life, culture and expectations and channeling them into what you deem is right for them?
And what has the African parent done to the children?

The procedure is simple: born to go through the school system (primary, secondary, university) like a parrot and acquire Degrees, Masters or PhDs. The children's innocent brains are burdened with mysterious strange concepts and advised to just cram them if they cannot understand them. "In the colonial society, education is such that it serves the colonialist.... In a regime of slavery, education was but one institution for forming slaves," according to a statement of FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) Department of Education and Culture: 1968. P: 223.

According to Ivan Illich, "they" (educators) school "them" (learners) to confuse process and substance and once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success.
In his text Deschooling Society (1970:1), Illich observes thus, "The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question."

According to John Holt, the advantage of this method is that it doesn't require you, the parent, to become someone else, i.e. a professional teacher pouring knowledge into child-vessels on a planned basis. Instead you live and learn together, pursuing questions and interests as they arise and using conventional schooling on an "on demand" basis, if at all.
Kihura Nkuba argues that: The biggest, costliest and most important part of building and putting something together should be thinking and planning. Therefore, with our west-imposed education system, we are simply brainwashed and obviously, 'when the mind is perverted, no clear thought can come out of it.'