Decolonizing Education

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10. I can no longer accept a narrative of education which teaches me that my village grandmother was illiterate, primitive, backward, stupid, uneducated, underdeveloped, uncivilized and not capable of managing their own affairs.

9. I can no longer accept a narrative of education which standardizes, sorts, brands, and condemns millions of beautiful brilliant talented children around the world as ‘failures’ and as ‘slow learners’ and teaches us that the head is more important than the heart, the hands and home.

8. I can no longer accept a narrative of education that sees my links to my land, to my local languages, to my seeds, to my rivers, to my trees, to my histories and herstories, to my body, to my inner voice, to my community all as a barrier to modernization and development which must at best be destroyed if we are to progress, and at worst be condemned to a multicultural day festival in school.

7. I can no longer accept a narrative of education that teaches me that physical work in the fields, in my home and in my community is 'drudgery' and my children’s salvation lies in consuming corporate advertising messages (such as drinking coca cola, eating mcdonalds, using fair and lovely face whitening creams) and chatting on Facebook..

6. I can no longer accept a narrative of education that teaches me that I have to compete against others in my community and against peoples from other countries as part of the survival of the fittest.

5. I can no longer accept a narrative which teaches me that learning is a commodity (along with the air, water, land, food) and that knowledge is the property of individuals.

4. I can no longer accept a narrative of education that teaches me that we are poor in education because we don’t have schools, trained teachers or scientific knowledge. So we need more foreign direct investment, we need more foreign aid, we need more public-private partnerships, we need more free trade agreements, and we need to always trust the Experts over the wisdoms of our communities.

3. I can no longer accept a narrative of education that gives power to the Ministry of Human Resources to define what it means to be human.

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Manish Jain, Shikshantar 2014"