A new toolkit for ‘decolonising’ philosophy in secondary schools and universities summarily dismisses canonical western philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through to Descartes and Wittgenstein as ‘dead white males’ who engaged in solipsistic “armchair theorising” and must now make way for more exciting and sophisticated voices from the ‘Global South’ (Mail, Times).
The toolkit, which is believed to be the first of its kind, was drawn up by four undergraduate student interns, working alongside four academic philosophers at Soas (formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London.
According to Decolonising Philosophy: A Toolkit, western academic philosophy “masks its antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able bodied” behind a thin veneer of academic respectability.
Resolution will only come, the document suggests, when educationalists confront their own “racialised” thought structures, and understand that students are being forced to follow a seriously démodé “traditional-cum-colonial” curriculum, which fetishises the study of Plato, Hume, Russell, Locke, Descartes, Wittgenstein (etc) for no other reason than that they are all white, male and European.
Although the aim of decolonisation is presented as that of sharing power with “marginalised groups” and thus enabling “transformative conversations between intellectual systems”, the toolkit appears to take delight in flagging what it sees as the inadequacies of the western ‘intellectual system’.
The problem with Plato and the 2,400 years’ worth of European intellectual endeavour that followed in his wake, the toolkit explains airily, is that “a lot of the epistemological discourse… involves ‘armchair theorising’.” As a result, the only thing all the supposedly impressive dead white males currently clogging the western system actually offer to posterity is the thin, distinctly unappetising intellectual gruel of “in-depth retrospections of their own experiences”.
Curiously, however, this methodological solipsism appears entirely unproblematic in the case of “minoritised students” [i.e., BAME students]. According to the toolkit, lecturers wishing to decolonise the curriculum should actively encourage students to talk about their “lived experience” during class and produce “summative work that is principally evocative of their personal interests, their lived experiences, and speaks to their lives”. So, ‘in-depth retrospections of their own experiences’, then.
According to the toolkit, lecturers can move beyond the “traditional-cum-colonial” model of teaching by sidelining the intellectually negligible scribblings of the Western canon’s naval gazing old fuddy-duddies in favour of fresh and exciting thought emanating from the ‘Global South’.
Intellectuals favoured by the toolkit include: Nishida Kitaro, a Japanese philosopher who seeks to challenge Eurocentrism; Uma Narayan, an Indian American postcolonial feminist scholar, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu who engaged for decades on a project to ‘decolonise’ African systems of thought; and Professor Nkiru Nzegwu, a Nigerian theorist of gender with research interests in African feminist issues.
The toolkit also provides a ‘best practice’ guide for lecturers wishing to revise their pedagogic practice. Having presented its academic readership with a reading list for a fictional “traditional-cum-colonial” philosophy module which contains classic undergraduate lecture titles such as ‘introduction to epistemology’, ‘scepticism’, ‘empiricist epistemology’ and ‘internalism and externalism’, the toolkit then offers a decolonised alternative. In this Year Zero-style variant, lecture titles are noticeably harder-edged, with Critical Race Theory inflected titles such as ‘introduction to (decolonial) epistemology’, ‘indigenous ways of knowing and being’, ‘epistemic injustice’ and ‘epistemic violence’.
Elsewhere, the toolkit advises teachers that to fully decolonise the classroom they must understand the role they play in “racist systems”, because, when they do, they will stop acting like teachers.
“Without this intellectual insight, it is impossible to even find the root of the problem, let alone begin to address it,” the toolkit says, before explaining that the teacher in a decolonial classroom must “unlearn their own colonially mediated assumptions and background knowledge”.
To “unlearn” in this way, teachers must “be prepared to forgo a singularly authoritative role” and stop themselves from “always wanting to correct, teach and enlighten”.
This desire to always be the speaker and speak in all situations “must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination,” the toolkit continues.
As to where the initial impetus for the UK higher education sector’s seemingly relentless drive to ‘decolonise’ its modules, courses and programmes stems from, one obvious culprit is the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), which advises universities on course standards and degree content.
In 2022, for the first time, the QAA introduced advice on decolonising courses. The independent charity’s so-called “subject benchmark statements” describe the nature of study and the academic standards expected of graduates across a total of 25 subject areas and are intended as “reference points in the design, delivery and review of academic programmes” (QAA).
The most recent update to these benchmarks told higher education providers to teach about “colonialism”, “white supremacy” and “class division”.
In one example, the QAA told universities that “computing” courses should address “how divisions and hierarchies of colonial value are replicated and reinforced” within the subject.
In the “geography” document academics are told that the “core values underpinning geography’s inclusive learning community” should be “informed” in part by theoretical concepts and ideas drawn from “critical race theory”; that is, a divisive, racialised offshoot of critical theory, which, in turn, was the brainchild of the ‘Frankfurt School’, a group of 20th century cultural Marxists.
The “classics and ancient history” benchmark advises that such courses “must now engage with and explain” the connections between the subject and “imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and class division”.
Meanwhile, the QAA consultation document on “maths” curriculums suggests that they “should present a multicultural and decolonised view of mathematics, statistics and operational research, informed by the student voice”, while the equivalent document for “economics” invites respondents to consider whether students should be taught that it is “still predominantly a white, male and Western field”.
Reflecting on the significance of the QAA’s updates for the Mail back in 2022, Prof Frank Furedi pointed out that in contrast with universities in totalitarian states like China, which promote government doctrine, UK universities have always been autonomous and free to decide on their courses and their content. What charities like the QAA, and the “egregiously woke” Advance HE, have exposed, however, is that in our “unusually centralised” system, bad ideas that emerge among one particular cadre of activists-cum-academics can quickly be integrated into the systems and procedures of other universities. That’s why Prof Furedi believes the QAA’s updated benchmark statements may end up dealing “a catastrophic blow to freedom of speech and the academic rigour it supports”, turning universities into “indoctrination factories” which take their cue from a de facto “central political body: the QAA”.
John Armstrong, Reader in Financial Mathematics at King’s College London concurs, noting that the QAA’s attempts to embed ‘decolonisation’ into mathematics are not just “objectionable” on their own terms, but also “symptomatic of a more general trend for the charity to try and dictate what universities should teach”. This top-down approach is, he says, “antithetical to the academically led approach that should be the hallmark of higher education” and is now “slowly homogenising university teaching and diminishing true diversity of thought”.
