Overcoming the Colonial ’Subordination Model’ of Education

The report under was recently submitted by me to the Chair of the Department of Sociology at a public university in Pakistan. I was asked to suggest ways in which the department might improve in 3 areas:

1. Teaching Methodology

2. Research & Thesis activity of students

3. Activities in the public arena

These recommendations, which are based mostly on my personal experience at US universities, both as student and lecturer, and considering reports on the state of education in “Third World” countries as well as the so-called ‘democratic schools’ of mass education in the US (where students are standardized to fill the capitalist marketplace as technicians), should be taken as a ‘work-in-progress’. As more teaching experience is gained in Pakistan, new problems based on such experiential data might become apparent, which might require altering various recommendations and inventing new ones. The process of self-correction and falsification is fundamental to all scientific systems of analysis, and therefore none of these recommendations should be taken as ‘set in stone’.

The department of sociology, more so than other departments at the University, due to the focus of its subject matter can make a difference in affecting lives of the people on the socio-structural level. It is up to the faculty to ensure that this position of prominence of our field in such a hierarchy of relevance (among the fields) is communicated to the University administration as well as the student body.

1. Teaching Methodology:

Effective teaching methodology involves a meaningful interplay between efforts of teachers, the efforts of students and the relevance of tools and technologies employed for teaching purposes. Regarding the teacher, we must ensure adequate qualification and experience in the area of instruction, the availability of tools (texts, technology and audio visuals) that will make teaching easy, effective and enjoyable for teachers and students alike. Concerning students, we need to remove ambiguity of tasks and unclear syllabi, which are both major impediments to systematic learning. These dual motives can be easily achieved by making sure that modern texts are available, that the syllabus clearly specifies required readings before each class period, and that handouts are not only available but are properly organized to minimize confusion.

The variable, in this regard concerning students that is beyond our control has to do with their quality of secondary education. Defects at the secondary level of education, which are quite widespread in our society, translate into inadequate comprehension and hence learning at higher levels. All recommendations at improving quality of education at higher levels therefore cannot ignore recommendations for reform at secondary levels. Moving beyond this dilemma, which is beyond out control, our emphasis for maximizing learning by undergraduate and graduate students should be on:

1. Critical/Analytical reasoning skills and not rote memorization. Students should be encouraged to use with originality, the core concepts they learn in class by applying them to happenings both in their private lives and in their society. For this purpose, critical analysis of the content of newspapers and other media should be encouraged by assignment on a weekly basis in all courses.

2. Habits of independent library and internet research should be developed as “classroom culture”. One week out of the 18 week semester, in every course, should be devoted as computer laboratory time, where instructors should assign tasks related to retrieval of information etc, based on their course in an objective fashion for easy comparison and correction. These sessions, combined with other similar tasks will go a long way in developing such research habits and enhancing familiarity of the students with tools that might be alien to some.

3. Habits of citation of work used, and the proper procedures of citation of references, as required by the American Sociological Association or other such bodies, should for part of class sessions in every course. These should be combined with sessions in which the structure (not only the content) of professionally written papers, proper methods of display of diagrams and tables etc, is discussed. Simple physical exercises of this nature will ensure that students not only learn these basic presentation tools but use them in their work.

4. Developing enthusiasm for subject matter should be the priority goal of every teacher. This more than anything else will enhance learning by developing student interest in the subject matter. This merely involves making the subject relevant to the student’s life regarding their primary and secondary groups as well as larger national and global structures. Sociologists more so than people from other disciplines can make this happen more effectively.

5. To enhance understanding of the subject matter, teachers should develop or collect as part of their courses, audio visuals, films, documentaries, and presentations etc, that will enhance understanding and generate interest among students as well as offer varied perspectives and boarder views.

6. Teaching methodology should abandon the ‘obedience model’ and should encourage students to challenge ideas of the teacher. Teacher/student status differentials should be maintained only at the minimal standards of discipline and not in the strict hierarchical levels that the ‘Colonial’ education model has historically encouraged.

7. Every course should incorporate a health mix of objective type and short-answer questions. Instead of long general essays, that encourage the rote learning methodology, stifling the thought process as a result, we can assign either take home exams, or term papers that incorporate the major core concepts of the particular course. The current exam methodology, as is clear by talking to various professors at the institute, is not producing desired results: It is not producing students that can think and write analytically and critically. Therefore abandoning the current structure of exams, taking note of the above recommendations can only benefit the students. However, instead of being rigid in methodology, we can keep it open and subject to constant revision based on the preference of teachers in getting results, and the students in enhancing their learning.

8. Oral presentations should be part of the syllabus and grade of every course at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Students overtime will develop a sense of the structure of oral presentations, time management in presentations as well as the habit of effective communication of ideas, which would become an indispensable tool for students in their professional lives.

9. Qualitative research techniques and model building should be encouraged together with quantitative methods. Without qualitative research, thinking and analysis cannot develop to its potentialities and mere number crunching (which these days is done through computers), should not be the sum total of research. Instead of such ‘de-skilling’ of the intellect, based on repetition of automatic procedures under a narrow defintion of the “scientific method”, all quantitative interpretation should be subject to qualitative analytical revision in the Grounded Theory or Extended Case Study methodology. One in this fashion can new knowledge be generated and made meaningful for results.

10. The library needs to be updated especially with current/modern textbooks that are no more than a few years old. Such one or two year old editions of modern textbooks (that for market purposes more so than any data or substance) are revised every year or two in the US, should be purchased regularly, as they are available quite inexpensively from places like Amazon.com. When a new edition comes out, the older ones become available inexpensively (some sell for a few dollars) and can be acquired easily within our library’s budget. In this context, emphasis for the library should be on quality and not quantity. Classics that have formed the foundations of the field should be acquired, if not available, and should be required reading for students at the graduate level. To better facilitate student ease of use of the library, a library session should form part of the syllabus of every course. Student assistantships for the library should also be sought to make it best serve their needs and not only the needs of the faculty.

11. Finally, every course, as part of the course syllabus, should devote a session or two to teaching the scientific methodology of acquiring knowledge (as opposed to the traditional ‘authority based’ methodology that is widespread in the culture, and is abused quite often). Most text books on sociology, research methodology and various branches of the field almost always contain beginning chapters that talk about such methodology, therefore there is no reason why every course should not incorporate such an introductory session in every undergraduate and graduate course, so that the scientific mindset become institutionalized in the psyche of the students.

The problems as I see them in areas of teaching, after reading reports on the condition of education in Pakistan and other “Third World” countries, range from empirically outdated/inadequately stocked libraries to rote teaching/learning skills, to inadequately qualified teachers and students, and lack of writing/presentation and critical thinking skills. These problems are quite similar to most “Third World” countries that adopted the pre-designed colonial model of education for the indigenous people of the colonies. Such an education system emphasized submission, obedience and conformity to the assumed “superior” knowledge of the West, over the creativity and innovation of the natives, who were deemed “uncivilized” and had to be incorporated into “civilization” based on the Western model as subordinates. A contemporary example of such a “subordination model” would be the dozens of MBA schools that have cropped up in Pakistan. These schools have been developed not to meet any substantive education needs of the country but to fulfill the labor demands of either external multinationals or their local clones to create “factory prepared”, standardized youth, that do not possess the skills to rise above definitions of reality that are being forced on them. The purpose of such ‘demand’ is not for the country’s social development but for exploiting cheap labor that possesses the minimal standards required for what at best is glorified clerical work. Recognizing this would lead directly to problem area #2, the research and thesis activity of students.

2. Research & Thesis of Students:

The American Sociologist, C. Wright Mills, apart from his work in political sociology (The Power Elite, 1956), is also remembered in academic fields for setting forth an alternative direction for sociology as opposed to the trends in the field that were being pursued in his day. Those trends, against which he wrote, (unfortunately) are being replicated in developing countries these days, trends involving sociology as a number crunching expedition in which conscious human beings are reduced to uniform numbers for regression analysis or probabilistic prediction, regardless of context, history or social structure. His book, The Sociological Imagination, criticizes this ahistorical, impersonal, dehumanizing, methodology as ‘end by itself’, sociology and offers instead a broader, more eclectic picture of society by asking students to consider social history, institutional social structure, and their projections in individual and group biography. He asks us to take this broader framework and place it firmly within the classical tradition of sociology which involves the values of truth, reason, freedom and humanism, something that is seldom captured by a mechanically oriented sociology.

In the appendix to The Sociological Imagination titled, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”, C. Wright Mills recommends that students should not detach their lives from their work as social scientists and should be like a “moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible”, and offers a mode of research that is more ‘meaning oriented’, emphasizes freedom of research methodology and conceptualization, rather than the over-emphasis on rigid bureaucratic procedures of modern day sociology. As Max Weber acknowledged, picking a topic for research (as opposed to the content of the research) can never be ‘value-free’ and depends on the value orientation of the researcher. Keeping this in mind, in order to better assist students to pick areas of research that are meaningful to their lives and their society, we have to inculcate in them an ability to translate with ease their personal troubles (things that affect them in their everyday lives) into public issues (things that transcend the individual and have to do with societal structure and hence affect not only the individual but entire strata of society, regardless of individual idiosyncrasies). This tool that forms the core of the ‘sociological imagination’ will enable students to pick relevant and not trivial topics as they translate their ‘personal troubles’ of local environments into ‘public issues’ of national and global significance.

Another important point that emerges from Mills’ The Sociological Imagination, concerns the short coming of products of research that are based primarily on the demands of the (capitalistic) marketplace. The role of most social scientists within such a bureaucratically circumscribed system (as most advanced capitalist systems are) is that of a hired hand, a technician in the service of power who writes only when he or she needs to get grants (i.e. money) for research, or what others tell them to write about (books that have a market demand). As such, their work becomes a kind of “salesmanship” fitting in with what the dominant corporate culture demands, work that is devoid of originality, which depends on value orientations of people of wealth and power, and hence lacking in passion and conviction due to its detached, artificial character. As a result, students when they submit to the demands of the marketplace, or think of applied sociology to mean merely what the capitalist marketplace demands, or view the degree as a fitting in mechanism for private “non profits” (whose basic philosophy of solving personal troubles while ignoring structural precedents is the very antithesis of sociologically inspired work), do nothing to advance knowledge of the field. Due to the ability of social scientists to transcend the milieu of everyday life and of particular groups, societies and nations, in order to view from on top the ‘big picture’, akin to Simmel’s ‘Stranger’, on a higher level, such should form the basis for all research and thesis attempted by students to make their education and work more meaningful.

3. Activities in the Public Arena:

A common misconception held by students, by psychologists and social workers is that societies are mere sums of individuals that inhabit them. This however is not the case: The total, society, is greater than the sum of its parts. Problems of societal structure (that predates and postdates the parts) with persistent regularity might not be problems (troubles) of all individual members that inhabit those structures, or might be related to those problems through subtle, intricate mechanisms. Therefore when we are dealing with problems involving a particular society, we need to be careful not to take the definitions of those problems given by those who are trying to translate their agendas into course of action for ulterior motives, be they distraction or obfuscation from the real issues. For example, take the case of the rights of women in Pakistan. (Public) Issues affecting the rights of women, as human beings, in Pakistan are access to health care and adequate nutrition, maternal and infant mortality, education and the roles assigned to women within a household and the wider social structure. If however these real issues are masked by slogans popularized by the West, dealing with the so-called women’s liberation, which have mostly to do with appearance norms or the outsourcing of home and family life to daycare in order to free extra labor for the corporate marketplace, (female) labor that is segmented and paid unequally for doing equal work, then few results will be obtained. In all public works by our department, this tendency of cooptation and obfuscation by the cultural technicians of the present, the elite in the global system, should be guarded against.

As Mills explained in The Sociological Imagination,

“Many great public issues as well as many private troubles are described in terms of the ‘psychiatric” (the individual is looked at for the cure) - often in an attempt to avoid the larger issues and problems of modern society (which also has the latent function of pushing drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical companies according to the ‘quick fix’ culture of the Prozac Nation, USA): due to 1. A narrowing of interests to problems of Western societies ignoring 4/5ths of the world’s population, 2. It also arbitrarily removes individual life from the larger institutions within which life is enacted and which many times bear with greater pressure upon the individual than the personal environments.”

(Mills 1959:12- words in brackets are my additions)

The importance of qualitative research (i.e. after ‘public issues’ have been identified quantitatively, which is an indispensable part of the process), cannot be over emphasized. For that purpose, sending students out in the field to gather data, if possible as participants in parts of lives of groups, will lead to the ability of students to combine and create new core concepts, and new models that are specific to our society. If problems are adequately understood, solutions can be effectively and easily formulated. Policy recommendations at the national level, using sociological research can only follow after such work. All our public related activities should, after clarification provided by such work, take note not only of the structure of our society but how it is affected by the wider global system of which it is a part. The existing network of non-profits, with whom we have contacts, can as well be instructed to think in structural terms for more effective work. Instead of the non-profits dictating terms to sociologists working with them, our department should aim at educating the non-profits on how to fulfill their manifest functions of poverty alleviation and social development, rather than their emphasis on individual and small group help that ensure a latent function of keeping such non-profits in business for perpetuity in the developing world without affecting aggregate indicators in any meaningful manner.

The most effective role a sociologist can play in our society, given: 1) its subordinate status in a global world order dominated by the US Power Elite and 2) whose institutions default to that subordinate role in a hierarchy where the military dominates facets of public and political life; is that of a consciousness generating independent researcher. A collection of such researchers, due to their ability to transcend their environment and view the ‘big picture’ in an institute should be our ultimate goal. Such an institute of sociologists, one without borders, that do not shun their public responsibility as intellectuals, can act as a developer of ‘publics’, and at the same time a policy generating tool that informs people of power, regardless of the results. This will serve the implicit purpose of increasing effective participation by the public and greater checks on the powerful, while explicitly it will enhance the role of knowledge, and people of knowledge in our society. Our major emphasis on activities outside the department should be in identifying concretely established ‘public issues’ and our goal the alteration of structures of our society which amounts to remedies at the ‘public’ level. For that purpose, a good start would be talking to the University administration to have as requirement for all degrees conferred, at least one introductory sociology course. Offering sociological insights to community leaders and to the public at large would be a worthwhile effort. Development of a policy institute in this regard, one that maintains contacts and links with sociology departments and sociologists worldwide, independently advising both the public and those in charge of the state, will bring us closer to the spirit of sociology, as envisioned by those that laid the foundations of the field.

References:

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. 1959. Oxford University Press, New York.

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Muhammed Asadi (http://www.asadi.org) can be reached at masadi@aol.com.