EDUCATION

FOR DECOLONIZATION

AND REJUVENATION

Western civilization has hegemonic control over three areas of existence: cosmology, epistemology, methodology. A meaningful program of decolonization and rejuvenation will need to weave these three together, not compartmentalize them, into a persistent program of study with its end goal being sustainable living in peace with justice for as many humans as possible.

Since Western knowledges and cosmologies are intertwined with methodologies, it seems necessary to come up with new methodologies. Otherwise, non-Western knowledges and cosmologies may just end up adding some exotic frills to an otherwise Western system. Methodology will probably be the most difficult to overcome, since many people who are talking about decolonization are doing so from within Western institutions.

A necessary step away from this hegemonic system is to legitimize peoples whose cosmological, epistemological, and methodological legitimacy is not based solely on them having passed through the hierarchical system of education in the West, which usually culminates in the Ph.D. Hard as it may seem, the program of rejuvenation will need to downgrade the Ph.D. and similar colonial certificates from their places of privilege. Even a cursory look at the history of colonization will bear this out, as the white man worked to set up institutions of legitimization, with their rewards and punishments, and these systems with their methodologies preceded their knowledges.

Where does this leave institutions of higher education? Clearly some will adjust, and some will not. The ones that will adjust to the program of decolonization and rejuvenation will survive in a world driven by peace, justice, and sustainable living, and the ones that cannot live this out will wither and fade away. The danger lies in forming alliances, due to economic or political expediencies, with existing institutions, since the colonizing methodologies of education will severely limit the kinds of projects needed for decolonization and rejuvenation.

From agriculture, to child rearing and medicine, and within the realms of politics, economics, and science, wide-ranging efforts need to persist in elucidating the nature of the destructive systems and putting in their place more sustainable systems. Much of this may entail looking at workable models on the ground, keeping in mind that the best workable models of sustainable survival with peace and justice are context and bioregion specific, worked out within the means and locales of specific cultural and ecological settings, and being wary and careful of universalized, standardized and westernized systems.

The Project on Andean Technology (PRATEC) deserves such study. Its developers created a program of decolonization and rejuvenation that simultaneously evaluated western knowledges and methodologies from a baseline Andean cosmological system. The designers and practitioners of PRATEC speak of 'eating, digesting, and excreting' the Western knowledges and methodologies, in an interesting twist on the usual rigid dichotomies of acceptance or rejection found in Westernized oppositions to colonization, such as Marxism and Liberalism.

Once the Andean cosmological system was understood, it became a matter of evaluating knowledges and methodologies in terms of a baseline set of assumptions. In this scheme, people with Western Ph.D.'s actually played the role of mediators, in that they were on the front lines with the Western development experts, disputing their plans and projects in their own language, having digested the Western ways of seeing and being able to explain them back to their designers in ways that could not be easily written off, before rejecting them in light of local needs and beliefs. In this light, there is still a role for the Ph.D., though it is more of mediating role then an authoritative role.

Similar workable alternatives could be studied as well, for the ways in which they combine a two pronged approach to the decolonization and rejuvenation project, with respect to locally relevant cosmologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. So any meaningful education in this sense will require a field-based component, which in a sense undermines another tenet of Western education: book learning. This is not to reject books, but only to say that their knowledges need to be worked out by people and so studying the ways people enact their knowledge systems, for better or worse, is a necessary part of the project. With these cautionary remarks in mind, some 'courses' in a program of decolonization and rejuvenation might include the following:

'Civilization and Sustainability' can examine the ways in which civilizations have collapsed once they lived too far outside the bounds of their bioregions. This course will problematize the Western notion of civilization in light of non-Western cosmologies, and look at what might count for a 'civilization' in an ecologically sustainable cultural setting. Studying the relationships between mental and environmental ecologies will be necessary to develop a conceptual framework for the course.

'Comparative Studies in Cosmology, Epistemology, and Methodology' can evaluate Western and non-Western views on these topics, in light of the findings from studies of civilization and sustainability. Cosmological studies can look at the three-part relationship between human beings and the unseen world, human beings within and among themselves, and human beings within a seen world or an environment. Knowledge studies can look at indigenous definitions of knowledge, and evaluate various knowledges as an antidote to the colonial educational systems that have insisted on a singular definition of knowledge as that which benefits the colonized way of life and its beneficiaries in terms of economic and political expediency. Studies in methodology can proceed from the above, by looking at how methodologies can embody cosmologies and epistemologies.

'Explorations in Other-than-Human Sovereignty' can ask the basic question of what happens when human beings are not the sovereign of the land. Whether it be in a deity and revealed religion, as in for example the Islamic sense of sovereignty, or in nature being the sovereign as in many indigenous people's cosmologies, such a course will pose major challenges to the humanistic Western system of thought that places the human being at the center of a rational universe. In order to avoid reproducing past pathologies, however, this course of study will need to look at how many belief systems, such as most contemporary forms of Judaism and Christianity in the West, have normalized humanism at the expense of their cosmological teachings, which in itself will also complicate efforts at purely relativistic studies and conversations, such as in interfaith dialogues.

'Psychology of Consumption' will, at the risk of being colonized by the jargon and norms of Western psychology, take to task the electronically mediated environments of Western consumer culture, and proceed to systematically evaluate its effects on local cultures. This will involve fieldwork and counseling, with the intention being to draw connections between consumerism and non-sustainability, and asking basic questions about how much is enough, and what do people really need to be happy.

Many more courses of study along these lines could be proposed for a new kind of education, perhaps involving an institution with a new name (poliversity?) or perhaps that will not even meet the Western criteria of an educational experience, with its campuses, certificates, and hierarchies. The key issue will remain to be whether or not it is possible to have an educational system that, paradoxically but maybe only temporarily, will have as one of its goals its own demise. This will remain a paradox as long as the Western norms of thought and action form the basis for non-Western allegiances to systems of cosmology, epistemology, and methodology, which can only be made clear once a program is developed with a sense of simultaneous decolonization and rejuvenation in view.