“…I am in exile in my own mind made by the stories they told about me.” —
“ The African learns to read and write but cannot write the true African story, viagra store because in order for it to make sense to the imperial system of capitalism, the African needs to make his masters understand…to write the African story in a European context.”
Home and Exile
By Chinua Achebe
(2001)
As I reflect on my current visit to South Africa’s University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban as a Visiting Scholar, I am once again humbled by the complexities of color, racial identity, class distinction, religious and spiritual practice and the political and social discourse that I have encountered just standing on the campus. While teaching within the Performance Studies & Drama Department of Howard College, I am once again confronted by the colonial system of traditional education that elevates some almost inadvertently through benignly neglecting others for whom the “traditional” system and empirical model of teaching and learning is more than difficult to understand, it is culturally contradictory. Alternative methods of teaching and learning that reflect the difference in learning styles represented within student population seem to go unacknowledged within the larger frame.
The model from which students contextualize their inquiry is almost entirely one of lecture, reading and writing from lecture and long examinations based on lecture and lecture notes. The readings of European and western European writers such as Bertol Brecht, Antonin Artaud and Constantine Stanislavsky forces them to translate, interpret and re-contextualize before being able to repeat what they did not fully comprehend in the first place. Language is indeed a barrier to reading and reading comprehension and therefore to learning and the self-confidence of the learner, and thereby the learner’s ability to learn.
The presence of diverse cultures, languages, ethnicities and experiences makes for a rich learning environment full of potential, and yet the disparity of educational equivalency makes that which should be so potent and powerful incredibly problematic. English, as the “common” language, is spoken and understood better by some than others. This deficit is directly tied to the legacy of apartheid and Bantu education.
Separate but not equal, the so-called “good” schools are private; the quality of public school education is highly dependent upon where the school is located. Sound familiar? Education is expensive and many people cannot afford the school fees that would prepare their children with the tools to confront the barriers of language and the clash of culture they will face in pursuit of higher learning. Unless they can master the English language, they will begin to feel ill prepared and subsequently inferior or un-worthy. What they then begin to do is become absolute imitators of what they see and hear. They simply learn to survive by repetition and therefore are defined by the very model they should be interrogating, critically analyzing and challenging. They learn to be what they are told to be and may never reach for what they actually could be. They learn to write the African story in a European context.
Dr.T
Artistic Director and Founder
The Conciliation Project
Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University
DrT@Margin2theCenter.com
www.theconciliationproject.org
