“These girls are just like boys”, proudly remarked one of my teachers to another when my friend and I stood in the Computer lab showing them a video we had filmed. We were in the seventh grade and drenched in sweat, having run around school to get the perfect shots on our Handycam. Our uniforms were grubby and our hair was tied back messily. I remember feeling so happy and proud of myself. I was finally just like a boy. I was finally enough. I had worked hard enough and had become confident enough to free myself from the realm of girlhood. I had found the ultimate life-hack to escaping misogyny – just be “boyish”, whatever that means. This didn’t last long. 

A few years of casually indulging in “boyish” behavior entailed a lot of vilification and demonization for it. It is funny because this “boyish” behavior entailed talking confidently, taking up challenges, and talking about my future without mentioning marriage. None of these things have to be boyish but were considered that anyway. 

In the tenth grade, I wanted to wear jeans instead of a dress for our end-of-the-year dance. At this point, I had unlearned the idea that boyish behavior was stronger or cooler and had unlearned that femininity was weak. I just did not associate pants with masculinity. I was told that I can’t wear pants because I would appear boyish and it would be unpleasant and uncomfortable for those around me.

Besides the fact that the two incidents are riddled with ridiculous gender stereotypes, they taught me a complex, confusing lesson about how there is no way I can win. If I exhibit “feminine” traits, I am considered weak so it is better to exhibit “masculine” traits. However, “masculine” traits make me a social delinquent who is going against nature and causing discomfort. 

Achebe’s depiction of masculinity in Things Fall Apart reminded me of these incidents in my life. I believe that Okonkwo was full of toxic masculinity and saw any traits in men that weren’t aggressive as weak and feminine. Men who were not able to bear the sight of blood were seen to be weak (p. 6). The metric for measuring that a man has not failed is that he has a large barn and three wives. The fact that Okonkwo’s wives, especially the youngest, were terrified of him was a way through which he escaped being seen as fragile and weak (p. 13). The gendered coding in the book was to the extent where yams were considered a man’s crop. Okonkwo called a man who contradicted him a woman (p. 26). Okonkwo considered showing affection to be a sign of weakness (p. 28). Okonkwo was happy to see his son grumble about women because a man unable to control his woman wasn’t a man after all (p. 53). 

All of this made me realize that for men, gender stereotypes can be circumvented and benefited through toxic masculinity, and men are able to exert hegemony by indulging in toxic behavior. Of course, this harms the men as depicted in Achebe’s novel, it does not take away from the fact that it benefits them in a way that it enables them to have control over people and opportunities. However, for women, there exists a double bind where confident and assertive women are seen as strong but are disliked because they seem to go against the natural nurturing and soft traits associated with femininity. Even when it comes to benefitting from harmful stereotypes, women have it unfairly difficult as compared to men.

Back in school, I remember being strictly told not to talk in Urdu during class, unless I was in Urdu class. This applied to talking to my friends or asking to go to the bathroom. It is important to note that everyone around me understood Urdu, so it wasn’t out of respect or inclusion for anyone who would possibly not understand the language, it was purely done because Urdu was seen as the lesser formal language. People who talked in Urdu were looked down upon and were considered not smart or modern enough. 

While there are multiple different ways in which schools in the periphery promote colonist ideas, the one that fazes me the most is how students are penalized for talking in their local languages. It was overwhelming how many South Asians in my discussion group could especially relate to this. 

Timothy Mitchell’s (1988) chapter, Enframing from Colonizing Egypt not only provided insight into dynamics between colonial relationships and how colonial power organizes but after class discussions, also became a window into the colonization and Eurocentrism in pedagogy. 

Mitchell described that the English people perceived restructured Egyptian villages such as Neghileh as neat or more civilized. It is important to notice that colonial restructuring involves a lot of cultural erasure, entailing a replacement of the colonist’s culture with the colonizer’s culture. Colonization transcends the realm of geography and enters a mental, intellectual zone where the notion that the colonizer’s culture is superior, cleaner, and more civilized is deeply instilled into the minds of the colonized. This is not just limited to the texts. I come from Pakistan and I know that when the Indian subcontinent was under the British Colonial rule, Thomas Macaulay, British historian, and politician wrote, “ … a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” (Pritchett)  

During last week’s discussions, my classmates and I talked about our personal experiences with this in addition to how our schools perpetuated colonist ideas during our schooling years. This was not just the case with my elementary/middle school in particular, but most of my friends from my city had similar experiences.

One of my friends from my city was volunteering for her school Science Fair where parents of students were invited. While demonstrating the project, the students including my friend were strictly advised not to pitch the project in Urdu no matter what. If someone asked them to explain the pitch in Urdu, they were ordered to simply repeat the pitch in English. When my friend was done with her pitch in English, a parent failed to understand it and my friend repeated it in Urdu. According to my friend, the parent seemed very apologetic. My friend did not understand why the woman had to feel apologetic about not understanding English when instead the school should have been apologetic for not being inclusive. 

This reminded me of the Bollywood film, English Vinglish, which revolves around an Indian housewife and her struggles with confidence and identity due to her inability to speak English fluently. This is the story of so many South Asian housewives who are afraid to go to their children’s parent-teacher conferences because speaking in their native language will make them seem uncivilized. 

Before I knew it, I found myself talking to my friends in English not only in school but also outside of it. When I stopped studying Urdu as a subject after the tenth grade, my Urdu became incredibly rusty and I could not form complete sentences without placing a word or two of English in them. It is so ironic because this was incredibly embarrassing for me but some of my peers took pride in their broken Urdu. I don’t completely blame the peers though, because colonist ideas are so deeply indoctrinated within us that they take heaps of time and energy to get past. 

To this day I am guilty of not doing my best to unlearn the significance of English in juxtaposition with Urdu. I still speak, listen to, and read more English than Urdu. Thanks to my supportive peers and the amazing local artists and filmmakers back home, I am able to cultivate the significance of Urdu in my heart (the use of the heart as opposed to mind is very inspired by Al-Ghazali) by decolonizing my own vocabulary. 

References: 

Mitchell, T. (1988). Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge University Press. 

Pritchett, F. (n.d.). Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd February 1835. Minute on education (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Retrieved September 18, 2021, from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. 

This week’s readings for Ways of Knowing introduced me to a lot of interesting ideas and got me thinking deeper about a lot of pedagogical practices. The chapter from Neha Vohra’s Teach for Arabia made me dissect what it really means to be enrolled in a satellite campus. I was thinking about the perception I have of certain colleges due to pop-culture. The first example that is coming to me right now is how Rory Gilmore goes to Yale in The Gilmore Girls, a show that I binge-watched over the summer after a recommendation by a good friend. What I learned about Yale from the show was that the prestigious piece of architecture was responsible for schooling predominantly white and rich students whose families had most likely attended Yale for generations. I wonder how much of this applies to Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college collaboratively established in Singapore by Yale and National University of Singapore. Navigating school spirit might be confusing when you’re enrolled in a satellite campus. For example, the sentiment tied to a university’s building might not necessarily be shared by students enrolled in a satellite campus. It is not at all the fault of the creators of Gilmore Girls to depict Yale the way they did, because Yale-NUS was established in 2011, years after the show was broadcast. Besides, the picture the show painted might lack nuances, but it does hint at the privilege within academia. 

However, one thing that really stood out to me was the idea of a banking model in education disguised as a problem-posing education system. When I first read Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my brain was ready to accept that a binary exists where there are strict teachers who do not encourage student engagement and in juxtaposition, there are lenient teachers who enable discussion and analysis. In this scenario, the former is the banking model of education while the latter is the problem posing system. However, I realised that the two education systems might not simply exist in a binary, where one system is devoid of the other’s characteristics. A system might claim to be problem-posing and might present that way, however it might just follow the same foundational notions that the banking model follows. In this blog, I will talk about how there might be instances where problem-posing education is just the banking model watered down to become palatable for the current times. 

In such problem-posing systems, assignments might be more analytical with a smaller emphasis on statistics and facts, teachers might be more lenient, but the contents of the analysis might still be concrete and the students might still be treated as banks but this time for liberal arts and social sciences. Student participation might be encouraged as long as they very intelligently articulate what the correct answer is. 

The current political climate we live in yields a lot of performative activism and allyship. Inclusivity, diversity, and social justice are ideas that have become easy to commercialize and capitalize on. We see examples of this in the conduct of corporations and companies on the daily. Examples of this include greenwashing, which is a marketing spin that companies deceptively use to persuade consumers or prospects into thinking that their products are environmentally friendly (Watson, 2016). If performative progress is seen in other facets in modern times, why would it not be seen in pedagogical spheres?

An educational institution is essentially a company as well, which according to Friere is used as a tool to feed into a capitalist system and produce employees. And since social justice notions are used as a commercialization tactic, a new set of skills is being added to many job requirements. This includes soft skills such as communication, inclusivity, and social intelligence. Personally, in my country, companies have recently become more interested in hiring liberal arts graduates than before. So why wouldn’t education systems adapt to this change to produce an army of employees best suited to today’s requirements? 

References:

Freire, P. (1972). 

Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Vora, N. (2018). 

Teach for Arabia . 

Watson, B. (2016, August 20). 

The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/20/greenwashing-environmentalism-lies-companies.