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Higher Education 8 (1979) 573-583 9 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

REVIEW ARTICLE

A PASSAGE TO LIMBO? HUGH TINKER Department of Politics, Univeristy of Lancaster, Lancaster LA 1 4YF, United Kingdom Philip G. Altbach and Gall P. Kelly, eds., (1978). Education and Colonialism. New York and London: Longman. viii +372 pp. s

A major problem in the social sciences is the question of when to move beyond the analysis of particular data towards the construction of conceptual models and the enunciation of general theories. It is arguably a fault of British social scientists (other than those who have a complete framework provided by Marx) to go on and on piling up data which is capable of quantification (such as election studies) but not to move very far towards conceptualising the broader questions. It is perhaps a fault of their American counterparts that they are too eager to come up with general deductions and general theories on insufficient evidence. The model builder really must be careful to ensure that the model is applicable to, say, 60 percent of the evidence before treating it as anything but a provisional hypothesis. Far too often, one has an uneasy suspicion that the trendy modelmaker has envolved the model first and then looked around for the evidence. There is a need for more intermediate studies based upon a comparative analysis of a number of situations. Such comparative studies can indicate trends which may lead to a general theory; although the theory may need substantial modification as further comparative studies come forward. A comparative statement about the impact of Western colonialism upon present-day educational development in the Third World is of interest to educationists and students of colonialism alike. We have many studies of particular aspects of colonial education, with probably the main emphasis upon the missionary sector in terms of subject, and India in terms of area [1]. There are few really significant works which treat the subject comparatively [2]. Hence, the present symposium takes up a theme of real importance. The editors begin by emphasising that their work is "exploratory", waiving any claim to provide an overall theory. They have brought together "a series of carefully researched studies" which have been written on an "interdisciplinary" basis. We shall consider some of these eleven studies separately (they are all, except one, by scholars working in America) but first let us deal with the Introduction written by the two editors. Even if this is treated as preliminary and provisional it must disappoint expectations by its dogmatic and simplistic tone. Its overall argument is that colonial education was developed to produce a feedback into the colonial regime. It is a truism that colonies

574 were seized and maintained by the Western colonial power in their own interests; and when they ultimately perceived their self-interest as losing rather than gaining from colonialism they rapidly vacated the lands they had ruled. But self-interest is sometimes interpreted as enlightened self-interest. Utilitarians, Liberals, and Fabians, all in different ways believed that their own best interests were promoted by studying the welfare of those they governed. They were paternalistic; they were sometimes guilty of self-deception; but one need not caricature their outlook. On p.2 we are informed: "Colonial administrators, when they took any interest at all, were concerned with training literate clerks who could staff the lower ranks of the civil service." Doubtless there were such administrators; but it is puerile to dismiss all of them in these terms. In a review such as this one must be content to confront facile generalisation by obviously selective counter-evidence. So here we may simply interpose the view of Mountstuart Elphinstone, whose thirty years in India ended in the governorship of Bombay. He recorded: It is now well understood that, in all countries, the happiness of the poor depends in a great measure on their education. It is by means of it alone that they can a c q u i r e . . , prudence and self-respect.., and if ever there was a country where such habits are required, it is this. We have all often heard of the ills of early marriage and overflowing population . . . of the helplessness of the ryots [peasants] which renders them a prey to money-lenders.., and, finally, of the vanity of all laws to protect them, when no individual can be found who has spirit enough to take advantage of those enacted in their favour. There is but one remedy for all this, which is education [3]. Now, one may argue that this is an absurdly over-generous claim for the benefits which flow from mass education: one certainly cannot deduce that administrators such as these were promoting education only to produce clerks. The Introduction is equally unacceptable when it refers to questions of fact. On p. 7 we read: "Until the 1930's, except in India and Indo-China, no higher e d u c a t i o n . . . existed". It would be tedious to list the numerous exceptions to this inaccurate generalissation; here we may just recall that the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines was founded by the Spaniards 25 years before that "schoale or colledge" which later became Harvard University [4]. The Introduction must be regarded as a manifesto against colonialism - and just as Calvin Coolidge's preacher was against sin, so we are all against colonialism these days. But it might be more illuminating to examine in detail how the various forms of Western colonialism shaped the various educational systems; and to try to discover how the various Third World cultures responded to or reacted against this massive influence. It is in this interaction that the present and the future are being formed. The Introduction lays down certain basic propositions. Colonial education, in its higher forms, substituted the colonisers' language as the vehicle for communication in place of the mother tongue. This is regarded as a deprivation (as indeed it was) but consideration is not given to the advantages obtained from providing access to a world language, in place of tongues that were at best national and were usually regional or local. It is also assumed that the types of secondary education provided in the colonies were qualitatively inferior to their counterparts in the metropole; we may not quarrel

575 with this, as a generalisation, but we ought to examine carefully the suggestion that this was deliberate policy, designed to perpetuate colonial inferiority. Colonial secondary education was provided almost entirely for the westernised middle class which formed a buffering mechanism between rulers and ruled. Again, we will agree that the purpose of colonial secondary education was to cater for an elite, but we should pause and consider who was insisting upon this form of education: was it the foreign administrators or the indigenous middle class? And who defined the elites to whom access to Western-type education was to be opened? Was the effective force here that of the alien overlords; or were there situations in which the indigenous elites by their own responses shaped the form and content of secondary and higher education? It would be the argument of this reviewer that one soon has to advance conclusions drawn from the very diverse policies and practices of the different Western colonial powers for broad generalisations about Western dominance as a whole. What was arguably most pernicious about the colonial experience was that the colonised were tied, not to "the West", but to particular metropolitan countries with very different national education philosophies. Indonesians were initiated into the very formal Dutch educational practice; Filipinos became imitators of American populist and pluralist concepts; Senegalese and Caribbean Creoles could conceive of nothing outside Gallic Classicism and logic; and a quarter of the world's population was encouraged to think that the apogee of education was found only (or mainly) at Oxford and Cambridge. An important distorting aspect of colonialism (virtually ignored in Education and Colonialism) was that its terminal point (not merely influentially, but actually) lay in the metropolitan universities and colleges of each different colonial power. One of the most striking aspects of "neo-colonialism" is the extent to which this polarisation continues - even in cases where the break between colonial domination and independence was achieved only after bitter and bloody conflict. Today, in 1979, given the choice, Indonesian students gravitate to Leiden or Utrecht, Filipinos maintain there is no substitute for a Harvard Ph.D., Mgerians and Vietnamese are most at home in the Sorbonne or Grenoble, Zaireans head for Brussels, and so it seems - Eritreans, and even Ethiopians, cherish the wish to study at Florence or Bologna. We will return to this theme later when we have examined some of the individual contributions to the symposium. For it is in the scholarship and research which have infused the separate contributions that the value of this volume resides. The first section relates to "classical" colonialism, by which is meant the reality of colonial rule, as opposed to the current fashion for transposing the concept of colonialism into any situation of inequality or oppression which takes a writer's fancy (in this book we are at least spared consideration of parent-child relations as colonialism). The section begins with an analysis of "Policy and Conflict in India", by Aparnu Basu, one of the two contributers to the volume who comes from a colonised background, and the only contributer who actually works in an ex-colonial institution (the University of Delhi). Anyone unfamiliar with the story of the famous controversy between the "Orientalists" and the "Anglicists" can obtain a good short summary from Dr. Basu's paper. The East India Company's original policy was to give support only to traditional Indian institutions ot Islamic or Sanskritic learning. The switch to English as the language of higher education was hotly contested by conservative British officials, with Macaulay and his brother-in-law, Trevelyan, leading the movement for westernisation: "The English language opens up a whole world of new ideas", Macaulay wrote. In this controversy the decisive factor was the attitude of the Calcutta middle class. When

576 Hooghly College (a non-government institution) opened in 1836, there were 1,200 registrations for the English classes within three days and in one year (1835-6) the number of Bengali youths studying English doubled [5]. The pattern was reproduced in Bombay and Madras and in Ceylon or wherever new facilities for Western education were opened. Much of the demand was geared to the growing practice of recruiting colonial civil servants by competitive examinations, modelled on those of the reformed early Victorian British universities. The Indian Civil Service switched to competitive recruitment in 1853, twenty years before the British (or "Home")civil service. The first successful Indian candidate for the topmost bureaucratic elite emerged in 1864, having completed his education at London University [6]. Dr. Basu deprecates the extent to which the new Indian elites embraced higher education, in arts subjects and in law, on the British model. She mentions (p. 63) the efforts of the p o e t Rabindranath Tagore to revive the Indian educational model, first by establishing a residential school on his remote estate at Santiniketan and later by setting up a university, Visva-Bharati, in which Indian arts and culture would be developed through the medium of Bengali-language teaching. Tagore refused government support, and sought to obtain the necessary funds from wealthy Indian admirers. There were to be no exams and no degrees in the Western pattern. He was only partially successful, and when he set up his agricultural college, Sriniketan, this was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and other American trusts. The subsequent fate of Tagore's superbly imaginative venture is an eloquent commentary upon the relative viability of Western and non-Western educational institutions in the Third World. When Tagore died, his life-work collapsed. After a few years, the Santiniketan trustees saw no alternative but to hand over the university to government control in order to receive government support. The campus became yet another paradigm of Western practices - courses, exams, degrees, all were standard. The departments teaching Indian music, art, and other cultural forms still maintained a high level of performance; but innovation was notably absent. One of Indira Gandhi's more admirable efforts was to appoint a commission to examine how the Visva-Bharati could once again be infused with unique significance. The commission reported, but seemed unable to shake free of the weight of standardisation - and westernisation - which had fastened Santiniketan in its grip. Dr. Basu concludes (p. 66): Political freedom has not meant the disappearance of the colonial frame of mind, which regards everything indigenous as inferior and everything foreign as inherently s u p e r i o r . . . The modern culture of the educated Indian is still very largely derived from a metropolitan culture . . . British education created an urban elite that was alienated from its own people. One must add that increasingly the assimilation of Western educational modes in India is filtered through layers of mental mistranslation and myopia. Elitest though it was, and is, Indian higher educationhas been almost overwhelmed by the problem of numbers. Calcutta University has a student enrolment of more than 250,000. Higher education has become mass production. A hundred years ago an Indian intellectual observed: "The students of the present day never open their mouths in the class room - unless, indeed,

577 it is to make a noise. They take down the professor's words, commit them to memory often without understanding them; and reproduce them in the examination hall. A copying machine would do the same" [7]. Nowadays, all too many professors are copying machines as well. Yet, at its best, the westernised Indian system has produced Nobel Prize winners and has given the United Nations bureaucracy some of its finest planners and leaders." University expansion in areas as far apart as Africa, Canada, and the Arabian Gulf has depended heavily upon the alumni of Indian universities. At its best, the colonial educational system of Indian has brought forth the international man, capable of an intellectual synthesis, a mental adaptation and adjustment, sorely needed in this world in which organisational technical advance has so dangerously outstripped our outmoded, chauvinistic emotional compartmentalism. But if modern India produced international man, it also produces alienated man; the intellectual robot. Is colonialism responsible for both? The argument of "Colonialism and Schooling in the Philippines" by Douglas Foley is that - despite a programme of mass education, from the early days of American rule the continuance of a political system in which power was centralised served to negate the democratic intentions of the educationists. The Americans inherited from their Spanish predecessors an educational structure that was class-based, city-centred, and church-controlled. They endeavoured to introduce the idea of the American grade school, importing shiploads of idealistic American schoolteachers, the "Thomasites". Professor Foley complains that because they did not displace the small landlord ruling class, and left their privileged educational institutions undisturbed, this gave the new public schools second or third class status. But surely one can make the same criticism of education in America? For those within the charmed circle of privilege there is the privileged, elitest private sector -Groton, Choate, and all that. At the other end, there is the tragic jungle of tile inner city schools. In between, there is a whole spectrum of educational diversity attractive to a British spectator, stuck with a monolithic system in which supposed equality conceals obvious inequalities. The American school system stretches naturally into the university sector, where again there are many sorts of alternatives. The state universities, such as Wisconsin, California, or Michigan provide a spectrum of choice. Britain offers a range of supposedly equal universities; but this pretended parity of esteem conceals a pecking order in which Oxbridge is always supreme. The British system is geared to academic gain or loss; the American system provides some sort of gain for everyone. One might suppose that colonial American education in the Philippines has also provided something for almost everyone. The University of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila are only for a limited number; but then there are the "diploma mills", providing a college education of a sort, at a modest price, and the bellhops and barboys who are their graduates feel they have gotten somewhere. Professor Foley sees little merit in an "operation propelled towards overproduction as the political elite sought mass support through distributing education and as the impoverished masses sought mobility through the promise of educational credentials" (p. 75). He criticises the emphasis upon agricultural and vocational schools (presumably modelled on Tuskagee). Filipinos gaining access to education did not want to become better farmers or craftsmen: they wanted to shake the dust out of their sandals and head for the city. Since independence, the effort to mobilise the community spirit of the villages has been

578 renewed (with American advice and aid) by even more massive re-education programmes for social and economic development. Douglas Foley sees all this as evidence of continuing neocolonialism, the whole style being geared to American affluence, not to Asian austerity. We may agree that programmes requiring expensive experts, expensive techniques, buildings, equipment are alien, and in a real sense neocolonial; yet, within two or three decades, when the world's oil dries up, we may all be striving to return to the countryside (what's left of it). The Americans in the Philippines exhibited the ambiguities of a colonial regime which could never accept that it was actually running a colony; trying to combine the rhetoric of populist democracy with the requirements of monopoly capitalism. French colonialism has seldom seemed to suffer from inhibitions; the mission civilisatrice came naturally to a people convinced of their unique global cultural superiority. Dr. Gail Kelly has examined one aspect of their record in ~'Colonial Schools in Vietnam: Policy and Practice". She sees the considerable French investment in education (15 percent of the colonial budget) as a deliberate attempt to counter the nationalist influence generated by the traditional Vietnamese schools. Like Foley she criticises the system because it allegedly provided something inferior to education in metropolitan France: "The schools taught Vietnamese children about life in Vietnam rather than about F r a n c e . . . Students were told to respect and love their families, to preserve family traditions and ways" (p. 108). Now, this is interesting, for we have always been told that the great fault of French colonial education was its centralisation, so that Senegalese children opened a history book which began by describing "our ancestors, the Gauls". But it seems that the fault in Vietnam was actually to emphasise the Vietnamese quality of life; Gail Kelly condemns this as "backward education". Perhaps the French intention was to reinforce traditionalism: though the Vietnamese historical tradition was of implacable resistance to the invader. Yet, as she indicates, the system was also designed to encourage the Vietnamese elite, the ~volu~s, to become French citizens, and if the system was colonialist it was not entirely racialist. Nor can it altogether be dismissed as "backward". Among other institutions the French developed the Ecole Franfaise de l'ExtrOme-Orient, a centre of brilliant research and scholarship. It is not too much to say that French scholars rediscovered the history of Indo-China for Vietnamese, Khmers and Laotians; just as British and Dutch scholars recovered the history of India, Burma and Indonesia for their peoples and thereby stimulated their sense of historical nationhood. These three essays leave one reflecting on the similarities and also on the differences between French, British and American attitudes to education as an instrument to influence non-Western peoples. Both French and American efforts were related to the belief that their own systems could be applied to other cultures with the intention of bringing about cultural adaptation, and even assimilation. French policy concentrated upon the colonial elites who could by intensive exposure to the pure form of French education become citizens, both legally and spiritually, of France. An excellent example of this transformation process is seen in Leopold Senghor, the poet-president of Senegal, whose literary eminence was formally recognised when he was instituted a member of the French Academy. The creation of the Francophonie, the economic and cultural association of the former French colonies (which even includes communist Vietnam) has strengthened cultural ties. As the former French colonies develop their own universities they continue to cherish their ties with the Academic Franfaise. If they are not formally -

579 associated with the French universities many Francophone African leaders feel that their own institutions lose their value. By retaining the continuing loyalties of these key Francophone leaders, France successfully perpetuates her presence long after the last l@ionnaire has departed. The American drive to give access to education to non-Westerners emerged from the rather praiseworthy conviction that education could socialise and democratise peoples (including those who were backward) and help them become liberty-loving peoples. It is easy to guy this commitment, to see it as part of "the insatiable American demand for the signs of friendship and love" from Asian and African peoples [8]. It is impossible to ignore the fact: that America invested enormously in overseas aid, long before the concept existed. One country above all others was the object of American philanthropy: China. And education was the favoured instrument. Cornell University opened in 1868; within five years it was accepting Chinese students. In 1906, a branch of Yale University, Yale-inChina, was opened at Changsha. By 1920, American missionaries in China numbered over 3,000 with a capital invested in schools, colleges, hospitals, etc. of around $12,000,000. This, although American commercial investment at $200,000 was about 10 percent of British investment. This massive investment in good intentions certainly created a perception of a "special relationship" which was eventually to prove a mockery. John Dewey issued a warning in 1926: We have presented a certain type of culture to China as a model to be i m i t a t e d . . . We have gone in loco parentis, with advice, with instructions, with example and p r e c e p t . . . Such a part arouses expectations which are not always to be m e t . . . Parents are rarely able to free themselves from the gratitude that is due to them; failure to receive it passes readily into anger and dislike [9]. Twenty years later, China's acceptance of communism was interpreted as the rejection Dewey had foreseen. The "loss" of China, its betrayal, its abandonment of the democratic crusade, led the United States to see the war in Vietnam as a cause which must not be lost. Vietnam and America both came near to destruction (though of a different kind) before it was belatedly realised that the United States could not have its own form of democracy wherever it desired. The long quest for education and improvement led to a bitter ending. The British colonial attitude to education was much more pragmatic. If education would further social and political goals which were regarded as desirable, then it would be encouraged. Much of the British effort was directed towards goals which eventually turned out to be mirages. British administrators assumed in the colonial lands a notion of community which derived from traditional English rural society. They were specially zealous in attempting to assist the "natural" leaders of society (by which was meant the sons of chiefs and princes) to participate in administration and politics. This attempt to modernise part of the traditional order led to setting up special aristocratic, elite schools. Almost every important British colonial territory included one such institution, almost invariably known as "the Eton of . . . " Malaya/Barbados/Rajasthan, or wherever. However, these many Etons in practice became the vehicle whereby the emerging colonial middle class ascended the ladder which in due time brought them into control of their

580 own colonial society. For every important British colony there was available, each year, one or two King's (or Queen's) Scholarships, which enabled the recipient to go on to a British university, usually Oxford or Cambridge. In an important sense, one can argue that the entire educational system of each colony focused upon that one Scholarship. The ordinary child whose only chance Was to attend a local primary school was, of course, never even in the competition: it is the greatest condemnation of colonial vernacular education that it was blind-alley education, leading nowhere. For the gifted child, or the child from an affluent home, the dizzy possibility of a King's Scholarship dominated all the years at high school or college. For one or two, there was to be an Open Sesame to an unknown Aladdin's Cave; for the remaining hundreds or thousands there was only secondbest. For the few who made it to Britain there was yet another competition to be won or lost, both in academic and political terms. Because the ultimate end of colonial education was in the metropole, one must include metropolitan university education as a vital part of the colonial process. In the British system, this largely meant Oxbridge; though London, with its lawschools - the Inns of Court - and its own university, was an important adjunct. The point can be made by listing the education received by some of the principal founders of the new states which emerged from the British Empire.

Higher Education of Selected Leaders of New States: India: Gandhi, Inner Temple, London; Nehru, Trinity College, Cambridge; Indira Gandhi, Somerville College, Oxford. Pakistan: Jinnah, Lincoln's Inn, London; Liaqat Ali Khan, Exeter College, Oxford; Z. A. Bhutto, Christ Church, Oxford. Sri Lanka: S . W . R . D . Bandaranaike, Christ Church, Oxford. Malaysia: Tungku Abdul Rahman, St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew, Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. Trinidad: Dr. Eric Williams, St. Catherine's Society, Oxford. Burma: Dr. Ba Maw, Cambridge. Kenya: Jomo Kenyatta, LSE and School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Tanzania. Julius Nyerere, Edinburgh University. Of course the pattern is not conclusive. Kwame Nkrumah was a student at London University but his most impressionable years were spent at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. Besides, one must remember that the Royal Military Academy/College, Sandhurst, trained three presidents of Pakistan and a dozen presidents and premiers for West Africa. The central point about British higher education was (and perhaps still is) that the colonial student was not expected to assimilate the whole of British culture (whatever that may be) nor to "pass" as a Brown Englishman. He or she might acquire a sense of identity with an institution and a place, such as Oxford or Cambridge; but as regards the wider environment they were regarded by British society as outsiders and transients. Perhaps because the cultural pressure was so much less intensive than in France there was not so much tension; for the tension within the assimilated Francophone between his assumed French identity and his original African identity is extreme, and sometimes destructive.

581 Despite the foundation of new overseas universities - firstly linked in a "special relationship" with London University, but soon quite independent - the numbers of colonial or ex-colonial students coming to Britain expanded after World War II. Reference back to the annual reports of London University in the 1950s serves to remind one that in that hopeful decade the presence of a substantial proportion of Afro-Asian students was cherished, as a symbol of the university's international role. Latterly, British governments have regarded large numbers of Afro-Asian students as an encumbrance and have restricted admissions, defining quotas which may not be exceeded. The authors of Education and Colonialism may see these restrictions as indirectly benefical, as they will restrain Afro-Asians from acquiring neocolonial values which will serve to perpetuate their thraldom. At some point the more detached analyst must try to distinguish between colonialism, neocolonialism, and internationalism. To be required to undertake the learning process through a foreign language may not be an intolerable imposition when that language is also used in international communication. The University of Rangoon, as a colonial institution, employed English as its teaching language. One Burmese student of English literature was so delighted by his discovery of the Sherlock Holmes stories that he translated them into Burmese, thereby acquiring a splendid familiarity with colloquial English (in slightly dated form). That student, U Thant, went on to become SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations. In the 1950s the University of Rangoon went over to Burmese as the teaching language; it is unlikely that it will ever produce another U Thant. The question of what is life-depriving and what life-enhancing emerges in relation to the last section of the symposium, headed Neocolonialism. Philip Altbach contributes a study, "The Distribution of Knowledge in the Third World: a Case study in Neocolonialism". He examines the publishing industry in the Third World, discovering that the great majority of books are in the languages of the former colonial overlord and that the publishing sector is dominated by the former overlords [10] .Yet, were we to assume a world in which exports by American, British and French publishing houses were stopped, would this really be a more enlightened, more free world? Professor Altbach deplores "the continuing impact of the metropolitan firms - such as Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and others in such ex-British areas as India, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya" (p. 306). However, the Oxford Press and Macmillan both operate independent publishing houses in India and other countries. Their volume of trade compares favourably with their metropolitan parent-firtns and their prices are adjusted to Third World, not to Western standards. OUP Delhi is 100 percent Indian in its personnel, its operation is financially distinct, and it frequently publishes works which would not have been issued by Oxford. Is OUP Delhi, which makes a steady profit, more or less "colonial" than OUP Toronto which is less successful financially? In studying neocolonial publishing we should not assume that certain truths are self-evident without a close examination. The second contribution to the neocolonialism section is in many ways the most interesting in the book: "The African University as a Multi-National Corporation" by Ali Mazrui. Professor Mazrui is an international celebrity - j u s t l y so. We may doubt if he would have attained this status if his education has been obtained in Swahili. Professor Mazrui draws a slightly whimsical comparison between the Western multinational corporation as a politico-economic force and the Western-dominated ex-colonial university.

582 He insists that African universities must shake off their dependency, their acceptance of academic values laid down by Britain or France, though he does not attribute all their problems to these external influences: The worst form of cultural dependency is indeed that dual dependency that blames all misfortunes on external forces and seeks all solutions from outside. Many African problems are indeed indigenous, but there are others that have been created by external forces (p. 345). He also rejects the solution of withdrawal into cultural isolation: There are reformers in Africa who urge only domestication, some of those to the extent of espousing cultural autarky. But withdrawal from world culture would result in the continuing marginality of Africa in global affairs... It would be futile for Africa to attempt a strategy of withdrawal or total disengagement. Modernity is here to stay; the task is to decolonize it (p.350) [11]. As part of the process of cultural decolonization, Mazrui wants to see the projection of Africa into the world culture, adding that in this "strategy of counter-penetration", "African universities can play a critical role in building the alliance with black Americans" (p. 352). However, this "cultural entry" will have to be developed with more vision and comprehension than was given to the Black Studies programmes, so popular in America ten years ago. Another African scholar, Dr. Soyinka, has commented upon these Black Studies: "Those who had the misfortune to experience the quality of the exposition... have had cause to be grateful w h e n . . , the immediate crisis defused, a quiet phasing out of African studies had begun" [12]. The problem of educational decolonization is not going to be easily solved. If anything, ethnocentric cultural imperialism in on the increase. Anyone who works in a branch of the social sciences in Britain is made constantly aware of the pressures exerted by American social science as it unloads its concepts upon us. Because of cultural timelag, we usually adopt some theory or model just when it is going right out of fashion in the United States. The latest import into the field of race relations studies in Britain is the concept of "ethnicity" which is now being adopted with enthusiasm here when (as I suspect) it has already passed its zenith in America. Apart from the French Acad~mie, which loftily spurns American academic exports, most of Western Europe has become a culture-colony. Dutch and Scandinavian scholars long ago accepted that if they were to maintain their standing in their profession they must be proficient in the English language (as modified by American academic jargon). Dutch professors and publishers, just as much as Asians or Africans, are required to communicate via the English medium, There are signs that the German universities (which, in the 19th century, shaped the American academic tradition) are responding to the same pressures. Just as the colonised elites of the British Empire were drawn to the prestigious universities of the United Kingdom so Europeans are drawn into the United States. Two contributers to Education and Colonialism have been so drawn. This "brain drain" may be explained as an aspect of the internationalisation of the academic community, but there has to be a little less complacency about the growing brain drain from Africa and

583 Asia to the West. It seems sad that Ali Mazrui with his splendidly wide-angled approach should be addressing himself not to an African audience but to the privileged students o f the University o f Michigan. Neocolonialism is as much as " p r o b l e m " as classical colonilism. The British, French, Americans, and others, colonised the minds o f the elite in Asia and Africa: an irreversible process. Today Asians and Africans can become aware o f what happened, a hundred or fifty years ago. The learning process must go on.

Notes 1 F o r an early British view, see C. E. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, London, 1838; for a survey written in the twilight of British rule, see "Education", by J. R. Cunningham, in L. S. S. O'Malley, ed., Modern India and the West; a Study of the Interaction of their Civilizations, London, 1941 ; and for a post colonial view see S. H. and L. I. Rudolph, eds., Education and Politics in India; studies in organisation society and policy, Harvard, 1972. 2 J . S . Furnivall's seminal work, Colonial Policy and Practice, Cambridge, 1948, contains a chapter (X) "Welfare: Health and Education" which compares the different sectors of education in colonised lands. 3 In case it is argued that all this was eyewash, we may note that Elphinstone was writing a confidential minute, not proclaiming a public statement. For the text, see Ramsay Muir, The Making of British India, 1 756-1858 (Documents), Manchester, 1915, pp. 2 9 7 - 8 . 4 For Spanish educational activities in the early period, see H. de la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581-1 768, Harvard, 1961. 5 A more detailed discussion of these developments appears in the present writer's "People and Government in Southern Asia", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, Vol. 9, 1959. See also Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Cambridge, 1968, Ch. 3, "The Rewards of Education". 6 A fuller account of the emergence of the competitive system is given in the present writer's "Structure of the British Imperial Heritage", in Ralph Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition, Duke, 1966. 7 G. Smith, Life of Alexander Duff,, London, 1879, Vol. I, p. 456, quoting Professor Lal Behari D& 8 This was the view of Geoffrey Gofer, The Americans; a Study in National Character, London, 1948, p. 178. 9 Quoted in Harold Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds; American Images of China and India, New York, 1963, p. 196. 10 Professor Altbach does not examine the Soviet publishing programme which is the largest state-operated organisation, in the export of works both in Russian and in translation in Western and Third World languages. 11 A classic statement on these lines was made by Gandhi: "I want the culture of all lands to be blown about m y house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any; I refuse to live in other people's houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave." Quoted by Jawaharlal Nehru; The Discovery of India, London, 1956, p. 367. 12 Quoted in the present writer's Race, Conflict and the International Order, London, 1977, p. 149.