Politics in Schooling: Linguistic Challenge to African Philosophy

Abstract

Post-colonial curricula in African Universities continue to dislocate the Africans under the school coated politics and infected benevolence of education. It remains the bearer of the Euro-American stamp which makes Africans the ‘natural’ followers of the stamp owners and define themselves in the language written over the stamp. The system teaches Africans to ignore the values of their languages which in turn pushes them to the periphery of knowledge production and true epistemic communication. It continued to teach them to hate themselves and to over-value  ‘foreign ideas and values’ in the schools. TOFFEL and ILETS are remaining legitimate vehicles of the system and above all the litmus test for non English intelligence. African children, among others, continue to stay on the margins of real communication and knowledge production. The worst thing is, however, African intellectuals are contributing to this discriminating politics in schools and this is nothing short of self-denial of one’s own access to oneself in the epistemic space. In this paper, I will discuss how imposed languages undermine the Africans from the academic and epistemic points of view.

Keywords: Knowledge production, politics, linguistic challenges, epistemic communication