Re-thinking the role of nationality in Malawian primary school education for cosmopolitan citizenship
Date
2018-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
ENGLISH ABSTRACT : The pervasiveness of global interconnectedness has necessitated the re-imagination of the
breadth and scope of citizenship. No longer should citizenship conceptualisation be restricted
to the nation-state. There is arguable consensus of the normative necessity to cultivate
cosmopolitan citizenship whose scope of duties transcends national borders. However, the
question of what the form and substance of cosmopolitan citizenship should be remains
contested. A given conception of cosmopolitanism directly informs the nature of education
for democratic citizenship. The prevalent model of cosmopolitan citizenship outlaws national
particularism ostensibly for being inherently inimical to the impartiality of universalism. The
underlying logic is that equal concern for all people of the world is achievable only through
impartiality over all particularism. There has however not been much research about the
normative implications, especially for developing nations, of an impartiality that necessarily
extinguishes national belonging. The context of developing nations demands a fundamental
re-think of the potentiality of an exclusively impartial cosmopolitanism for such
cosmopolitanism risks entrenching global inequality.
The removal of Malawian History from the primary school curriculum and of mother-tongue
instruction for the first four years of primary education has normative motivations and
implications. This dissertation argues that the systematic diminishing of the role of
nationality through the removal of national History from the curriculum in Malawi, and
adoption of English as the sole medium of instruction in primary education, are advancing a
problematic cosmopolitan citizenship model that is incompatible with ideal human equality.
Such a cosmopolitanism undermines the normative value of mother-tongue instruction. The
cosmopolitanism also regards national history as inherently promoting parochialism and thus
inherently inhibitive of universalist cosmopolitan duties.
Building on Seyla Benhabib’s (1992; 2011) idea of the concrete (differences) standpoint of
universalism of human equality, as opposed to the general (commonality) standpoint of
universalism, this dissertation argues that since nationality hosts people’s sources of
concreteness, nationality has normative value and ideal cosmopolitanism is therefore
essentially a duality of the particular and the universal. The two are mutually dependent and
regulating ideals such that supplanting one for the other undermines human equality. An
essentialist universalism is problematic because by excluding subjectivity and particularism, it denies normative value to what individuates the peoples of the world as the concrete (not
merely generic) human beings that they are.
The dissertation further argues that the idea of the detached transcendent self for whom social
relations are not constitutive of being is flawed because it ignores the care he or she receives
from others to achieve autonomy. Achievement of autonomy is dependent on the relations
and institutions of care-giving typified by such elements of nationality as language, history,
common culture and territory. With respect to democracy, nationality, though often assuming
a background role, is the principle that makes civic patriotism possible. Civic patriotism
cannot sustain democracy without continually drawing from nationality.
The dissertation argues that ideal authenticity-oriented education ought not to avoid
subjectivity or else the education will lose meaningfulness to the people. Education should
acknowledge that learners as citizens share a common fate through nationality. In education,
the marginalisation of the national subjective for citizenship in favour of exclusive
impartiality, amounts to tacit assimilation because the ostensible objective impartiality
prejudicially marginalises valid moral perspectives of the world’s other peoples.
In Malawi, despite being the motivation and catalyst of colonial resistance, nationality was
abused in the independence era. Currently, there are tokenistic commitments to nationality
due to a lack of political will coupled with the prevalence of neoliberalism. Global
interconnectedness, which necessitates and enables the imagination, of cultivation of
cosmopolitan duties is itself characteristically inhered by Eurocentric particularism,
neoliberalism and inequality in the representation of global people’s particular interests.
Consequently, the marginalisation of the local promotes attitudes that regard local language
and local epistemologies as subaltern. In such a context, mother-tongue instruction is stripped
of its normative value. National History is regarded as advancing particularity, and narrowmindedness. However, particularism is an indispensable component of ideal universalism.
Further, there are valid relational normative conceptualisations of human nature besides
individual-centrism that found a relational (and not individual-centric) universalism.
This research contributes towards the re-imagination of an education for citizenship that
challenges the prevailing global homogenisation of the unprivileged and unrepresented
epistemologies and voices, marginalised on account of their otherness, ultimately compelled
to assimilate involuntarily into the mainstream in the name of impartiality of equality.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING : Geen Afrikaanse opsomming geskikbaar nie
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING : Geen Afrikaanse opsomming geskikbaar nie
Description
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2018.
Keywords
International education -- Malawi, Mother-tongue instruction -- Malawi, Education, Primary -- Malawi, Cosmopolitanism in education, Nationalism and education, UCTD