BBC INTERVIEW -Visionaries, Sohail Inayatullah

BBC Interview

Visionaries, Week 6, Programme 3:

Education

Breaking Down the Barriers -

Towards International Understanding and Tolerance

Visionary: SOHAIL INAYUTULLAH - PAKISTAN

We’ve started to move in a situation where post moderns say, yes, we can have many cultures, we can allow them in the doors of official knowledge of European civilisation. But it’s still within the terms of the centre of the West. So over the long run, my vision is that in fact we’ll have many cultures and some type of authentic encounter with each other.

Now, that authentic encounter isn’t going to come around for all of us just eating in a Pakistani restaurant or a Chinese restaurant. It’s moving away from the commodity view of education, but it’s essentially about conversation, communication, and about trauma, where you meet them and they scare you, you hate them, they hate you, there is some struggle.

And the issue is, how do you deal with that struggle? Do you run away and kill them, which is one way, or do you ask, what is it about them that I don’t understand? How can I learn more about them? What is it about me that’s also wrong, that they don’t like?

When I start to think about the future of knowledge, the future of subjects, or how causes interact with each other, one of my favourite examples is of the library. Now, most of us think that the library is a political institution, but if you look at the structure of a library, it’s going to be government documents, social sciences, sciences, then on the top floor you might have ethnic studies, woman studies, Pacific studies, or whatever is the latest type of group vying for rights.

Now, that division seems to be universal, but if you ask Hawaiians, how would they construct it, they would have it quite dramatically - genealogy, where the ancestors sat, the Ina, the relationship with the land, the gods, those become your floors. If you ask the Indian, the floors become the first layers of the body. The second layer is the intellect, the third layer is intuition. The fourth layer is the supra-causal mind, transcendence, discrimination.

So within each of those layers, you would get books. So science would be just one floor. You’d have floors and floors dealing with other notions of reality. Even something as simple as a library, which we see as multicultural, becomes in fact quite unicultural.

So better schooling is not just saying, well we need more teachers from other perspectives, or we need the official female teacher or brown teacher etc., or we need better representation. It’s also about asking, what are the world views that go into how we teach? Every text is not just neutral. So that partly means, how do we create children’s stories that are more multicultural? If you look at children’s stories, it’s always about, if you’re a feminist, why is the witch always evil? It’s very clear who’s the good guy, who’s the evil person.

These stereotypes of who we are are ones that have to be challenged. There are not ones that help you learn about the other. Now, let me give you one example. There’s one cartoon called “Kimbo, the White Lion”. I watched it today with my three and five year olds. It’s about a white lion that lives in a jungle. And he sat there puzzled. And he said, “What do I do, basically, about human evolution?” And his monkey friend, the baboon, said, “Well, you can’t change human evolution, it’s a cycle of life. Grass eaters eat grass, and then meat eaters eat those animals and we keep on going.” And Kimbo said, “No, I think we should stop eating meat.” And the animals said, “How can we do that?” And so he said, “No, we have to challenge evolution. We have to create a new circle of life, where we’re not killing other animals.”

And this became quite dramatic. Suddenly, he started to challenge official views of culture. And he started also to challenge official views of evolution. And I watched my kids watching that. So suddenly that’s one of the first shows I’ve seen, where suddenly vegetarianism ceases to be something that hippies do, or something that’s done in India, but it became part of a common cartoon.

If I start to think about the future of education, going on a hundred years, two dimensions come to me. One is about authentic multiplicity, that other cultures, their texts, their visions become part of how we learn about each other, not just one culture’s text. Now, the other part of that is that it is not just about multiculturalism but about new humanism, meaning the rights of humans, but also of plants and animals. The new humanism part is crucial, because it becomes the cardinal human values. We can have multiplicities, but we have to ask, what is there that we embrace that’s basic? And that’s our common humanity.