The political bondage of colonialism is often shown through public educational structures set up in the African colony or ex-colony, and the imposition of a foreign language and in some cases religion. Post-colonial societies often try to change this status quo, but sometimes only when it is in their best interest. This is an example of a system in which the Western power establishes its own educational system, which is imposed on the new territory and produces colonial people who are literate in the tongue of the colonizer.
These people are then better able to get educationally ahead in the new society more than the majority of the population, which is kept illiterate and therefore largely apolitical. “Emanations of a particular moment of time and a particular perspective (European confidence in its own material power and moral superiority, as well as its racial arrogance and blindnesses), colonial histories inscribed the European colonial project” (Boahen, 1987). These colonized peoples are often caught in a confusing double-bind.
#2 The Englightenment caused higher education to become more secular, and more based on ideals of liberty, reason, science, and the pursuit of liberal and intellectual individual freedoms. “The existence of the Enlightenment they defined as anti-Catholic, promoting reason over sentiment and emotion. The philosophes, according to their detractors, “flagrantly celebrated self-love, avarice, ambition, and lust as ‘natural’ instincts” (Censer, 2002).
This supposition is borne out by these cherished enlightenment ideals and how they were often only selectively applied to white males. However, ideals of freedom and equality were stressed during the Enlightenment, and therefore also took a key place in higher education of the time.
REFERENCE
African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Censer, J. (2002) Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Journal of Social History.