What does a Western Education mean for minority students?

We like to believe in Western society that we are individuals in nature. That we have free choice and all our decisions are our own. Whatever truth there may behind this, it can only be part of the story. The truth is whatever freedom we have is still constrained from societal pressures. We have choice, but what determines our choices? These questions about the nature of culture in our university readings of Wadham, Pudsy and Boyd (2007) resonated with me particularly because of my experiences with culture within the educational system.

I am a Filipino-Australian. I grew up and attended Primary and Secondary school in a city known as Darwin in the Northern Territory. Darwin houses a population of just over 100 000 people. Darwin's population is notable for the highest proportional population of Aborigines of any Australian capital city. In the 2006 census 10,259 (9.7 per cent) of Darwin's population was Aboriginal. I had not realised seeing indigenous people on every street corner was not a normal thing until I had moved to Sydney. In school, there was a lot of focus on indigenous education and aboriginal history and culture.

There aren’t a relative lot of Asians in the Northern Territory and because of that different cultural practices and features between Asian nations were distilled. It didn’t matter if you were Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian or whatever: if you looked Asian you were merely grouped as “Asian”. Everyone lives next to everyone and knows everyone. There are no culturally homogenous neighbourhoods or ghettoes. Filipinos were a minority that received little recognition in both Western media and academia.

I remember back in primary school, I quickly learned that I was different than the other kids, I was not exactly ashamed of who I was but I sure knew I was different. If I excelled at a subject, it was quickly noted that I was smart “because I was Asian”. When I played AFL, people were taken back from the fact that it wasn’t a stereotypically Asian thing to do. When I got a bit older and I started running into trouble or dabbling in things I shouldn’t have, people found it odd that I didn’t conform to some “model minority” stereotype. When schools would celebrate multiculturalism and how ethnically diverse they were, I couldn’t help but cringe sometimes. I’ve always felt that by exaggerating the effect of someone’s race you may only reinforce their feelings of otherness. Like every kid does, I wanted to fit in.

Filipino history was not taught in schools, I knew nothing about my cultural history outside of what my parents taught me but this seemed irrelevant and almost alien to me due to the fact that we live in Australia. As a result I grew up only learning English, most of my friends were not other Asians and I knew little of Filipino history. It wasn’t until my late high school years when I did my research. What I found was that Filipino culture was not something that was always homogenous. It is in fact a very contested notion. The Philippines only grew a true national identity relatively recently and the idea of a single nation amongst the thousands upon thousands of islands there was a preposterous ideal at one point. They united essentially to fight off the Spanish only to later face the Americans. America promised them self-determinism and independence. This wasn’t exactly the case. Keep in mind this is a horribly short summation of decades of politics and war but the point is after further reading I stumbled onto the works of Renato Constantino and I learned a new term. Cultural Imperialism.

In his essay “the Miseducation of the Filipino” Constantino (1970) argues that “The American military authorities had a job to do. They had to employ all means to pacify a people whose hopes for independence were being frustrated by the presence of another conqueror. The primary reason for the rapid introduction, on a large scale, of the American public school system in the Philippines was the conviction of the military leaders that no measure could so quickly promote the pacification of the islands as education.” 

The education of the Filipino under American sovereignty was an instrument of colonial policy in order to transform Filipino citizens into “good” colonials. Young minds had to be shaped to conform to American ideas. Indigenous Filipino ideals were slowly eroded in order to quell any resistance. “The ideal colonial was the carbon copy of his conqueror, the conformist follower of the new dispensation. He had to forget his past and unlearn the nationalist virtues in order to live peacefully, if not comfortably, under the colonial order.” (Constantino, 1970 p.21 )I can draw many parallels here to Assimilation era strategies of the Indigenous people in Australia.

Education in the Philippines much like it was in Australia during the Assimilation policy era stressed the use of English as the medium of instruction. “English became the wedge that separated the Filipinos from their past and later to separate educated Filipinos from the masses of their countrymen. English introduced the Filipinos to a strange, new world. With American textbooks, Filipinos started learning not only a new language but also a new way of life, alien to their traditions and yet a caricature of their model. “ (Constantino, 1970 p.24)

This of course struck home to me. I questioned everything I was and everything I do. Are my thoughts and actions really my own? Or have I merely assimilated the discourse of the dominant culture? Are we more than the friends and tastes we have or the city we grew up in? Am I merely an animal conditioned by Western society to the point that even my conditioning has been conditioned, so caught up in cultural trappings that any way I could envision escaping from the trap would be part of the trap itself?'

And of course one question of increased significance has lingered on my mind to this day as I study to become a teacher myself.

Can education be more than a tool for cultural imperialism? Was this all it ever was? Think about it. Socrates was executed for teaching the youth things contrary to the state’s agenda. And he was not the last to be. 

Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006, 2006 Census Quickstats: Darwin (Statistical Division). from Australian Bureau of Statistics
http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ABSNavigation/prenav/LocationSearch?collection=Census&period=2006&areacode=705&producttype=QuickStats&breadcrumb=PL&action=401

Constantino, R. 1970, The Mis-Education of the Filipino , Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1:1
pp.20-36

Wadham, B. Pudsey, J. & Boyd, R. (2007). Culture and education. Sydney:
Pearson Education. Chapter 1: What is culture?