Willinsky, John. (1998).Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End. Reviewed by Roger Deacon

Willinsky, John. (1998).Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 304 pp. $22.95   (Cloth)     ISBN# 0816630763             (Paper)     ISBN# 0816630771 Reviewed by Roger Deacon University of Natal Durban, South Africa           First, I was excited. The title and first chapter of this book promised to examine the influence of empire on education, situating the enterprise of schooling within its truly global historical parameters. Then, I was disappointed. The accounts offered of imperialism itself as well as of its effects at a scholarly level seemed too commonplace, too unoriginal and at the same time too ambitious. Finally, though, I have come to the more sober if critical conclusion that, for all its inadequacies, there is a need for a book of this sort, a book which neither dismisses the legacies of Western imperialism and its educational project nor shies away from confronting the paradoxes and tensions built into any attempt to reflect upon the manner in which modern subjectivity is manufactured.           John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World asks us to think, and re-think, how "five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the world" (pp. 2-3). Drawing upon postcolonial and postmodern ideas interspersed with a fair smattering of left-liberal and Marxist beliefs, Willinsky wishes to make sense of our "divided world"—"beset by struggles of ethnic nationalism, hardening of racial lines, and staggering divides between wealth and poverty" (p. 1)—and to explain this emphasis on difference to the young. Consequently, the three chapters that make up the first part of the book examine the "adventure in learning" that was European imperialism, along with some of its more glaring effects both in Europe and abroad. On the one hand, for example, "the expansion of experience and conquest educate[d] the conqueror" (p. 55): the conscious imperial self-display through the media of museums and expositions, public gardens and zoos, encyclopedias and travels "educated the eye to divide the world according to the patterns of empire" and in the process informed and civilised the populations of the imperialist countries (p. 57). On the other hand, the establishment of schools throughout the colonies brought indigenous populations directly into contact with Western beliefs and values, teaching them too to identify and divide themselves and the world in terms of the categories of primitive and civilised, Oriental and Occidental, and black and white. The second part of the book, consisting of five chapters, begins the task of rethinking our educated imaginations—since "what has been learned can be learned again" (p. 2)—by investigating ways in which the teaching of history, geography, science, language and literature in schools can and should take the opportunity to reflect upon their place in the imperialist educational project.           "What comes," then, "... of having one's comprehension of the world so directly tied to one's conquest of it" (p. 3)? As Willinsky makes clear, schools have offered little which might help to explain why differences are treated as having such profound consequences. And it is no doubt important for students to be made aware of differences and to learn to appreciate their effects (p. 5). Yet in the process of developing his argument—which is in part an ideology- critique—and claiming that "educators owe those they teach some account—if always partial—of what we have taught them about the world" (p. 16, emphasis in the original), Willinsky appears to find it difficult to avoid implicit references to a rather idealistic, even ahistorical, conception of education. While Willinsky's conscientizing project is commendable, even despite being unable to avoid repeating and reaffirming the differences that it wishes to expose and overcome, it verges at times on an apologia, as if those who have relayed imperialism's educational project (regardless of whether they have done this deliberately, unthinkingly or critically) "owe students an account" of what they and their predecessors have done (and as if students are themselves merely innocent victims and not implicated participants), and must somehow explain "why education has not done more good in the world" and has "not done more to realize fully [its] democratic promises" (p. 16). It is only in the light of a (never defined or delineated) ideal of what education ought to be that it is possible to suggest that "colonial education ... did little for the good name of education ..." (p. 103). In the face of the vacuity of this ideal, it would be more realistic to try to explain how and why learning appears to be "dependent ... on taking possession of the world in this [encyclopedic] way," given, as Willinsky himself notes, both that "any work that aspires to encompass the known world could be said to suffer from imperialist aspirations" (p. 73), and that the supposedly uniquely European thirst for an all-encompassing knowledge and mastery of the world also accompanied the imperialist aspirations of ancient China, Greece and Rome.           This misplaced educational idealism—which contrasts education as it is (imperialist) against how it ought to be (democratic)—is also apparent when we are told that not all educational interests are inherently imperialistic (p. 40), but we are offered no criteria with which we might identify and distinguish between those interests that are, and those that are not, "imperialistic." It appears again in the radical commonplace that "although colonial education was dedicated to extending the regulation and usefulness of the colonized, it also—the human spirit being what it is—contributed to the empire's undoing" (p. 89). For example: in India and Malaysia (and, by implication, in many other colonies), schools were set up to provide local civil servants for the (in this case British) empire (p. 99), but also, ironically, trained the earliest statesmen. Similarly, Western education is said to be both about cultural domination and a resource for resisting that domination (p. 109). But how far can educational theory be said to have got when we can do little more than tiredly repeat how social reproduction through education inevitably meets up with resistance? We are told nothing new when the relatively insignificant efforts of a few (usually Western) women who campaigned against "the slavery of the harem" (p. 103), thus "confound[ing] the roles of submission and domination" (p. 104), can only prompt the conclusion that, "fortunately, colonial forms of education were not fully determined in their application or outcomes" (p. 105).           To repeat: the intellectual legacy of imperialism is certainly a topic worth addressing in schools (p. 18), since the West did take an intellectual as much as a political and economic hold over the world (p. 24); and yet, ironically, in so doing the West also constituted itself in new ways ... indeed, it became the West. It is thus exceedingly odd that the establishment and expansion during this historical period of state-run schooling systems in Europe itself is barely mentioned in this book, whereas the establishment and effects of colonial schooling are accorded an entire chapter. (Is this an example of educating the conqueror about his far-flung and heterogeneous empire while assuming the unquestionable value and validity of his supposedly homogenous heartland?) Willinsky, concerned with what remains of the "crime" that was Europe's imperial accumulation of learning (p. 17), does not appear to even contemplate the fact that this "crime" might in part have made modern education possible, in the mother country as much as in the colonies. There is thus too much of a sense in which this book deals with the educational project of imperialism, in which learning and knowledge supplement imperial conquest and expansion, rather than imperialism as an educational project, in which learning can dominate and divide in its own right.           A certain nostalgia and romanticism also finds a place in this book. Arguing that "the world was assumed to be a tabula rasa that awaited inscription by the West and its soldiers, administrators, scientists, and educators ..." (p. 36), Willinsky relates with a sense of solidarity how certain communities in Canada are "refusing this naming and returning to their original, native names" (p. 37 n9). Despite referring in this context to Derrida's critique of the myth of the origin, however, Willinsky fails to reflect on the extent to which the "original, native" name was itself no less than an(other) inscription of the world. Willinsky also advocates an educational collaboration between students and community members in order to "compile, organize, preserve and present different senses of the community's experiences" (p. 158), as if who "the community" is is unproblematic and as if a community's representation of itself is necessarily more accurate than how it may have been represented by others (not to mention that this "remapping" of a community will unavoidably repeat elements of imperialism's prior mapping).           Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is that it does not dismiss imperialism or wish it away, but grapples directly with its effects: "[W]e have to work with this [imperialist] knowledge of the world ... for this knowledge is all that many of us have of the world ... by understanding the cost at which it was achieved and the ends to which it was exhibited." Such a perspective, Willinsky contends, may enable us to disable some of our all-too-ready assumptions, and "[i]f we cannot go back, perhaps we can go forward" (p. 87). Yet this strength is constantly being dissipated by formulations which seem to appeal to something outside of history. "The lion in the zoo is no less real or true for all that the forces of imperialism did to make such a spectacle a part of our lives, but when we stare into the lion's eyes, what is it we see that has not been touched in some way by the colonial adventure that we have, through myriad forms, learned so well?" Here again, the assumption that there is something pure, innocent, untainted and free in the lion's eyes belies the degree to which the world was remade in the image of imperialism. Like it or not, the mass educational project of Enlightened imperialism has made us what we are, and to question it is to attempt to ask of our institutions, practices, fellow practitioners and, not least, our very knowledge, what one can know about them from the inside, as it were, from within their bounds, limits and limitations.           While Willinsky does ask, "What impact did this colonial exercise have on the emergence of public education during the same period in the West?" (p. 90), his "three-chapter review of imperialism's educational influence on the world" (p. 109) never answers this question. (Is the West, and education in the West, somehow not of this world, otherworldly, an Archimedean point, perhaps, or just too obvious to mention? Chandra Mohanty's important argument that "[i]t is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center" (quoted in Willinsky, p. 106) is noted but not followed up: if it is only through its definition of the Rest as peripheral or other that the West can confirm its centrality and quiet its own anxieties, surely this has implications for the nature of education in the West as much as elsewhere?) If "[t]he aim is to hasten and focus changes that are already underway in creating a multicultural curriculum" (p. 18), the book in fact makes little attempt to delineate further what such a curriculum does or ought to entail, let alone to address the fact that multiculturalism is a product of the very same historical process and educational project that is imperialism.           This fundamental lacuna aside, in the remainder of the book Willinsky usefully examines the changing content of various school texbooks with the intention of "identifying the colonizing aspects of various educational domains" (p. 108): for example, "science's confounding role in maintaining ... [racial] divisions" (p. 186), the use of English as language and as literature as an instrument of domination and silencing, and history and geography as mechanisms for learning about, and subordinating, others. Even where such texts prove to be largely uncritical of their complicity with imperialism, as in one American world history textbook, we are enjoined, pragmatically, not to "think about abandoning existing resources" given the limited funding of public education (p. 129). Fortunately, there are other textbooks which reflect a more postcolonial influence (p. 129) and allow for a more critical understanding of what historians make of history, for "a state of permanent revision ... drawn from among the redeeming features of Western knowledge" (p. 132); unfortunately, these redeeming or not-so-redeeming features are nowhere spelled out. All we are left with appear to be personal predilections, for "critical self-reflection" (p. 151), for "turning the gaze back onto itself" (p. 153), and for creating in classrooms "a critical space ... that allows students to stand apart from ... representation[s] of the world" (p. 155), as if criticism is Archimedean. Granted, though, "we need not forsake that experience [of attempting to stand apart from the world]", even if it is implicated in the imperialist project (p. 239), since in order "to move forward", we must perforce first "understand what education has already made of difference and diversity" (p. 244). And to Willinsky's credit, his conclusion reflects the journey that he has made in the course of writing this book: "more or better history teaching, including the history of imperialism, does not in itself point the way forward" (p. 245), since there is "no place to be found outside this [imperialist] history of history" (p. 246). He acknowledges the paradox of continuing "to count on the educational system to make us free, even as I question its entrenched complicity with imperialism" (pp. 247-48), and ends with the suitably "modest proposal"—"the best that we can hope for" (p. 263)—that we must "supplement our education with a consideration of imperialism's influence on the teaching of history, geography, science, language, and literature in the hope that it will change the way this legacy works on us" (p. 247).           Learning to Divide the World, like the educational ramifications of imperialism which are its focus, contains much about which one can be critical, but also much from which one can learn and, indeed, much even to be admired. Falling somewhere between a textbook, with its concluding "snappy student activity sheet" (pp. 255-56), and a treatise, between something practical and useful and something historical and critical, it challenges educators and students alike to attempt to re-think how they think. Finally, notwithstanding its self-limiting frame which wishes to believe that critical reflection upon our imperially educated imaginations may somehow bring us closer to freedom, or harmony, or toleration, or justice, it displays the productive paradoxes, twists and turns of a personal trajectory of learning which has come to educate itself. About the Reviewer Roger Deacon is managing editor of Theoria, a journal of social and political thought based in South Africa.