A neocolonial warp of outmoded hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies in Trinidad’s educational system

ABSTRACT

I reappropriate the image of a space-time warp and its notion of disorientation to argue that colonialism created a warp in Trinidad’s educational system. Through an analysis of school violence and the wider network of structural violence in which it is steeped, I focus on three outmoded aspects as evidence of this warp – hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies – by using data (interviews, documents and observations) from a longitudinal case study at a secondary school in Trinidad. Colonialism was about exclusion, alienation, violence, control and order and this functionalism persists today; I therefore contend that hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies are all enforcers of these tenets of (neo)colonialism in Trinidad’s schools. I conclude with some nascent thoughts on a Systemic Restorative Praxis (SRP) model as a way of destabilizing the warp, by stitching together literature/approaches from systems thinking, restorative justice and Freirean notions of praxis. SRP implies that colonialism (and this modern-day warp) has rendered much psychic and material damage, and that any intervention to address structural violence has to be systemic and iterative in scope and process, include healing, be participatory and foster an ethic of horizontalization in human relations.

KEYWORDS:

• School violence
• neocolonialism
• Trinidad
• hierarchies
• curricula
• student discipline
• attractors

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this article to the students at SSS; may you one day be part of an educational revolution in Trinidad. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for your comments.

Disclosure statement

I have not financially benefitted directly from this research.

Notes

1. In Trinidad, schools built during the colonial era are today called ‘prestige’ schools.

2. Trinidad society is a cultural mélange of people of Indigenous, European, African, East Indian, Chinese, Lebanese and Syrian descent.

3. Trinidad is part of the two-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. My case study was in Trinidad, therefore I will use that term only and not include Tobago, though the educational system is similar and may benefit from my findings.

4. Nationally, most students sit the secondary school placement exam at the age of 11 or 12, but for many students who have been kept back in the primary school system, they often sit the exam when they are older and many of these students are ushered into schools like SSS.

5. However, I do acknowledge the many instantiations of indigenous agencies, resistances and appropriations. Although colonial knowledge may have constructed colonial subjects, the relationship between power/control and knowledge is dialectical and by no means unidirectional (London, 2002; Sengupta & Ali, 2011). On a meta-epistemological level, Stoler (2008) deconstructs the notion of an all-seeing colonial gaze, even asserting that there was not as much rigid, consistent certainty in colonial governance as is usually ascribed to it.

Additional information

Funding

Research supported by Diversity Grant (Teachers College, Columbia University), Graduate Fellowship (AC4, Earth Institute), and R&PD Grant (Gettysburg College).

Notes on contributors

Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams

Hakim Mohandas Amani Williams is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Education at Gettysburg College as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4), based at Earth Institute, Columbia University. His research/teaching interests include school violence, peace education and conflict resolution. He is an activist, academic and artist and is conducting a critical youth participatory action research project on youth empowerment in Trinidad.