Away with the Captive Mind

Opening Speech by Mohamed Idris on the first day of the International Conference on "Redesign of Social Science Curricula" organised by Citizens International and Multiversity, Penang, 19 November 2004

Hon'ble Chief Minister of Penang, Dr. Koh Tsu Koon, Claude Alvares, my dear colleagues and friends,

It is my pleasant duty to welcome you all to this international conference of scholars from Asia, Africa and South America, who have gathered here for a very unusual enterprise: to challenge conventional social science agendas and to redesign them.

The normal menu of what passes of as "social sciences" has bothered several people, including myself, for several years. Almost everything about the social sciences in our countries is imported from the Western countries -- not just the books, but the categories of thought, the fundamentals, the methods of analysis and research, the histories of each subject, the theories. Most often, even the contents of this so-called social science knowledge, are about the industrialized countries only.

The unchallenged assumption is that these social sciences have been invented by "advanced" industrialized societies, a direction towards we are all apparently headed. Because these societies claim to be developed, they claim that their social sciences are "science"; that these are universally valid and meant to be taught to everyone in the world.

For several decades now, we have timidly accepted such claims. Sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily. Syed Alatas has proposed that this has much to do with the phenomenon of the "captive mind". Others like Ngugi wa Thiong'o have spoken instead of the "colonised mind". Ward Churchill, speaking as an American Indian, has claimed we are all actually working within a regime of studies we should frankly label "white studies" because these are studies generated by predominantly white societies for their own academic purposes.

So the question to ask is what are we doing with these studies?

I have been most concerned by what this imported mental baggage has done to our youth and their state of mind. Millions upon millions of them are led through this text-based, sterile, conceptual universe, taught and disseminated in a foreign language and governed by ever changing fashions and slogans. These young minds are eventually convinced against their better instincts that this is "knowledge": knowledge that will make them educated, liberate them, bring them enlightenment, culture and refinement, give them mental composure and enable them play a creative role in society through some form of employment.

It does the reverse instead.

In fact, it effectively deprives them of even the ready instincts they were born with. It also turns them into parrots. The proficiency of parrots is measured in proportion to their price. In our case, we measure the worth of an individual depending upon the amount spent on his or her education and the institutions he or she has patronised.

Parrots, we all know, are generally kept in cages and are expected to repeat what they are taught. If you try and interact with today's MBAs, you will know what I have in mind.

Except for a few persons like Gandhi, Freire, Illich, few have bothered to even question the worth of this system of higher education and what it professes to achieve. After all, it was originally never designed for us, let alone with our needs in mind. Even those few, who in the past questioned the system in a radical manner, were let down by our political and intellectual leaders, and their ideas for alternative systems were never seriously implemented.

Liberation or independence from colonial rule means that we now have democracy, Parliament and other such institutions of our own. But our actual enslavement has remained intact, because of the education system from which we have refused to liberate ourselves. This is all the more tragic because we know that this system was designed to make us subservient individuals, always inferior, always deficient in some way. Merely because it is now administered by our own people does not make it any less enslaving.

We are good at making critiques of existing systems. But our critiques must today include a rigorous analysis of what these so-called social science studies have done to our younger generation. Only if we carry out that analysis thoroughly, will we understand why we must face this issue with some measure of urgency.

Multiversity is not interested in seminars that fold up on the last day along with the vote of thanks. These meetings are meant to be beginnings. We want things to happen -- some fundamental challenge to be mounted, some changes to be effected -- if not everywhere, at least in some countries like India or Malaysia to begin with, which would inspire confidence in others.

I do not say that is going to be easy.

Have you ever heard of a war of liberation that has been won without a fight?

Che Guevara recommended arms, Gandhi used militant non-violence. Whatever the kind of weapons used, freedom has to be seized and appropriated, since it is never distributed free on a platter by oppressors.

So it is in the sphere of knowledge as well. By now we should all be ready to concede that power or politics decides what is knowledge and what should be taught as knowledge.

For the past 150 years, Western academic institutions, their intellectual work and their preoccupations have been treated as the norm. We have accepted without question what according to them is knowledge. We have also discarded, without question, what according to them must be rejected. I, for one, find this total capitulation shocking and unprecedented in history.

Our intellectuals and teachers from our colleges and universities, particularly the better ones, are quite aware of this continuing dependence. Yet they see no reason to change. We readily admit that true knowledge comes from experience and not from text books. Yet, we allow daily, without even a murmur of protest, the overwriting of experience by text books, whose so-called knowledge is based on experience from countries differently organised from ours. Very often even the interests of those societies are diametrically opposite to ours.

There are admittedly today, a few of us, who consider ourselves successful modern sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists and whatever, who have, in private moments, questioned the very basic assumptions in which these disciplines are rooted or take their inspiration from. We came into these disciplines as students, so we never questioned their assumptions then. But today we claim to have some expertise in these fields. We have even made our lives dependent on successfully circulating these inherited categories for our own purposes of employment and survival, mostly in the form of career advancement. Is this the reason why we have hardly any incentive now to publicly question these assumptions, even when we have the mental equipment and sometimes even the wisdom to do so?

We have invited you all here to this meeting because in your own writings and talks, at some time or the other, you have demonstrated similar anxiety about what we teach our young people in the name of "higher education".

Some of you have criticized with harsh words the dismal state of social sciences in your own country: the lack of imagination, the copying of fashions, the flashing of new phrases made current in intellectual circles in Paris or Harvard. We also know that the students are either bored or walking out. They go through it all because they believe this torture must be endured. If you had a choice of all the hundred things you could do with your life, would you choose to do sociology or psychology today?

Others among you have decided to opt out altogether and work with more self-respecting methods of creating knowledge, which will be of use not only to students but human beings as a whole. I can mention Ari Sitas from South Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya, Claude Alvares and Vinay Lal from India, our own Syed Hussein Alatas from Malaysia, the group of intellectuals that operate under PRATEC in Peru, the Zapatistas in Mexico, Yoshitaka Miike from Hawaii, many Islamicists all over the world and many of you present here today. The list is quite large and significant. So why have we all not come together to work on a common platform? Isn't it time?

Ashis Nandy suggested in his very first book, The Intimate Enemy, that the language of the rebellion must be well-chosen. Those who rely upon the vocabulary of the oppressor will always, submit eventually to the regime of the oppressor, because by using the oppressor's terms, he has forfeited the opportunity to play the game differently. Only those who refuse to play, (the non-players), and those who insist on carrying the discussion using their own tools of trade will protect their worlds for the future.

It is imperative that at a time when the ruling classes of the planet are intending to get globalised and to homogenize human societies using one mould, we must move equally firmly in the direction of resistance, inscrutability, separate languages, indigenous histories, a hundred forms and methods of doing social science, and the installation of our own separate assumptions of what constitutes social science knowledge and how it must be conducted. We know now that there is no other effective method of protecting our cultures, our minds, our souls, our civilisational contributions to the human species.

I hope that we can go further and examine whether the social sciences as we know and teach them, in the form of different disciplines, are in fact useful tools for the generation of relevant social knowledge. Thus far, the approach they embody has only generated tunnel visions. We need to examine new ways of looking at the major social issues that alternatively anchor or shake our worlds and which may have to transcend the limits imposed by individual disciplines. This is something new that I hope you will also examine during this conference.

Hon'ble Chief Minister, these are, briefly stated, the principal objectives of this conference. Penang has been a fertile city for conferences and meetings that have become known all over the world. The Third World Network originated here in 1984. Multiversity was inaugurated here in 2002.

As a knowledgeable person, who has worked in educational arenas and departments before you became Chief Minister, we believe you will have a personal interest in these issues and will look seriously into them and act in their behalf.

On behalf of the people of Penang and Malaysia, I welcome all these distinguished scholars to a task that is needed to be carried out with a great deal of urgency and timeliness in the days ahead.

Thank you!

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