Independence Is Not Enough

...Rather, it leaves the gap unclosed, with a host of prickly problems to which solutions must somehow be found and which, should solutions not be found, could drop the peoples involved into a bog far worse than the colonialism from which they had escaped...

...under Western conditions, in Ireland...

...In India, this particular kind of divisiveness led to the partition of the subcontinent (as it had...

...Independence Is Not Enough Preparation for the shift from colonialism to freedom is vital By C. Hartley Grattan Conspicuous on the agenda of our times are two items: how to order the relations of peoples within states, and how to order the relations between states...

...But that the bridging of the gap is far from automatic once freedom has been won by a colonial nation is quite apparent...

...Assuming that a government, backed by a sound constitution, can be set up, what about staffing it with natives of the country...

...But missing from this formulation is any knowledge or understanding of what is involved in the passage from colonialism to freedom...

...As he points out, the education of colonial subjects in the culture of the West is, ironically, one of the root causes of the current colonial insistence on freedom...

...There is, as a matter of fact, far more to it than that.The way things are in the world today, few colonial peoples are prepared to wait for their economic situation to become wholly satisfactory before making a break for freedom...

...A structured educational system from the primary to the university levels has never been provided...

...Sir Ivor draws most of his data from the period after World War II and from the experience gained in Asia...

...This might be sardonically called official American Marxism: the belief that a political and social structure presumed to be desirable is certain to follow from an economic situation assumed to be favorable...

...As Sir Ivor began by pointing out, the British Commonwealth has been self-consciously wrestling with the problem of relations of peoples within that system for about forty years, sometimes rather lackadaisically, but quite vigorously during the late Twenties and early Thirties and again since World War II...

...As Sir Ivor suggests, a distinction must be drawn between the ministers necessary to form a government at the political level and the civil servants (or bureaucrats) needed to carry out ministerial decisions and policies...

...Pakistan and Ceylon...

...Sir Ivor Jennings shows that it can be handled either by a frontal attack, which often perpetuates the division instead of dissolving it into a national patriotism, or, more hopefully, by indirection...

...the second by the emergence into independence within the Commonwealth of India...

...Incidentally, there is evidence that where the urge for education is widely stimulated by political developments, as in Nigeria, the grave dangers of superficiality and ludicrous overspecialization immediately show their heads...

...This results in the creation of a vast gap between the situation at the moment and the posited solution which is not only difficult to bridge, but is also of a character not generally understood, for so many people choose to ignore its existence...

...In any case, some solution must be found...

...Under either name, the relationship is condemned, often unthinkingly...

...The really coveted Western-style education has long been that to be had only in the metropolitan country, or an equivalent...

...It is an active force, for example, in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, where it is today muddying the politics of freedom...

...The first great effort is symbolized by the Statute of Westminster (1931...

...The problem of primary and secondary education, now chiefly left to the local governments, is equally important and has yet to be firmly faced...

...Hence Point IV and technical assistance generally, as well as schemes for capital investment...

...This brings us to Sir Ivor's third point, the role of education in the transition from colonialism to freedom...

...The inescapable conclusion is that, when freedom is achieved, the educational deficiencies of the colonial era prove a severe handicap to the running of the country...

...It is not one invented for purposes of obstruction by defenders of colonialism, anymore than communalism was invented by the British to obstruct Indian independence, but is one inherent in the various situations to which constitution-makers must find an answer or risk the failure of their efforts...

...This is illustrated well in the deterioration of the relationship which used to be called imperialism and is now usually called colonialism...

...An adequate analysis of the gap would require the services of a wide variety of experts, and several book-length studies...

...The popular solution is freedom for the colonial peoples--which means setting them up as free and independent nations...

...The basic reason is found in the deficiencies of the local educational system...

...Moreover, the Western-style education obtained, whether at home or abroad, has usually been humanistic in essence, tempered in recent years by the social sciences...

...Ex-colonies are never in a position to staff their governments immediately at all levels with trained individuals who are natives of the country...

...Hence, the Western-educated leaders have tended to be very special types...

...Since both the questions and the suggested answers to them almost invariably arouse the most violent passions, candid discussion of the issues is rare, and most people satisfy themselves with simple, and often simple-minded, solutions...

...Hence, the newly free countries have to address themselves to the task of building an educational system which will sustain the freedom already won at the political level...

...Americans, confronted with this situation, have a bias toward the notion that, if the standard of living in the colonial areas can be raised, solutions to all problems will more or less automatically be found...

...It could be argued that the answers, true and false, that have been offered to these two questions account in large measure for the unbroken cycle of violence in which we have been involved for the last forty years...

...Most of the important colonial leaders have been men of this description who got their education in England (e.g., Gandhi and Nehru) or America (e.g., Nkru-mah of the Gold Coast), or both...

...On this showing, three vexing elements of the gap between colonialism and freedom are far from easy of solution...

...Hence the great value of a recent series of eight articles in the London Listener by Sir Ivor Jennings, the distinguished British constitutional lawyer, lately Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon and constitutional adviser of the governments of Ceylon and Pakistan...

...Political freedom is apt to run ahead of economic viability...

...Hence, the most perplexing of immediate questions are apt to be not in the realm of economics (important as this is), but in political science, public administration, and education...

...This task takes a great deal of money and, perhaps even worse, cannot be satisfactorily accomplished in terms of educated personnel short of a couple of generations...

...On both continents, it creates a problem in constitution-making that is vexing in its complications...

...Not even India, whose resources in this respect were most remarkable, was able to do that...

...The aspirations of the latter have been the very stuff of colonial politics, but these have been miles ahead of (or away from) the not-easily-discerned aspirations of the masses...

...First, constitutions must be provided for countries whose populations are in rare instances homogeneous...

...Many of our troubles stem from our failures--even refusal--seriously to study that gap...

...In Asia and Africa, the stratifications based on income, characteristic in the West, are complicated by divisions of religion, culture, language, and even race, summed up in Asia as communalism...

...In the colonial areas, moreover, education has never really reached the masses of the people...

...Implementation is the proper work of civil servants of all grades, from junior clerks to highly educated, technically trained experts...

...This education has been, of course, severely rationed by the purse, only available to the sons of the well-to-do, or to the lucky...

...And still other elements exist...

...The "villain" in this particular piece is Thomas Babington Macaulay and his successful recommendations for British-style education in India...

...In Africa, where new nations are most likely to emerge in the immediate future, this phenomenon is called "tribalism...

...Most of the colonial spokesmen we hear about are politicians, potential cabinet ministers who are quite capable of making general policy decisions, but only rarely men who can implement the policies...

...It has fitted its beneficiaries for politics, perhaps for high-level administration, but rarely has it been preparation for technical expert-ness of any kind...

...However, the Macaulay approach was never carried very far or very efficiently, even in India, and in some colonies never got started until very recently...

...This has created a gap between the Western-educated classes and the masses of the people which is often overlooked by outsiders overly impressed by the stature of the Western-educated leaders and their associates...

...To talk about freedom in Africa with no knowledge or understanding of the significance of tribalism is to ignore a basic problem...

...Parenthetically, it should be said that since the last war the British have recognized the force of these remarks and have been spending large sums of money, with assists from American organizations like the Carnegie Corporation, in setting up "university colleges" and universities in the colonies...

...Here I propose to select and interpret three of his main points...

...In short, the "solution" solves nothing...