A Critical Appraisal of Aims-Based Curriculum from a Global South Perspective

An Ideal Theorization of Aims

Reiss and White’s approach to conceptualizing an aims-based curriculum starts with an ideal expectation of what individual students should achieve from education and then gives a few examples of how these ideal aims would play out at the school level, including assessments, school inspection and teacher education. This kind of ideal theorization is consistent with liberal theories in general, of which Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) is a paradigmatic example. Sen (2009, p. 5) calls such ideal theorization as ‘transcendental institutionalism’ approach as it first imagines a perfectly just society and then tries to set up institutions that will enforce this ideal into reality. Wolbert et al. (2019) draw parallels from the ideal theorization of justice to the ideal theories of education like that of Reiss and White (2013) and argue that ideal approaches don’t begin with the existing challenges that are being faced by any particular education system but instead tries to come up with a utopian scenario of what can be imagined in a perfect situation.

The problem with such an ideal approach is, as Sen argues, that it assumes ‘compliance by all with ideal behaviour’ (Sen, 2009, p. 7). In the Global South perspective when we think of school inspection and teacher education, we see anything but ‘compliance by all with ideal behaviour’. The tremendous corruption that exists in all these areas can’t be merely wished away as a problem of implementation and weak institutions, which can’t diminish the value of these ideals. These challenges need to be incorporated in the very approach of thinking about the aims of our education system and what it means to prepare students to lead a flourishing life. Thus, Sen attempts to present a realization-focused approach that deals with the current challenges and problems of the system and attempts to come up with a theory that accepts and begins with non-ideal behaviour.

Wolbert et al. (2019) use Sen’s framework to develop two model of theorization—a nonideal theorization of human flourishing for education as well as a realist idealist approach, both of which begins with the real-world inequalities and challenges. From a Global South perspective, the challenges can be as vast as hunger and starvation among school children, homelessness and missing parent(s), caste, race and gender-based exclusion of students, violence at home and neighbourhood, extremely low confidence and self-esteem due to generations of marginalization, alienating language and culture of educational content, unavailable teachers, the distance of the school from home, substance abuse and much more. Of course, these challenges are unequally experienced by students of marginalized communities, therefore, to arrive at a universal ideal of human flourishing seems like a doomed project right from the start. Wolbert et al. problematize the ideal theory as it

centralizes the ideal instead of the actual, is inclined to limit itself to describing the ideal situation, sometimes hinting in the direction of what needs to change in order to move closer to the ideal, but is not committed to reasoning how one should bring about such change – and whether it is possible, and to what extent, in the actual world. (Wolbert et al., 2019, p. 3)

Reiss and White idealize that the child coming to the school has a ‘certain level of health, respect and freedom from attack, arbitrary arrest and other impositions’ (2013, quoted in Wolbert et al., 2019, p. 7), which as mentioned is untrue for many children in the Global South. They assume that the parents are available and are playing an influential role in children’s upbringing, teachers are coming to school and are invested in teaching as well as treating children with dignity and respect, school inspectors are committed to keeping the schools accountable and so on. These assumptions of ideal situation blind the theories from what actually needs to be done to lead a ‘comparatively lesser un-flourishing lives’ ¹ which is the norm for the majority. For reducing the suffering and injustices of an un-flourishing life, one doesn’t need a general (minimal) principle but a mere comparison between the flourishing lives of the small percentage of elite children with those of the majority, who are made to suffer due to human-made social hierarchies of caste, class, gender, race, religion, sexuality, abilities and so on, and the theory-praxis required to reduce this gap.

To be fair to Reiss and White as well as other ideal theorists of human flourishing, they do give a substantial account of how the general (minimal) principles can be applied in practice. However, as Wolbert et al. argue, the action-guiding part in the actual world remains an add-on and not central to the theory, which leaves a lot of room for the aims to fall through the cracks (Wolbert et al., 2019, p. 9). Ironically, this big loophole of liberal approaches is not new at all. It actually starts right from the beginning of enlightenment thought in the seventeenth century when liberalism and colonization were practised simultaneously by the new European nation-states. Thus, it is important to explicate this basic contradiction between ideal just aims and completely contradictory unjust practices that liberalism is able to comfortably inhabit since the seventeenth century. This will also help us understand the appeal of the liberalist framework which promises a utopian scenario of equal liberty for all humans, but in practice ends up perpetuating domination of elites over the large majority of people.

Limitations of Liberalist Framework

Explicating the purpose of education, Reiss and White (2013) claim ‘what education should be for is essentially a political issue, since it is intimately connected with the kind of society we wish to bring about or maintain’ (p. 48). Here Reiss and White highlight the importance of political consensus on what kind of society people wish to bring and aligning educational aims with the political goals. However, there is absolutely no discussion by the authors on the various ways in which the political community can be organized. They almost follow Fukuyama’s end of history argument about the liberal democratic framework, as it’s assumed to be the ideal without any other alternatives possible (Fukuyama, 2006). It is also evident from the literature that their book draws upon is completely Eurocentric without any engagement from any thinkers of the Global South, where three-fourths of the world’s population stay. Because if one thinks from a Global South perspective, they will easily identify the contradiction between the high ideals of liberalism and the simultaneous exploitation of colonialism that was practiced in visible form for many centuries, and which continues in more invisible forms now.

Bhiku Parekh in his influential essay on Liberalism and Colonialism (1995) highlights these contradictions starkly by pointing out:

liberals stressed the virtues of individuality, autonomy and moral self-development, but they vigorously supported the nineteenth-century capitalism that made these virtues unrealizable for masses of men and women, and they often resisted attempts by the state to regulate the evils capitalism produced. They advocated freedom of choice, civil liberties and an inviolable area of privacy, yet many of the liberal architects of the New Poor Law of 1834 wanted the workhouses to become ‘objects of terror’ and to enforce strict segregation of the sexes. Liberalism claims to be sceptical of all claims to absolute truth, yet for decades liberal economists and politicians entertained no doubts about their laissez-faire economic theories, even when the havoc they caused at home and in the colonies, including Ireland, was too stark and horrendous to be missed. (Parekh, 1995, p. 81)

Although Parekh primarily problematizes the contradiction of Locke and Mill, the two most known liberal philosophers from the seventeenth and nineteenth-century England respectively, it is not surprising that Reiss and White writing in 2013 also make the same exclusions. In their explication on the importance of historical understanding of the world, they start from the rise of civilizations and in modern history they highlight industrialization, urbanization, rise and fall of empires, globalization and the importance of liberal democratic ideas over authoritarian forms of governance but never once mention colonization and capitalism as the key challenges of modern history that continue in twenty-first century (Reiss and White, 2013, p. 41).

This invisibilization and contradiction are both conscious and unconscious in liberal thinkers as they ‘reasonably’ argue the justification for colonization. With the case of Locke and Mill, Parekh shows both were staunch defenders of personal autonomy, private property and equality of all human beings. However, both uncritically universalized the bourgeoise English life for all human beings, not only for non-Europeans but also within Europe, namely Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Breton and Basque people among others. According to them, all human beings pursuing a ‘rational’ and ‘industrious’ project of self-improvement are doing justice to their purpose as humans, while those who are content and leading a communitarian life are primitive. Thus, individually all humans are of equal worth, but cultures can be put in a hierarchy and need to be civilized (Parekh, 1995, pp. 92–97). They don’t have the right to their land, political society and self-determination as a collective, as they are unable to privatize property and accumulate individually. Only through liberal colonization, can the non-Europeans be made liberal subjects and realize the importance of self-improvement and accumulation through individual labour. Hence, liberal democracy is the only reasonable way of organizing political society while other forms are not reasonable and should be done away with. ²

One can see in Reiss and White that these outdated approaches of singular universal reason, individualist ontology and one justified way of organizing political society, that is, liberal democracy is still uncritically perpetuated. Not only does this do great injustice to the multiplicity of human reasoning, ontological understandings and ways of organizing society, it also creates an illusion that problems of the twenty-first century need to be addressed through further liberalization. By sustaining the myth of independent individual which ‘masks a white, healthy, youthfully middle-aged, middle- or upper-class, heterosexual, cisgender male citizen’ (Anderson et al., 2021), it undermines interdependent and relational ontology of other cultures.

In contrast to the atomistic individualism in liberalist frameworks, feminists argue for a relational and multiplicitous conception of the subject that can’t be easily isolated from its context even for abstraction purposes (Anderson et al., 2021). Of course, liberal values like personal autonomy and equality are central to challenging the patriarchal control of women’s bodies but conceptualizing autonomy in a liberalist sense only helps privileged communities to justify their accumulation of wealth and property as fruits of individual labour. Instead, with a relational autonomy approach, one recognizes the nonideal context in which autonomy is not assumed but fought from dominant groups who have undue power over other humans and resources. The abstraction of all humans as individuals invisibilizes the historical and cultural context through which power is hijacked through the intergenerational accumulation of wealth, status and property.

Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins have critiqued ideal liberal theorization as it doesn’t empower the oppressed groups to challenge the status quo—as the ideal seems to pacify people by handwaving towards the right things but it doesn’t get translated into practice (Collins, 1998). Instead, Collins is more interested in how a theory can speak truth to people about their lived realities and equip people to collectivize and resist oppression (Collins, 1998). She instead takes a more pragmatic approach towards theorization as that according to her can serve the purpose of self-definition and self-determination for the oppressed groups. By drawing on the works of other black feminists on visionary pragmatism, Collins explicates:

The notion of visionary pragmatism more closely approximates a creative tension symbolized by an ongoing journey. Arriving at some predetermined destination remains less important than struggling for some ethical end. Thus, although Black women’s visionary pragmatism points to a vision, it doesn’t prescribe a fixed end point of a universal truth. One never arrives but constantly strives. At the same time, by stressing the pragmatic, it reveals how current actions are part of some larger, more meaningful struggle. Domination succeeds by cutting people off from one another. Actions bring people in touch with the humanity of other struggles by demonstrating that truthful and ethical visions for community cannot be separated from pragmatic struggles on their behalf. (Collins, 1998, pp. 189–190)

Thus, when we critically engage with the givenness of liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of political organization and therefore aims of education should be aligned to perpetuate it, we see the invisibilized prejudices come to the fore. From a Global South perspective, thus, it makes more sense to design the aims of the education in a pragmatist realization-focused manner, rather than in an ideal liberalist manner that will only perpetuate the status quo of power hierarchies. I will attempt to show this more clearly with the case of India’s political society and education.

The Case of India as a Particular Example of Global South

The limitation of a liberalist framework is even starker in countries like India where there are older hierarchical practices that have sedimented for centuries and created a highly unequal society in terms of accumulation of wealth, status and private property. Without addressing generations of accumulated power and resources, the liberalist framework provides an illusion of starting afresh as individuals without the need to recognize and dismantle existing hierarchies. In the Indian context, Brahminism ³ for centuries has organized the society in a hierarchical manner through the caste-patriarchal system, which allows savarna cis-men, only about 10% of India’s population, to continually accumulate wealth, status and private property for their own kind at the cost of others. ⁴ This hierarchical system has sustained in various forms even after many egalitarian social movements throughout the past two and half millennia and has been able to expand to a national scale in the past two centuries (Omvedt, 2003).

Ambedkar has theorized the caste system as a form of graded hierarchy in his influential works, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development (1979 [1916]) and Annihilation of Caste (1990 [1936]). This graded hierarchy is not merely a division of labour but also a division of ‘labourer’ as it kills the social spirit among the communities and proscribes any intermingling of different groups. Having himself experienced the worst forms of untouchability and exclusionary practices of the caste system while growing up, Ambedkar was quite attracted by the liberal values of liberty, equality and fraternity, as well as socialist values of social, economic and political justice. During his education at Columbia University, he came across the influential ideas of American pragmatist John Dewey and drew on him substantially to theorize the need for a pragmatist democracy that inculcates liberal and socialist values (Stroud, 2018). Finally, Ambedkar is able to integrate all of this together in a Buddhist ontological framework of interdependence, fellow-feeling (maitri) and equality (samata) (Mahadevan, 2021). These values got enshrined in the Constitution of India of which Ambedkar was the chairperson of the drafting committee and are supposed to continually inform the democratic institutions and associated living in the country.

However, there was also a fear in Ambedkar that the ‘socially dominant sections would hijack independent India and manipulate liberal democracy in order to consolidate and expand their own power through the reproduction of the old hierarchical order that placed Dalits at the bottom’ (Guru, 2011, p. 101). Guru (2011) highlights how the promise of creating an egalitarian society was thwarted by ‘paternal liberalism’ which only allowed access through the patronage of dominant groups, thus not changing the fundamental hierarchical gradation (Guru, 2011, p. 108). Guru (2011) further argues that Ambedkar was able to see through these limitations of the liberalist framework as it only allowed a few individuals to gain socio-economic mobility while obstructing collective emancipation. At the same time, it allowed social isolation between caste communities to be preserved on the grounds of individual preferences (Guru, 2011, p. 117).

Thus, liberal colonialism gave way to liberal Brahminism, as socially dominant sections appropriated liberalist ideas of individualism, accumulation of private property and unbridled exploitation of human and natural resources for perpetuating their own selfish goals (Aloysius, 2010). This liberal Brahminism used individualist interpretations of labour and merit to maintain the status quo of power relations in the society right from the beginning of the Republic of India (Siddiqui, 2017). It used the un-marked universal individual language to thwart constitutional attempts to positively discriminate marginalized communities by using the bogey of pseudo-liberalism and pseudo-secularism (Teltumbde, 2020). Keeping this history in mind, the educational aims need to be particularistic, so as to achieve the specific political goals that are enshrined in the Constitution, that is, achieving collective emancipation of all the communities from this graded hierarchy and experiencing equal civil liberties.

Dewey also had the foresight of this contradiction in ideal liberalist frameworks when he said, ‘merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experience is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred’ (quoted in Mukherjee, 2009, p. 360). Thus, the aims of education can’t be merely drawn keeping the idealistic world of liberal democracy in mind. But instead, we need to think of our aims in much more concrete terms to at least achieve a ‘comparatively lesser un-flourishing lives’ for the majority of the people of Global South. Hence, the aims need not be general and minimal that can be declared for all human beings mono-logically, but instead, they need to be particular and arrived at dialogically to address actual causes of un-flourishing lives (Nodding, 2013, pp. 5–6).

Going back to Sen’s comparative approach focusing on realization-focused objectives, Sen argues that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have an agreement on what a fully just political arrangement will look like (Sen, 2009, p. 15). The people who are unable to lead flourishing lives already know what they want by comparing it with what the elites of the society are enjoying. In the case of education too, we don’t need to first arrive at an agreement on an ideal educational setup but instead, listen to those who are deprived of quality education. Rege (2010) in her important article, ‘Education as trutiya ratna’ (third eye), brings forth the narratives of first-generation women learners and listens to what is being articulated by these students. She argues that a progressive pedagogical practice will be a combination of three models:

The first model is the one which the PAF [Phule-Ambedkarite-Feminist] teacher believes that she understands the truth/ the real relations of power and imparts it to the students. The second model believes in a dialogical mode and making the silenced speak. While in the third the focus shifts on developing skills - so that students are enabled to understand and intervene in their own history. (Rege, 2010, p. 95)

She provides numerous examples of ‘talking/writing back’ by girls and other first-generation students who had been systematically kept out of education, to explore what should be the aims of education in the Indian context. Developing on similar concerns for the majority of Indian students, Velaskar (2012) conceptualizes these aims as Education for Liberation. Having the aim of liberation in contrast to flourishing makes us think in concrete and particularistic terms as education for liberation always asks the question—liberation from what. In contrast to liberation, flourishing can be imagined in an idealized and individualized conception as we see with Reiss and White. It is free from any real-world context to imagine education as one that promotes an ideal good life for any individual human. This conception, as Wolbert et al. (2019) have argued, is too broad and vague to create the desired change in the material and social conditions for a majority of the human population and is therefore of not much use at best, and perpetuates the status quo at its worst.

Instead, education for liberation is essentially training students to become aware of the real-world context and to collectively liberate themselves from the social barriers that divide them into hierarchies of power and material conditions. The framework of liberation necessitates a relational approach as the hierarchical exploitative relations need to be transformed into egalitarian relationships that redistribute wealth, status and private property equally. In the Indian context, this implies collective liberation from Brahminical patriarchy as that perpetuates a hierarchical society with only a few getting benefited at the cost of many others. A relational approach has the capacity to highlight the importance of personal autonomy without compromising on the collective spirit that is required to bring about any social transformation. Educational aims that individualize students into thinking about their flourishing lives in isolation from other students can only perpetuate the existing hierarchies within the society.

To conclude, Reiss and White make an important contribution in highlighting the problems with a subject-based curriculum as we need to ensure that an education system aligns directly with the goals of the political community. Thus, it is important to displace subject-centrism with an aims-based curriculum that prepares the students to contribute directly to the wellbeing of the political community. However, as I have shown, the authors fall short of questioning their assumptions about liberal democracy being the only ethical alternative for a political community, as well as their individualized ideal of leading a flourishing life. I have shown how liberalism, right from the seventeenth century, has been able to vouch for important values of liberty, equality and fraternity while perpetuating colonialism and capitalism that severely limits the real possibilities for a majority of the human population. In the context of the Global South, specifically India, which has a long history of hierarchical socialization, liberalism is easily appropriated by Brahminism to perpetuate the accumulation of wealth, status and private property by savarna cis-men. Thus, what we need instead is a particularistic conception of aims of education that prepares students for collective liberation. Instead of articulating general (minimal) principles which are too distant from social realities, what is more important is to have a realization-focused comparative approach that is centred on listening to the experiences and requirements of first-generation students as Rege (2009) and Velaskar (2012) have theorized.