The Influence of Colonial Education on Decolonization

“We seem... to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” These lines by Sir John Seeley (1883) explain the education policy of the British Empire during colonization. The “superior” white race realized the necessity of training Africans for service to the white man; therefore, the colonial power, the British Empire, tried to impose its own education on the “less developed” local population in Africa at large. Africans who were educated inside colonial schools were brainwashed to destroy their own cultures and replace by Western cultural and social values, which were supposedly superior but this exploitation as Clive Whitehead (2005) states resulted in mental enslavement, a sense of inferiority and a culture of dependency. This study tries to reveal how colonial education was implemented on African societies to strip the colonized people away from their indigenous learning structures and draw them toward the culture of the colonizers.