Growing up in the UK education system, we are taught nothing of our colonial past, but more importantly nothing of the structural inequality that this continues to uphold today. This allows systems of repression and oppression to go largely unnoticed by young people, letting exploitation and greed continue. Moreover, celebrating historical colonial figures, as seen in the statue of Edward Colston among many others, continues to valorise their horrific acts rather than educate on the need to undo what colonialism left in its wake.
University should be a place where critical thinking is encouraged at all costs. Yet it remains the case that our institutions shy away from revealing their colonial past and enlightening students in a broad way and granting them an education that allows for widespread reform. Even on the surface, out of a total of more than 21,000 professors in the UK, only 140 academic staff at professorial level identified as black, equating to 0.7%. This is a horrific demonstration of restricting, through multiple layers of inequality, diverse and under-represented groups from being centre stage in academia, and points to some of the factors that leave universities failing to offer many critical courses. The oppressed themselves are struggling to even have their voices respected within academia, let alone heard through academia.
That is why decolonising the curriculum is one of the most important projects of our time. If we are to strive for equality and diversity, this cannot be done with token acts, but by actually restructuring our whole subconscious, our supposed “rational” thought, into one that is more equally representative of the world as a whole. For example, it is not just about having a representative group of different students in a class. This does nothing to address the structural systems at play, rather it is about the knowledge that we are all taught. Formal colonisation may have ceased, yet the unequal power structures continue to impoverish the world today. By knowing this, we can work as a collective to undermine them.
Project Myopia is one such collective effort that brings together students who wish to share things that they believe should be added in the creation of a decolonial curriculum. It is devoted to diversifying university curricula through crowdsourcing material from students that they feel their curricula would benefit from, whether the submissions are of visual, literary, cinematic, or musical matter.
If you take a look at their website, you will see a range of inspirational and enlightening material, grouped by different hashtags. In fact, there exists a massive collection of highly interesting, stimulating, beautiful, and worthy histories, demonstrating the agency of people that are unjustly oppressed by our academic institutions. We have a lot to learn from including such material in our education, beyond the mere importance of recognising the value and splendour of others that are ‘not like us’. We will begin to realise the structural inequalities that led to these voices being hidden in the first place and work towards a more equal society.