During my years as a student, I often felt something was missing. We were taught to think, but only in ways that were approved. Approved by whom? Not by our history, not by our culture, not even by our society. The approval always came from somewhere else — from textbooks designed in distant places, from frameworks that never grew out of our soil.
This is what I have come to call pedagogical colonisation. It is not about chains anymore. It is about classrooms. It is about teachers who unknowingly serve as gatekeepers of someone else’s knowledge. It is about syllabi that pretend to be universal but are deeply foreign to the context in which we live.
We don’t even notice it most of the time. A political theory course starts with Plato, jumps to Hobbes, moves to Locke, touches Rousseau, then lands on Marx. A neat little parade of names, all Western, all presented as if the story of thought itself is their story. And what about us? Our thinkers appear, if at all, as side characters. Kautilya? Maybe. Ashoka? Rarely. Iqbal? Almost never treated as a philosopher, only as a poet, a dreamer.
This kind of teaching quietly trains us to believe that wisdom only flows in one direction. From the West to us. It tells us our questions are not valid unless they sound like the questions asked in Europe. It tells us our answers are only answers if they resemble theirs. Everything else is folklore, tradition, or at best, cultural heritage. But not philosophy. Not political thought.
The consequences are not small. When generations are raised like this, they stop seeing their own intellectual lineage. They lose the ability to think in categories that belong to their own society. They borrow theories and then try to apply them to problems those theories were never meant to solve.
Pedagogical colonisation creates a kind of inferiority complex that hides under academic respectability. We praise students for quoting Foucault or Habermas, but we rarely ask them to wrestle with Shah Waliullah or Sir Syed in the same way. We pretend this is neutrality, but it is not neutral. It is bias, inherited and enforced.
Our thinkers need creating space: not as ornamental accents, but in the centre. Their ideas are to be included in the living curriculum that does not act as mere museum exhibits. Otherwise, our classrooms will keep producing students who can explain Rousseau’s social contract but cannot explain what political community meant to Iqbal.
Khawar Faiz
Lahore
