DEMYSTIFYING VALUE- FREE SCIENCE TO PROMOTE ALL SCIENCE AS ONE: A 21 ST CENTURY IMPERATIVE

 

BY

 

F.C. OWEYEGHA-AFUNADUULA

Department of Zoology

Makerere University

Kampala , Uganda .

 

Website: http://www.afuna.org or http://www.afuna.o-f.com

Email:afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk or afunaduula@afuna.org

Tel: +256 78 555 222 or +256 71 845461

 

30 th January 2005

 

The Uganda Government has recently pronounced its intention to selectively fund students who pursue what it calls “Science” at institutions of higher learning such as Makerere University . This follows a long-drawn-out strategy of government since the early 1990s to reduce its social responsibility for education, health and social security (pensions), most likely in line with the World Bank's anti-social spending stance in relation to the genetically rich but financially poor countries.

 

As a popular practice under its structural adjustment programmes (SAPS), the World Bank has been forcing the Government of Uganda to cut social spending on health, education and pensions and instead emphasise non-priority areas such as privatisation of public enterprises, debt-servicing, investment incentivisation or corporate contracts that are obviously anti-social but are attracting most of the Bank's “foreign aid”.

 

According to a recent Government statement in the Uganda Press, 75% (if I remember well) of all government (public) funding will go to sustain the education of “Science” students. By science government, without doubt, means the “natural” sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Definitely, it also means that what have been called science-based professional courses such as Human Medicine, Veterinary Medicine, Forestry, Agriculture and Engineering will, in terms of educational policy and, therefore, funding, be preferred along with the natural sciences. This is at a time when debate is raging as to what is natural and what is not natural, and what is science and what is non-science.

 

Unfortunately we are yet to hear about the extent to which we have gained from ‘scientists' that all the tax payers have nationalistically and patriotically trained so far. How many of them actually acquired, through many years of training, the critical resources of creativity, initiative, innovation and imagination to justify their being selected for? Does Charles Darwin's “Survival of the fittest” really apply to them? To what extent has Government come to terms with the spiraling brain drain, which, although welcomed by some of our leaders as good for Uganda's economy on the basis that victims (beneficiaries?) remit foreign money to the country, has made us spend money to train for others?

 

The main assumption of government, I think, is that Uganda is suffering from lack of “real development” because there is a serious shortage of so-called scientists. This is based on the belief that a great divide exists between the social sciences (including the humanities) and the “natural” sciences (including the ‘science-based' professions) -a colonial legacy –and that there is great value in preserving this divide. There is also the serious assumption that the greater fraction of the public whose children pursue mostly the social sciences and the humanities -and who definitely pay taxes to fund social services (education and health) -will automatically endorse the government pronouncement.

 

It is now generally agreed the world over that there is a consummating need to transform education to reflect the fact that the problems, issues and challenges of environment and development are complex, interrelated, interconnected and highly dynamic, thereby demanding a more holistic (broad) education.

 

The trend, therefore, is not towards entrenching the artificial division between the social sciences (including the humanities) and the natural sciences (and the professions thereof) but linking them. This is based on the realisation that there is nothing called “value-free science” and that all science is one, not two, requiring that it is promoted as such. Education planners and policy-makers in Uganda should be made aware of this trend so that our country is part and parcel of what is going on. No one should later on say he or she was ignorant of this trend.

 

It is unfortunate that the structure and function of our knowledge processes remain strongly colonial and are continuing to be responsible for providing the institutional, individual and group ignorance that, no doubt, can stand in our way of perceiving new possibilities or opportunities in education. Not perceiving new possibilities and opportunities means we sustain and perpetuate what has been taken as education at the university and transfer it well into the future. This is disciplinary education. It is responsible for the current academic and intellectual style and for producing all those who have passed through our education system.

 

Disciplines of knowledge have been and continue to be seen and perpetuated as natural units of learning and knowing. The demarcations between them are also seen and perpetuated as natural, logical and undisputable. In most cases each discipline parades itself as perfectly independent and this way it justifies its existence. Anything which falls outside the discipline is seen as ‘noise'. Practitioners in the disciplines have, therefore, been taken as the real men and women of knowledge and their graduates as their perfect replicas and evidence of the relevance of the knowledge they perpetuate. In fact every graduate of the disciplines is some kind of small professor. Once out of the system he or she is expected to manifest accordingly.

 

One is, therefore, a specialist when, through experience and practice in one's discipline, one knows more and more about the encapsulated regime of knowledge in that discipline and less and less about anything else. One's specialist knowledge is assumed to be the type, quality and perhaps quantity necessary for use in formulating or solving human, societal or even environmental and developmental problems and issues or confronting the challenges thereof.

 

It is easy then to see why no discipline ever wants to admit that it does not have all the answers to all human, societal or environmental and developmental problems, issues or challenges. Each discipline further legitimises its knowledge regime by including, as much as possible, the intrusions into them by other disciplines. Those members of the discipline who try to question the knowledge regimes by suggesting that there should be linkages and collaborations between the disciplines through thinking, writing or reasoning beyond the disciplinary boundaries or limits are actively resisted, alienated, marginalised, denied or simply told that they are not ‘focused' or ‘disciplined'. Or else they are told that they should be in some other place. As if this is enough, each discipline is almost equivalent to a Department. The departments may be placed in larger units called Faculties, or even lager units called social sciences, life sciences or physical sciences.

 

There is no doubt that the recent Government statement on future funding of education in the Universities will help re-entrench this status quo to the detriment of transforming education for the future sustainable development of the country. It is in essence transplanting the knowledge styles and practices of the past into the present and prescribing what should obtain in future despite what is broadly happening in education: linking all knowledge.

 

The so-called scientists view science as a process of building theories or models of what the universe consists of, how it is put together and how it functions. The theories consist of a set of assumptions about the universe: pieces of the grand truth about the universe that they are striving to discover, with their assumptions being the closest that they can ever come to that truth. Because sciences in the social sciences (and the humanities) are openly value-packed, natural scientists -believing that values do not play any role in their trade -have traditionally dismissed the social scientists and humanists as non-scientists. In their thinking, allowing social scientists and humanists to encroach on their type of science would pollute it with values.

 

In reality all science -whether natural or social –is value-packed and, in fact, political. This means that science education is and will always be value- packed and political. In fact all education is value-packed and political. There is, therefore, no such thing as value-free, apolitical knowledge, truth, science or education anywhere in the world. For that matter it is nonsense to talk of pure knowledge, truth, science or education. Moreover all truth, science, knowledge and education is ideological and geared towards establishing a kind of hegemony that would serve the role of societal control by the reigning political regime anywhere in the world. This is why any new policy towards science or education must not be taken at its face value.

 

If, for example, the Uganda Government is coming out with a new policy on science education, we must ask: what is the new ideology behind it? If past so-called scientists have not been as creative, initiative, innovative or imaginative as they should be, does the current ideological orientation of the political regime in the field of education aim at enhancing these virtues?

 

It is my view that the purist tendencies or attitudes that Government wants to promote by unfairly discriminating against social scientists and humanists will not breed the kind of scientists that we need to ensure that we do not continue to rely heavily on foreign scientists to create, initiate, or imagine new ways of doing science.

 

I think that the label ‘science' is being used to hide the real design by both foreign capital and the reigning political regime to mind control and dominate the unsuspecting Ugandans.

 

If there has been marriage of convenience in areas such as energy development between foreign capital and the political regime to ensure that there is excessive over-reliance on hydropower from large dams, another marriage of convenience is being hatched in the area of education to ensure that the majority of Ugandan youth who pursue the social sciences and the humanities that are immediately relevant to social development drop out of the education system.

 

I believe this is the most dangerous plot yet to be hatched by the conspiracy of domination and relegation of a people by foreign capital in service of capitalism. It is using education technocrats and the political leaders to produce labour that is floating. Capitalism (the culture of money and corporatism) thrives on labour that can be easily hired and fired and there will be plenty of this when Government implements its science education plan.

 

True, already the phenomenon of the emergence of labour that one can hire and fire at ease has been emerging as a result of a combination of factors, including colonial education structure and structural adjustment programmes. However, it is my view that Government's new idea of promoting what it calls science will worsen the situation. It is anti-change and anti-development.

 

Continuing as before and then discriminating against the large majority of the graduates of our education system is harmful, destructive, misleading and debilitating and blurs the future of our youth whom we have been telling that their primary goal is to serve society (social development). Besides, the active refusal of values in and unity of the sciences can only help to perpetuate the servitude of the mind of the African and ensure further academic, intellectual and literacy dependency in a complicated Century. Death of the mind through dependency is as good as being forced into extinction.

 

Therefore, being a believer in the ‘wholes approach' (sometimes called the holistic approach) to environment and development, including science and education, I advocate that we should not be busy discrimination between knowledges, sciences, truths or education styles but actually integrating them. We should be pursuing pluralism and linkage of intellectual and academic processes based on the view that all science is one. We can do so through interdisciplinarity.

 

Interdisciplinarity entails interaction of the disciplines and their products. It requires day-to-day interaction between persons from different disciplines. It, therefore, requires some learning of the other discipline's basic language and interchange, in interactive mode, of samples, ideas and results.

 

We should be promoting an education system that values interdisciplinarity because doing so will allow for experience of a range of cognitive outcomes such as critical and creative thinking, contextual understanding and coping with complexity, receptivity to new ideas, tolerance of ambiguity, willingness to challenge assumptions and the ability to shift perspectives, to synthesise and to integrate. It will also allow for experience of outcomes related to ways of thinking and, therefore, rethinking of our beliefs and perceptions. It definitely undermines the urge to hoard information and tendency to fear and be silent, individualism and arrogance, and tends to promote teamwork, democracy and openness and collaboration. Finally it breaks down the artificial boundary between the social sciences and the natural sciences, thereby presenting all sciences as one and demanding that everyone is socially and naturally scientific .

 

In terms of interdisciplinary research -which is becoming the inthing this Century -the members of the research team in a research unit jointly bear the responsibility for integration of individual contribution into a coherent whole. Designers of education should be looking to this rather than away from it. Scientists contributing to this kind of research in the 21 st Century will then be working to ensure that (i) different bodies of knowledge are represented in the research group; (ii) group members use different problem-solving approaches; (iii) members of the group perform different roles in solving problems; (iv) members of the group work on a common problem; (v) the group is responsible for the final product; (vi) the group shares common facilities; (vii) the nature of the problem determines the selection of the group members; and (viii) members are influenced by how others perform their tasks.

 

Because environment and development demand breadth rather than narrowness of mind, we have no option but to be current. We must design education policies that do not undermine environment and development. We must have policies that reintegrate knowledge like was the case in the times of ancient Greeks for a more holistic science of environment and development and of the problems, issues and challenges thereof. Promoting an education status quo of academic and intellectual “pigeon holes” in an arrangement of technomechanistic and political power and influence takes us in the past and denies us the right to contribute to progress of humanity this Century.

 

If, therefore, I was asked to give my view as to whether or not a Government of Uganda in the 21 st Century should not educationally discriminate against the social sciences or humanities in terms of funding, however little, my answer would be: “Do not discriminate between but integrate all education”. The current doctrine of “holism” in education has no room for institutionalised discrimination of this nature.

 

Government has the social and political obligation and responsibility to fund the education of every daughter and son of Uganda just as it has such obligation and responsibility to ensure that every citizen accesses a safe, clean and healthy environment, let alone health resources. Therefore, Government should never allow itself, consciously or unconsciously, to become a tool of discrimination against citizens now and well into the future.

 

Together with the Universities and the school system, which it should be presenting with an appropriate education policy, Government should be an agent in facilitating or forging unity of and collaboration between different knowledges to solve our increasingly complex problems of environment and development.

 

Whether we like it or not, the University and school systems are subsidiaries of the State in which Government, however subtly, pursues its hegemonic, ideological goals and myths of governance. Whether we deny it or not, political intrusion in university or school structure and function is inevitable since, as I have shown elsewhere in this article, education is ideological, political and steeped in values. Indeed the recent Government action towards “Science” accosts to this. There is, therefore, an opportunity in crisis for Government to rethink its current ideological, political and value orientations to work towards making education holistic, pluralistic, democratic, all-embracing and interdisciplinary rather than otherwise.

Education, environment and development are today seen as unitary issues forming a tri-polar constellation. Therefore, they should in the 21 st Century be approached holistically without temptation to discriminate between the Sciences or between the Arts and the Sciences. Ignoring this is to accommodate continuing colonial influences, including design and application of meaningless, destructive legislative, executive, judicial, education, environmental or development blueprints.

 

We should not agree to use ourselves to destroy ourselves through education by allowing discriminatory academic and intellectual structures and processes to persist and be strengthened well into the future. They only serve to put us firmly on the road to destruction or extinction, at least academically and intellectually, for foreign interests to benefit as we lose.

 

Remember change is inevitable. We must avoid, however, enhancing attitudinal, administrative, academic and intellectual chauvinism and fundamentalism. Those who refuse to change often face dangers of perishing. Of chauvinists and fundamentalists, the latter are perhaps the more formidable roadblocks to progress. Those who are labeled fundamentalists are often portrayed as fossilised relics, traditionalists clinging to an imagined past in stubborn and irrational resistance to changing circumstances –the very epitome of reaction.

 

In writing this article, therefore, my concern, in the face of holistic approach to education and knowledge, is that political fundamentalism, serviced by fossilised intellectual and academic relics of the other Century, may be forging a formidable front with foreign capital to use the status quo in education to defeat reason in and virtue of linking social sciences and the other sciences for long term survival. I suggest that we do not take the changes desired by Government in the education and funding of our children's education at face value. We need a deep and through-going debate on the way forward now and not later.

 

The BIG question is: If God used both the attitudes that lie in the Arts and the “Sciences” to CREATE and the ancient Greeks regarded all science as ONE until feuding academics in the classical times in Europe created their little knowledges or academic empires by forming disciplines, departments or faculties, why should we continue with education using this obviously wrong model as if it is naturally right?

 

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