Postcolonial Bangladesh and neocolonial assimilative literacy practices: the case of private schools and English language programmes

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which neocolonial and assimilative literacy practices colonise the psyche of students through private schools and English language teaching programs in Bangladesh. Colonialist education in British India was designed to produce collaborators and not critical thinkers and to create a new breed of Indians who were Brown in the skin but British in the mind. This paper attempts to understand the impact of neocolonial literacy practices in the psychic colonisation of present-day Bangladeshi students. The research involved conducting a critical discourse analysis of pedagogic materials like syllabi, the Norwood Report of 1943 (a key policy document of British colonial educational policy), and seven institutional websites involved with current literacy practices in Bangladesh. This paper shows that schools following British curricula are creating eclectic identities of students whereby they are compelled to contend simultaneously with an embodied ‘superior’ English cultural capital against an ethno-national ‘Brown’ and ‘inferior’ Bangladeshi ethos. Suggesting possibilities for resistance, the paper thus exposes the colonial elements embedded in literacy practices and developing English language proficiency among Bangladeshis.