Indigenous Science




Knowledge and education.
The gap between knowledge and education is one of the reasons why kids struggle with science subjects because knowledge is local to a geographical area like a desert, sea, forest, mountains or grassland, while education is geared towards serving a particular language, economy and a way of life perceived as ‘developed.’

Because knowledge is territorial, kids growing up in a desert know more about water, its scarcity, availability and how to save it than kids that live near the sea, waterfalls or rivers.  However, that doesn’t make kids that live in a desert more intelligent than their coastal counterparts.  Not knowing something is a handicap, not stupid, as most kids in Europe, Canada and the U.S. label what they don’t know.
The gap between knowledge and education is the reason why teachers seldom stress the connection between nature and science.  It is not intentional at all.  It’s the medium of instruction.  A circle is taught like a circle, not something kids know in their languages and see everyday, like the sun and the moon. 

Their house is built in a circle; water pots are a circle; single plates where everybody eats with their hands are circles; most games they play involve joining hands and going around in circles except for games like jump rope (ingqathu), which survived slavery and is still played by African Americans in Georgia, Illinois and New York; meetings adults have under the tree are in a circle and the tortoise rural kids don’t bother at all, has luggage that is almost a circle.
People, history books list as primitive knew science.  They understood the weather better than Environment Canada or T.V weather women that later became actresses.  They had no alternative.  Survival.  They had to understand all the nuances of their god given environment. They understood why animals that normally howl at night, howled in broad daylight. 

Knowledge is how kids live at home.  They see their mothers harvest corn, place dead stems and leaves in a heap for recycling back into the earth, take the corn home, put it in a pot, it boils, steam forms on the lid and the corn is cooked after a few minutes.
Education is separating the corn’s journey, the steam on the lid for example.  The science teacher calls it condensation.  She takes them to the laboratory to demonstrate this scientific process.  Water is no longer water, but a string of difficult Latin, English or French words that students have to memorize.  The same thing applies to explaining the reincarnation of the dead stems and leaves back into the soil.

Parents cannot help their kids with homework because they have knowledge acquired thousands of years ago, not education.  Simply put, they don’t speak English or French. Prince Charles and his grandchildren have an advantage. They speak English so there is no demarcation between knowledge and education.
Teachers have a lot on their plate in 2019 and beyond, which makes it difficult for them to take students to the forest and explain science.  It’s even worse for urban schools.  No forest, just concrete and plastic. 
Teachers in rural areas where indigenous languages such as Cree, Maori and Zulu are still spoken, could use idioms to introduce scientific concepts because idioms are granaries of how people relate to nature. 

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Elections And Political Bullies

Comfort Food As Regret Food

Organic Brussels Sprouts