Western education is never superior

THE general consensus in non-western countries, or the Global South as it’s called, is that the education system in Western countries are far superior to their own or in any other countries that are not in the West.
Papua New Guinea is not an exception. Most, if not all, of us believe that anyone educated in Australia, US, Canada, NZ, or Europe are far better qualified than anyone educated in PNG.
This belief is not just held by the average village idiot. People in the city and, most especially, employers also believe this, as if it’s a fact of nature.
This is psychological colonisation and we have to change this mindset.
I’ve seen during the election period, a candidate went out of his way to point out that his peak of educational journey was achieved in an American university, as if that gave them extra brain cells. And the masses bought into that nonsense.
It’s not that significant to hold a degree from the West. That does not make you more qualified or more capable than someone educated here.
Our universities have produced some of our brightest minds that are in our workforce today and in the past as well.
I’m sorry to have to put it this way but if you think that whiter education is superior, then you’ll never be able to see our academics, our teachers, our scholars, and our experts as anything but inadequate and inferior.
This is not an isolated peculiar anomaly of our society alone. Almost everyone in the Global South share this belief.
Universities in the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are just as good or even better than universities in the West.
The first university was built in the Middle East (Iraq) almost two centuries before the Europeans had the concept of university.
This false perception of reality was imposed by colonialism and Eurocentric narratives that forever cast the people of the Global South as nothing but supporting side characters in the story of the world.
All they have left in the West is this western-centric ranking system for universities, telling the world that their universities are better than everyone else’s, but that’s just branding.
It is like a hand bag that’s worth K20 but they are selling it for hundreds of Kinas because of the logo.
The actual value of Western education is mediocre at best these days.
If you attach high standards and prestige to Western degrees, then you are reinforcing colonised mentality.
You are attaching value to Western-ness, and simultaneously decreasing the value of our own society.
If this mentality persists, we are not going to get the most qualified people into the positions that they need to be in, in order for our society to flourish and succeed.
We are going to be putting our own people into positions of worshipping the West and they will ignore our own achievements, history, culture, beliefs and heritage.
In other words, we’ll be putting people in charge of our country who’ll then look down at us with the same disdain that the colonisers did and they’ll run things in a way that they think the colonisers will approve of, because they’ll think it is more “civilised”, to the extent that they’ll think that Western approval is more important than the prosperity of our society.
They’ll even be opposed to our political Independence and economic sovereignty. They’ll think nothing is good unless the West is obeyed or emulated.
Look at how the West have run their own society, their economy and their political system. They instigate wars, made common cause with banks and weapon manufacturers, legalised abortion, legalised same-sex marriages, normalising single-parenting, normalising pedophilia (they’re calling it Minor Attracted Person now), and now they can’t even decide what gender/species they are.
Their population is dwindling. They’re dying out, to the point where they’ve replaced their manual workers with robots and automation.
That’s not a successful model of society. The fact that it’s unsuccessful is part of the reason why the global economy has shifted out of the West.
If we follow their way, we will destroy our own society as well.
So yes, it is fundamentally dangerous to hold their education system as being better than ours.
We would lose nothing if we stopped sending our people over there to get that overpriced mediocre education.

Phil Kaizerman
PoM