Our History

How Science is Taught

If working together to solve our common problems requires a planet-wide earth community, and if there can be no community without a common story shared by its members, and if the closest thing we have to a common story shared by all the women and men alive today is the one told by the natural sciences, then how science is taught has important social consequences.

It can determine whether or not all humans regard themselves as members of a family sharing a home. Today science is taught everywhere. It has the potential to be the common vision needed for transformation. But how science is being practiced, propagated, and taught in schools in the light of the its historical and ever mounting baggage of alienation, exclusion, hierarchization and epistemological disenfranchisement makes conscientious people cry out in more than despair. 

Science, Education and Governance

We need an ‘Education’ that is enlarged beyond the western practice of schools and subjects, and that is deepened to fill the empty spaces in our inclusive imaginary, which should be occupied with diverse knowledges – traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge, civilizational knowledges from all parts of the world.

It should focus on laying the basis of creating an Indigenous Diplomacy, ethical space, cognitive justice, the tacit constitution, knowledge panchayats, metaphysics of Ubuntu, true tolerance, restorative action, dialogue of knowledges, Truth and Reconciliation of knowledges.

Looking Beyond the Classroom

We need an education which creates a context in which the democratic imagination and conversation is constructed between the knowledge systems for emerging leaders across the disciplines and sectors. A new approach to decision making in governance, in science and the educational field that seeks to integrate questions of global ethics, learning and plurality must be found. A new governance model of local-global interface focusing on issues of sustainability, and fostering an increased consciousness of a human mission in a complex world is needed urgently.

Such new governance should be underpinned by a lived ethics, not compliance driven ethics that is commonplace today. Education should produce leaders who must look beyond the “classroom” and its world of objects, categories and restrictive logic to foster a wider understanding of science, history, technologies, and cultural sciences as practiced by other knowledge systems.

Innovations that come from this education goes beyond innovation from the laboratories to innovations from below (Mashelkar 2002).

Emphasizing the plurality of cultures

The Institute is an attempt to add to the democratic imagination, emphasizing the plurality of cultures, enhancing the relation between knowledge and democracy by linking it to livelihood and citizenship. It is African in that it develops out of UBUNTU, a theory of caring and humility; but it is global in the sense that it seeks to identify theories of “caring” and humility that exists variously in the global setting so that the violence of exclusion that permeates the scientific field is brought and discussed in public. 

By optimizing plurality and minimizing violence, the Institute sets the frame for dialogic knowledge as a playful, yet disciplined and a strategic way of creating the conversation of cultures: a great thought experiment. By the Institute taking on “Applied” dimensions of governance, it will develop the epistemics of governance that will be worked out in terms of a new vocabulary beyond the unnuanced model of governance that is practiced today. 

Lived ethics interacts with epistemology to create a more ecological critique of governance. It links memory and innovation. We need to search for a new language beyond current economics and the governance that ensues from it by introducing a sense of locality, context and relevance. 

The distinction between frugal subsistence and poverty

Indigenous ways of living/knowing also teach much about the crucial distinction between “frugal subsistence” and “poverty” (Gupta 1999). It is knowledge surrounding all pupils in Africa, emerging from their grass-thatched huts but which is excluded from the curriculum. 

Our nation’s leaders and educators must look beyond the classroom to foster students’ interest in science, history, technology, humanities, cultural sciences and society; beyond a world of objects, categories, and restrictive logic as we know it from the way science is taught today. It must take the future leaders into an examination between African/indigenous languages and their relationships to the energies of all living things –rocks, trees, plants, birds, fish and animals.