Skip to main content

Macaulay's Children: The problem of how we pick what to teach

As a Professor of Communication teaching in Singapore, I have often been struck by the absence of introductory or advanced texts that are grounded in Singapore or in the broader context of Asia.

I find myself having to cover Western concepts of Perception, Stereotyping, or Media Structures as the fundamentals of communication and new media theorising, modifying then the readings in the texts to "fit" my students in Singapore by drawing in examples or cases from Singapore. As I pick an international version of a much-used US-based text, I am left wondering what it means to have an "international" version of an introductory text, where most of the concepts are US-centric.

Singapore emerges in my pedagogy as a source of case studies, built into a comparative frame where the foundations are covered in a required US text.

I remain dissatisfied with this strategy of adapting a fundamentally US-centric text to the Singapore context of my students (I am not even sure what the term international means in the title of the text I have adopted).

I recognise that the base remains US-centric, but this is nevertheless a base that gives me an entry point and I end up using the text, in spite of all my writings on decolonizing method and pedagogy.

This problem with having to pick texts and seminal readings raises a vital question about pedagogy, located in Asia.

What are we to teach students as seminal texts? What texts get counted as seminal texts?

So for instance, with students in my critical-cultural studies module, do I go to Adorno, Horkheimer, Gillroy, and Williams? And what are the implications of these choices

What would an English literature professor pick as seminal texts? Would she go to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bronte, and Blake?

And what about students in Psychology? Would they be required to read about William James, cognitive dissonance, impression management, expectancy value, big five, psychodynamic theory etc.?

And what then would be specific to their lived experiences as we teach from these Western materials, rooted in Western thought, and presented to them as universal markers of theory? Do we teach them to adapt their world-views and adjust themselves to these theories? Do we teach them to take these theories as the seminal pieces and then look at how they can understand their lived experiences in Singapore through the language of these theories?

How do we, and how do I, as a Professor of Communication in Singapore, choose what to pick?

Why is it that I find myself at a loss to pick seminal texts that are rooted in Singapore or China or India.

Perhaps my failure as a teacher in delivering my pedagogy in content rooted in Asia (or a specific locale within Asia) is tied to my predicament as Macaulay's child. 

Digging deep into the history of colonialism   of India tells me how a rich history and tradition of education in India was systematically erased through Macaulay's intervention. Macaulay, believing that the Indian languages were incapable of providing a basis for a modern education, introduced English as a colonial intervention into India, accompanied by the widespread teaching of English literature as the basis for modernisation. He had argued that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England,’ thus unleashing a violent history of erasure that is integral to the pedagogy of modern India. 

You see, what we take as seminal today, is deeply tied to this history of oppression and erasure. 

As a child of Macaulay's intervention, I must speak his language (English), read his literature (English literature), and proclaim my arguments in a form that is rooted in the logics of the English language.  Even as I write this blog post, I must erase myself so I can participate, benefit from the accompanying economic logics, and erase the rich narratives of my Bengali culture. More importantly, the erasure is so final that I don't know any other way to express myself outside of Macaulay's logic. Much like the problem with the selection of my introductory text, I am deeply tied to he assumption of what must be included in order to form a foundation in education in a specific discipline.

In other words, my ability to select and be inclusive is constituted within a liberal modernist logic that must erase my Bengali identity and work it into the training of the baboo class that my forefathers were bred into. In this sense, selection is both a privilege and also a tremendous sense of loss. Selection is a luxury that places me in an economically viable profession of being an academic with a global reach in a position to make decisions about what gets taught in the classroom.

To humbly start the process of decolonizing what I teach and how I teach what I teach, I recognise that I must myself start on a journey of decolonisation, trying to understand my erasures amid my privileges.

This journey of decolonisation itself is a paradox as I know not how deeply I have been erased and how deeply I have erased myself.

I have a strong feeling that the language in which I express myself is not the soul I feel within, and the yearnings of my soul from deep within must remain unspoken, hidden, silenced, erased.

Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor

  The Substack and the Slur: How a Manufactured Crisis Toppled a Wahine Māori Political Editor On the architecture of the Aotearoa culture-war machine, and the danger it poses to a democracy heading into 2026 There is a particular cadence to the afternoon on which the career of a senior Māori journalist  at TVNZ is finished. It is unhurried. It begins with a tweet — in this case, a single image of a typed statement, posted by Maiki Sherman, the now-former political editor of TVNZ, on the afternoon of Friday, 8 May 2026, announcing that she had parted ways with the broadcaster. The post was terse, dignified, and final. As RNZ later reported , Sherman wrote that the scrutiny of the previous week had placed enormous pressure on her and rendered her role "untenable." The first wahine Māori to lead a major broadcaster's political team was gone. The story that finished her had not, ten days earlier, existed in any newspaper, on any wire, on any website you would consider mai...
Read more