ABSTRACT
The third chapter shifts to India. It examines the nature of the debates accompanying the introduction of higher education in India in the early 19th century. Given that the introduction of modern education is coeval with the colonisation of India by the British and colonisation is often looked upon as a pedagogic task, it is necessary to clarify the nature of this pedagogic task. The postcolonial scholarship points out that education served as the ‘civilising mission’ and introduced a new moral order. To make sense of this ‘new’ moral order, I argue that we have to see liberal/secular education as partly a solution to the moral lack in the ‘natives’, identified as ‘wanting in the fundamental norm of truth’. The pedagogic task of colonial education was therefore an initiation into the truth norm. The norm of any action is transformed into a truth norm and the domain of everyday life upon as a domain of beliefs which now had to be assessed for their truth or falsity. Thus, discussions on education focussed on the moral reform of the natives (pre-supposing a lapse from a normative, moral order) rather than emphasise formation, discovery and self-understanding.
