Impact of colonial education in Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey
Uploaded by menkash on Apr 13, 2006
Hodge’s book Crick Crack, Monkey is a story that mirrors the racist and the class divisions in the society. She wrote about women, their lives and the effects of Post Colonial education. Hodge believes that these divisions were fostered and nourished by the British cultural influences. Girls’ education is portrayed mainly through the education of Tee in Crick Crack, Monkey. Tee's education puts her above the 'ordinariness' of Tantie's household, but at the same time, it does not make her belong anywhere. At school, Tee was expected to get the same education as the colonizer, thus "civilizing" her. Children were taught European things, and thereby acquired European culture. Her reading career "began with A for Apple, the exotic fruit that made its brief and stingy appearance at Christmastime," and then she had to learn about Jack and Jill and Little Boy Blue, all the time wondering, "what, in all creation, was a 'haystack'?". She also wondered why Little Miss Muffet "sat eating her curls away." Through all this confusion, if she didn't understand things, or misbehaved, she was beaten; her schoolmaster regularly whipped children's hands when they were out of line.
As Sophia Lehmann [7] rightly puts it, 'The paradox of assimilation is that it tends to worsen rather than lessen the sense of marginality for which it was supposed to be the cure'. However, assimilation only became needed as 'cure' once Tee was feeling marginalized, a condition she did not know before her schooling or her stay at Aunt Beatrice's. Thus, the colonized middle class passes on its own sense of marginalization, which results in an endless cycle of attempted assimilation as a supposed resolution to a state brought about by the desire for education - and education then makes the feeling of marginalization more acute. At school, Tee was expected to get the same education as the colonizer, thus "civilizing" her. Children were taught European things, and thereby acquired European culture.
Hodge has argued against this form of education that seeks to abrogate the student's experience: "The problem in a country that is colonized...is that the education system takes you away from your own reality...turns you away from the Caribbean...We never saw ourselves in a book, so we didn't exist in a kind of way and our culture and our environment, our climate, the plants around us did not seem real, did not seem to be of any importance--we...