Postcolonial Bangladesh and neocolonial assimilative literacy practices: the case of private schools and English language programmes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which neocolonial and assimilative literacy practices colonise the psyche of students through private schools and English language teaching programs in Bangladesh. Colonialist education in British India was designed to produce collaborators and not critical thinkers and to create a new breed of Indians who were Brown in the skin but British in the mind. This paper attempts to understand the impact of neocolonial literacy practices in the psychic colonisation of present-day Bangladeshi students. The research involved conducting a critical discourse analysis of pedagogic materials like syllabi, the Norwood Report of 1943 (a key policy document of British colonial educational policy), and seven institutional websites involved with current literacy practices in Bangladesh. This paper shows that schools following British curricula are creating eclectic identities of students whereby they are compelled to contend simultaneously with an embodied ‘superior’ English cultural capital against an ethno-national ‘Brown’ and ‘inferior’ Bangladeshi ethos. Suggesting possibilities for resistance, the paper thus exposes the colonial elements embedded in literacy practices and developing English language proficiency among Bangladeshis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".