Importance of unlearning in higher education

The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb. – Prof.

(Author- The New Education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux)

By Susantha Hewa

Often, education is considered synonymous with learning. It connotes effort, acquisition, gathering, processing, construction, etc. Rarely does anyone think of associating it with unlearning. You are yet to hear of a person who goes to school or university to unlearn. Unlearning seems to be too paltry to deserve a place anywhere near education. Worse, for many people, unlearning may sound the exact opposite of learning. The point is unlearning, which sounds like abandoning or letting go, is a vital and inevitable process in leaning, though generally, remain in the background.

You may bet that one would hardly come across the word “unlearning” in any curriculum or syllabus. In any syllabus, no unit is built on the ‘unlearning’ of the previous unit. In learning, as a general rule, one proceeds from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown. Our schools are yet to incorporate a subject which tests whether the student has unlearned what he has previously learned or acquired. After all, it makes little sense to teach something at one level only to negate it at the next level!

However, intriguingly, every study programme embeds a latent unlearning process, no matter what the discipline is. That life is a learning process is no news, but how often do we construe it as an unlearning process, which is inseparable from the former? Isn’t there a tacit implication of unlearning whenever someone says that he “learned a lesson”? The fact is, learning and unlearning, whether in formal contexts or otherwise, is so fused that often the latter goes undetected. When unlearning is made to occur at a conscious level it is obviously seen as unorthodox and disparagingly called “brainwashing” by those who feel exposed or imperiled. This is natural when conscious or innovative unlearning is aimed at challenging ‘authority’ or tradition. In science, humanities or social sciences, unlearning results when existing models fail to explain ‘established facts’, for example, the ousting of the Geocentric theory by Copernicus’ Heliocentric theory, or, the rise of feminism against forms of oppression of women. It is obvious that such revolutionary landmarks in knowledge expansion had to cope with resistance. The fact is, although education is widely defined sans political tinges, it is inseparably tied with global economic and political trends and, obviously, those who are at the levers of power wouldn’t want any deviations to upset the status quo.

In light of the foregoing, it is not difficult to appreciate the views of Prof. Farzana Hannifa, as enunciated in her article titled “Undervaluing Social Science and Humanities teaching in the Sri Lankan University System”, which appeared in The Island of February 1, 2022. The article is interesting in its focus on “unlearning” and in the way she draws attention to the influence of market-oriented thinking dominating the general perceptions about tertiary education. As she says, the latter is evidenced by the smugness with which the goals of university education is often coupled with “employability” and the apparent lack of attention to Humanities (H) and Social Sciences (SS) in formulating even overarching quality assurance outlines. She says, “The AHEAD project is the latest World Bank-funded university improvement exercise and the mantra of “employability”– the contentious ground from which all recent higher education policymaking is done—drives this particular project cycle as well. The workshop we attended was entitled “How to incorporate employability skills into teaching and learning in University Education using the Sri Lanka Quality Assurance Framework (SLQF).” When higher education gets increasingly aligned with producing “employable graduates” for the corporate world, it is not surprising that even quality assurance frameworks are formulated with little or no attempt to bring perspectives of Arts Degree programmes in to such schemes.

The article also emphasises the relevance of “unlearning” that is invaluable in creating a culture of questioning. Prof. Hannifa says, “In our H and SS programmes, we constantly strive to teach students to unlearn what has become “normal” in popular parlance.” Of course, as we have already mentioned, an element of unlearning is embedded in all “learning” processes. For example, science education helps people to unlearn many of the superstitions acquired although it is not specifically intended to achieve this end. However, some Arts stream programmes incorporate modules where the unlearning aspect is more pronounced, i.e. as in feminist studies.

To digress briefly, it is true that outcome-based education is salutary in that it evinces a recognition of preference to a student-centred teaching methodology as against the outdated teacher-centred education. However, it has to be understood that an outcome-based education, which focuses on student performance at different levels, obviously, would not be the ideal teaching paradigm to help students to “unlearn” what they have learned as “normal.” For example, feminist studies incorporated in some Arts Degree programmes challenging the stereotyping of ‘gender roles’ in personal and social life, help students unlearn some of the familiar concepts that have become normalised over generations. It is obvious that such programmes need broader and more flexible criteria for assessing student performance than the more “technical” outcome-based assessment methods. In fact, even the inclusion of “student performance” may be debatable when conceptualizing the relevant evaluation criteria. In such a context, Prof. Hannifa’s comments with regard to the consideration of the content of the workshop conducted under the World-Bank funded AHEAD project are significant: “The years we spend teaching students to recognize different forms of inequality and marginalization, to explain their histories, how they continue to persist, to analyse the material effects of such situations and their prevalence in students’ own contexts, and to design creative strategies to overturn persisting inequality and marginalization, are negated in the trainer’s assumptions.”

Despite the apparent lack of recognition for streams of Humanities and Social Sciences in universities, these disciplines, or at least some of their modules, help students to acquire new insights to critically examine time-honoured ideological structures in society. The Indian sage, Krishnamurti emphasizes the value of “unlearning” when he says, “”

In conclusion, it has to be said that there are other established ideological structures that foster and perpetuate some seemingly unsolvable conflicts in society that seemed to have evaded the radar of humanities and social sciences. It would benefit society if the concerned academics pay more attention to exploring such seemingly innocuous but disruptive divisions among categorises of race, ethnicity, religion, etc., that continue to plague our society, which have become instruments of manipulation in the hands of vested interests.