Paul Hirst, Liberal Education and the Postcolonial Project

Abstract

Paul Hirst’s defence of liberal education and his forms of knowledge thesis are likely to seem out of step with contemporary calls to decolonise knowledge by ‘delinking’ it from ‘Western’ Enlightenment traditions. In view of the decolonial challenge, and emphasising too that Hirst’s work should be located in its time, we consider the extent to which his account of liberal education still has a place in the postcolonial era. We outline Hirst’s defence of liberal education and how it changed over time, and show how philosophy of education in the tradition in which he has been so influential departed from Hirst’s account of liberal education, with some of these trends anticipating postcolonial imperatives. While there is a pressing need for attention to the significance of colonialism in philosophy of education, the discipline has moved on and diversified considerably over the last half century, including by developing more expansive conceptions of liberal education with the potential to contribute to the postcolonial project. Some elements of Hirst’s defence of liberal education are compatible with the postcolonial project, but it would need adjustment to make it relevant to the postcolonial era. After addressing the postcolonial critique of liberal thought in general as complicit in colonialism, we conclude by assessing what contribution Hirst’s conception of liberal education could make to the postcolonial project, noting a degree of openness to aspects of the decolonial project.