Having just watched Joshua Wong: Teenager vs Superpower (2017), I can’t help but feel the need to point out some of the situational and logistical imperatives that the movement rested on. To begin with let us examine the principal demand raised by Scholarism, the movement founded by Joshua, to the People’s Republic of China – that National Education be withdrawn from Hong Kong. To this precise extent one can see how this may be thought of as a city’s resistance, and that to a city with a Colonial history (Honk Kong) to the nation state (China) which seeks to assert its sovereignty.
The ‘umbrella movement’ emerging from the street assemblies led by Scholarism however depicted the use of tactics like civil disobedience and the occupation of public squares, a strategy that we have seen in many contemporary uprisings, most notably the Arab Spring. The difference is however that the Chinese authorities actually respond and open up a public means of communication with Scholarism. The Chief Executive of Honk Kong, Leung Chun-ying made a truly just point when he remarked at a public conference that the movement cannot ask merely whether national education should be withdrawn or not be withdrawn.
Bear in mind that Scholarism is a movement initially led by high school students resisting the implementation of National Education. It then also became a movement about Universal Adult Suffrage in Honk Kong when an influential law professor Benny Tai joins their cause. The system of political representation in place in Honk Kong at the time entailed Beijing nominate five representatives amongst whom the people could have a vote. With Benny Tai, there arose a demand for Honk Kong to elect their own representative without nominations from the center.
At this point let us leave aside the later history of Scholarism, its dissolution and reformation into Demosisto. What interests me is Leung Chun-ying’s reply, or rather what is unsaid in it, for it is a question imminent to the student protests in Delhi against the UGC. If there is not to be an implementation of national education, then what shall constitute the curriculum that students study? The demands raised on those barricades were of Institutional Autonomy, yet this in itself is not enough – one must ask the question, the autonomy to do what? Who actually determines what students study? Presently, within public universities in India the curriculum is drafted by departmental committees and ratified by a Board of Study authorized by the Vice Chancellor and which is at liberty to invite external members. We still do not have any student representation in what is to consist of a curriculum and perhaps what is most disappointing, is that this has not even been raised as a demand.
The overarching situation hence becomes a power struggle between the institutional mechanisms of universities and the UGC, with students serving merely as fodder for a fire whose warmth is basked in without any representative or even nominalistic results, for come the day after when classes resume, they are determined by this or that authority.
My intervention here would be to point out that with the means at our disposal today can we not ask for a peer reviewed syllabic structure? One which enables the freedom of discovery that is quite frankly non existent within how thesis’s are doctored within the contemporary establishment. What we require is not simply the freedom of some institutions (such as educational enterprises, be it schools or universities) from other institutions (such as local and central governments) but a representative procedural democracy within institutions that is willing to learn from and incorporate the goal of questions that arise. If there are any of you watching this who know of any steps being taken towards this I would be most eager to know.
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