Beyond Independence: Decolonizing Education and Reimagining the University

What if true educational freedom begins when students learn not only WHAT to think, but HOW, WHY, and FROM WHERE they think?

Nearly eight decades after Pakistan gained political independence, an important question still deserves our attention: Are we truly free in the way we think, learn, and teach? Political freedom may arrive on a particular date in history. Intellectual freedom is a much longer journey.

In a thought-provoking episode of EdTech 2.0, Dr. Junaid speaks with Professor Dr. Fatima Sajjad, Founding Director of the Centre for Critical Peace Studies at UMT and a scholar of decolonial studies, about the invisible structures that continue to shape what universities consider credible knowledge, whose voices we recognize, and what students believe they are capable of thinking.

The conversation begins with a powerful realization and that is, 'Independence does not automatically decolonize the mind'. For many students, education gradually becomes a race towards grades, rankings, credentials, and the next opportunity. Curiosity and questioning can easily become secondary. Reflecting on her own experience of Pakistan's education system, Dr. Fatima observes: “We were mostly teaching them how to get grades.”

The statement raises a fundamental question for every university educator: What happens to a student's mind when success is measured primarily by reproducing what has already been taught?  A meaningful university education should go beyond completing credit hours and earning a degree. It should develop students who can question assumptions, investigate ideas, challenge established thinking, and remain curious when there is no easy answer.

For teachers, perhaps the more important question is no longer simply 'Did my students understand what I taught them?' It is: Did they leave the classroom with better questions than the ones they brought into it?

One of the most compelling ideas in the conversation is the “captive mind”—the continuing influence of intellectual dependence even after formal colonial rule has ended. Dr. Fatima explains: “We are basically just the consumers of the knowledge which is coming from the West.”

This is not an argument for rejecting Western knowledge. Rather, it asks us to examine what happens when one intellectual tradition becomes so dominant that students begin to assume meaningful knowledge can only come from particular countries, languages, histories, or thinkers. Dr. Fatima challenges that assumption directly: “You have just as much thinking power as the West does.”

Decolonizing education, therefore, is not about replacing one hierarchy with another. It is about giving students the confidence to recognize that knowledge can also emerge from their own histories, communities, languages, lived experiences, and intellectual traditions.

Perhaps the deepest question raised in the conversation is one universities should regularly ask themselves: What are we actually educating people for? Technological advancement, employability, research, rankings, and innovation are valuable. But should they become the ultimate purpose of education? Dr. Fatima offers a striking answer: “The purpose isn't to create human capital for the economy. We want to create human beings.”

This distinction has major implications for higher education. Technology is a tool. Rankings are tools. Employability is an important outcome but education loses something essential if these become its only measures of success. Universities must also nurture empathy, ethical responsibility, intellectual courage, curiosity, and humanity.

Critical thinking cannot flourish where questioning is treated as rebellion. One of the strongest calls emerging from the conversation is for universities to become genuine safe spaces for intellectual inquiry—not spaces where everyone agrees, but spaces where ideas can be examined, challenged, debated, and tested. Dr. Fatima puts it powerfully: “Making university a safe space for people to question and safe space for even dangerous ideas.” This does not mean accepting every idea as correct. It means creating enough intellectual confidence to examine ideas rather than silence them.

For teachers, this can be uncomfortable. A genuinely critical classroom may challenge the teacher's own assumptions, disciplinary traditions, curriculum, or established beliefs but that is precisely where meaningful learning can begin. The teacher of the future may not be the person with every answer. Perhaps it is the teacher who is confident enough to say: “Let's question this together.”

Decolonial thinking is sometimes misunderstood as a rejection of Western knowledge. Dr. Fatima makes the distinction clear: “It's not a rejection of Western knowledge at all. It's engaging with that knowledge on a different scale and giving respect to the knowledge we have.”

This leads to the idea of “Pluriversity” that is a learning environment where multiple knowledge traditions can exist in conversation rather than allowing one tradition to dominate. As she explains: “We're giving respect to different forms of knowledge.”

For university classrooms, this can mean studying global thinkers while also engaging with local intellectual traditions; examining modern scientific knowledge while recognizing indigenous wisdom; and connecting international theories with the realities students experience around them. The question is not which knowledge tradition should replace another. It is: Why should students be taught to believe that only one kind of knowledge can explain the world?

The conversation also turns to one of the most pressing issues facing universities: Artificial Intelligence. While AI is increasingly shaping education, Dr. Fatima challenges educators to think beyond the pressure to simply “keep up.” Her concern is what happens if students begin outsourcing the very thinking that education is supposed to develop: “If critical thinking is a skill we want to develop, AI is going to kill that skill in many ways.”

The challenge is not necessarily to reject AI. Instead, universities need to ask a more fundamental question: What should AI do for human learning and what must remain fundamentally human?

AI can process information and generate responses, but education still depends on curiosity, judgement, empathy, lived experience, ethical reasoning, and the courage to imagine something different. As Dr. Fatima reminds us: “It doesn't have that human punch.” The task for educators is therefore not simply to teach students how to use AI, but how to use it without surrendering their capacity to think.

Near the end of the conversation, Dr. Junaid raises a profound idea: education does not simply serve a public; it creates one. Every classroom is therefore more than a place where information is delivered. It is where future citizens, professionals, researchers, teachers, leaders, and communities are being shaped. Dr. Fatima's response is refreshingly grounded: “What I'm just trying to do is what I think is the right thing to do right now.” That may be where meaningful educational change begins not with the promise that we can control the future, but with the responsibility to teach better in the present.

Decolonizing education does not begin with simply adding a new reading to a syllabus. Critical thinking does not develop merely because it appears in a list of graduate attributes. And we cannot prepare students for the future while discouraging them from questioning the assumptions of the present. Transformation begins with everyday teaching choices: Let students question rather than rewarding silence, introduce diverse intellectual voices beyond the familiar canon, connect global knowledge with local realities, reward original thinking, not only correct answers, use AI critically, rather than treating every new technology as progress, create classrooms where disagreement is intellectually safe, teach students not only how to succeed, but how to become responsible human beings.

The future of education may not ultimately depend on how quickly universities adopt the next technology or climb the next ranking. It may depend on something much more fundamental: Do our classrooms still give students the freedom, space, and courage to think for themselves? True educational freedom is not simply the freedom to access information. It is the freedom of the mind to question, imagine, create, and recreate!