Tracing Decolonial Options in the History of Sami Educational Philosophy by Stine H. Bang Svendsen

Decolonizing education is a project that relies on tracing the paths towards a different futures that have become overgrown and barely visible due to the dominance of colonial institutional practice and thought. In this essay I outline a decolonial future for education that was imagined by Saami philosopher and teacher Per Fokstad (1890-1973) in the first decades of the 20th century. At this time, the Norwegian system for comprehensive education was in its early formation. Fokstad suggested a curriculum based on the principles of mother-tongue instruction for all children, and a multi-lingual and multi-cultural education system that could accommodate equal rights to education for all children. His suggestions to the national school committee working from 1922-1926 were rejected, as they considered assimilation into Norwegian language and culture the only viable future for Saami children. A century later, however, Fokstad’s educational philosophy still points towards a decolonizing future for Norwegian and Sami education.

What if education was a right for all children?

Per Fokstad was a teacher and politician born in 1890 who lived and worked for Saami education until his death in 1973. His influence on what would become institutionalized Saami education is difficult to exaggerate. He proposed the first plan for a Saami school with a Saami curriculum in the early 1920s, he was part of the postwar Saami commission and most other initiatives to promote Saami education in the postwar era. Towards the end of his lifetime some of the institutions and education practices he had envisioned was being realized, to his great joy. He remained controversial throughout his life, however, due to his “unrealistic” and “damaging” political demands for Saami education. He left letters that attest to a deep, and indeed existential, doubt that Norwegians could ever understand the Saami cause. Meanwhile, he kept writing to his Norwegian colleagues about the possibility of an equal relationship between the Norwegian and indigenous Saami people, attesting to a hope of being heard eventually.

In the essay “How Norwegianization interfered in my life” from 1917, Per Fokstad published the first notes towards a Saami educational philosophy and school that he would develop throughout his life as a teacher and politician. The problem with Norwegianization, he explained, was that it hindered Saami childrens’ spontaneous and intuitive expressions of the self through preventing them from using their mother tongue. He wrote of his own experience of schooling in the early 1900s:

“Something revolutionary occurred in ones emotional life. The bright, forward openness left; the childlike mirth disappeared. One dear not ask about anything; one only guessed. Never did an expression of wonder escape ones lips. It was as if one suddenly had grown old. One became mute. And gripped by a feeling of loneliness” (Fokstad 1917: 39)[1] .

In this quote Fokstad describes how a school that rejects children’s self expression is likely to harm their construction of self- esteem and confidence, but also that it amounts to a destructive individualization of the bodily experience of the world, resulting in loneliness. For Fokstad the denial of the chance to express oneself severed the ties between the self and the world in ways that instilled an existential doubt in the child about whether one would ever be heard or understood. 

These remarks highlight a keystone in Fokstad’s thinking about education. For him, self expression, which is any expression of will or intention, has a felt motivation in the self, and can only be expressed in relation to others. Self expression, then, is both affective and collective in nature.[2]  This is a point he keeps returning to in his work, articulated in different ways. Late in life, in an interview with Tor Edvin Dahl, he says “Do you understand this? (…) I cannot speak in the ordinary way. I need understanding. I need to know that one is on my side, else I cannot muster the energy to speak” (Fokstad cited in Dahl 1970: 14). I read the carefulness he articulated here as the lifelong effect of the emotional revolution of his schooling. When the social space for expression has been denied early in life, one ceases to presume its existence. The self grows guarded, careful, and doubtful of the capacity of others to meet and harbor its feelings and thoughts. He likened this state of the self to being frozen: “We are frozen to the core. We feel like we should have been laying in the ice. We cannot be ourselves. We must act, pretend, become false.” (Ibid: 14, See also Jensen, 2005; 147)

 

A school for all

Fokstad’s alternative to the freezing of the Saami child and Saami self-expression that Norwegian schooling mandated was a Saami school. The Saami school he proposed for the Norwegian parliamentarian school commission (1922-1926) was a separate Saami school located in Saami communities, with Saami teachers who instructed the children in Saami language in all subjects. He proposed that Norwegian should be taught as a foreign language from grade 5. His argument for the necessity of the mother tongue suggests a link between the mother tongue and the necessary love and appreciation needed to welcome and invite children’s self-expression. He wrote: 

“Only with the help of the mother tongue could one’s interest awake. By that one could get the child’s feelings into words. For feeling is the door to sense and will in any human being. Only for the warm and the good would one open up, and the warmth is felt in the mother tongue” (Fokstad 1917:39).

Fokstad argued that the Norwegian teacher could not reach the Saami child because they did not share a language of the heart. He contrasts the distant and cold pedagogical acts of the Norwegian teacher with those of the Saami mother, who brings language to life and gives meaning to letters. I think that this reference to the maternal relation also suggests that the language of the heart in questions not merely linguistic. Prior to the spoken language is touch, visual communication, and gesture. But like language, physical expression and communication has cultural formats. It should not, thinking with Fokstad, be thought of as a possible universal dimension in the language of the heart. 

The pedagogy of love that I read from Per Fokstad’s work is centered on the actions that love into becoming (fremelsker) children’s self-expression in processes of teaching and learning. The will to express oneself relies on the knowledge that the expression is wanted and recognized by others, in this case the teacher. Thinking with Fokstad, recognition cannot be universalized, however. This is important, as the term recognition as derived from Axel Honneth, is used as a universal in education research and practice as something that any teacher can practice in relation to any child. For Fokstad, recognition relies on the experience-based knowledge of the child’s means of expression. Strictly speaking, this is not “knowledge” as understood by western philosophy at all. As it is based in the senses, it cannot be universalized, and made into theoretical knowledge. Rather, recognition in Fokstad’s sense can be understood as sensibility. It is through sensibility for the child’s expression that the teacher can express her warmth, which in turn can inspire curiosity and interest. 

 

Decolonial options for the future?

If affects are feelings that have not yet found their match in words (Brennan, 2004), language mediates between the felt self and the self’s expression as it is heard by others. For Fokstad, the racist devaluation of Saami language and culture made it feel impossible for him to express himself honestly, and to expect to be understood. 

100 years after he made his critique of Norwegian comprehensive education, it remains a primarily monolingual and monocultural project, in which only the main colonial English languages and cultures have been awarded any value in addition to Norwegian. The establishment of a Saami version of the national curriculum from the 1990s onwards can be seen as an admission of the violence that the Norwegian assimilation policy. Nevertheless, the failure to facilitate a truly bilingual schooling that also asks Norwegian children to learn some Saami makes it very difficult for Saami education to succeed in its aim to educate bilingual Saami children. 

If Fokstad’s basic principles for education were to be honored today, education in Saepmie and beyond could take their first meaningful steps towards decolonizing education. The paths to a decolonizing future can be found in the paths that were left unused in our not so distant past. 

 

References

Dahl, T. E. (1970). Samene i dag – og i morgen. En rapport. Oslo: Gyldendal.

Fokstad, P. (1917) Hvordan fornorskingen i barneskolen grep ind i mitt liv. I J. Hidle og J. Otterbech (red.)  Fornorskingen i Finnmarken.  Kristiania: Lutherstiftelsens bokhandel. 28-44.

Jensen, E. B. (2015). Tromsøseminarister i møte med en flerkulturell landsdel. Stonglandseidet: Nordkalottforlaget.