DECOLONIZING EDUCATION

Catalog description

Schooling has proved one of the most powerful modern technologies for socializing and enculturating successive generations of students. This course engages with the problems the Anthropology of Education has posed since its formalization in 1950s and 1960s for schooling, learning, and the reproduction of inequality. Utilizing readings, films, and discussions we investigate the “hidden curriculum” schools, the distance between the official goals of educators and actual effects on students and we will ask why education, so often posed as remedy to society’s problems, seems to instead perpetuate failure for many of its students. Exploring decolonizing, structural, informal, and other anthropological approaches, we will examine the rich ethnographies that have challenged assumptions about schooling and provided surprising and insightful nuance to how students learn, resist, and experience education."