Decolonizing Education

Catalog description

Frantz Fanon (1963) writes that decolonization "sets out to change the order of the world." This course approaches decolonization in and around Education not as a "metaphor" for "civil and human rights-based social justice projects" couched in diversity, inclusion, and equity (Tuck and Yang 2012), but as part of a range of political projects and experiments that have sought to fundamentally reorder global structures, systems, and relations of power. Though prevailing philosophies about the meaning and purpose of Education cast schooling as a critical pathway to democratic, socially just, and inclusive societies, the historical foundations and contemporary realities of formal education in the Global South complicate theses ideals. For much of the formerly colonized world, Western education was one of the earliest and most enduring imperial projects, which deliberately undermined indigenous systems of knowing and learning in order to produce "good" subjects for incorporation into colonial regimes. Despite the promises of post-colonial nationhood, in most parts of the world, education still retains this function as the primary instrument of elite re/production and social stratification. And, yet, education is also typically imagined as central to decolonial and anti-imperial projects, improving social conditions, and forms of social and political belonging. This course interrogates histories and contemporary realities related to the politics and possibilities of Education from the vantage point of the Global South, which here signals a geography of relative geopolitical power indexing relations of development/underdevelopment, core/periphery, and empire/colony. By considering the various ways education has been part of decolonizing projects, we will investigate the relationships between education and indigenous ways of knowing and learning, colonialism, nationalism,…