The Limits of "Knowledge for All": Historicizing U.S.-Kenya School Reforms

• In Event: Marginalization, Discrimination, and Inequality in Education Discourses Worldwide

Abstract

Calls to increase access to and improve the quality of schooling in nations and peoples in the “developing world” are commonsense means of improving outcomes for marginalized groups. This paper questions the limits of this humanitarian impulse by historically comparing two transnational school reforms in Kenya—the Jeanes School, Kabete (1924-1939) and Bridge International Academies (2009-present). At the center of both interventions are the child, family, and community who-are-different, whose inclusion in the promise of “knowledge for all” can only occur by first seeing marginalized groups as occupying a non-reasoning space that must be reformed. Historicizing the present is a strategy to question a commonsense that disqualifies other ways of being, thinking, acting, and feeling in the world as non-reasoning.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin-Madison