Contesting a Transnational Crisis: A History of "the Child," "the African," and "the Mind"

• In Event: 44.029 - Making Up People: Futurities, Fear, and Hope

Abstract

In development discourse about Sub-Saharan Africa today, a prevailing narrative holds that children living on less than $2 USD a day need quality schooling to lift themselves, their families, and communities out of poverty. This transnational “crisis” of education is often located in Africa’s “villages and slums” (Bridge, 2016; Global Partnership for Education, 2016; World Bank, 2010) that are perceived as particularly distant from education’s promise. Yet the economic and geographical distinctions of income and place are not merely that; they belie cosmopolitan judgments about intolerable modes of life that must be changed. In the transnational crisis of schooling is an unspoken cultural thesis: if the “problem” of inequality is found in poor Sub-Saharan children’s lack of education, then the solution lies in transforming the mind of the African child.

This paper asks how this formulation of a transnational educational crisis became intelligible to thought. The paper considers the relationship between truth and power in the foundations for transnational comparisons and judgments that proliferate in schooling today. Specifically, “the child,” “the mind,” and “the African” are analyzed as objects of scientific discourse that emerged in the long 19th century of U.S. and European settler colonialism. Historically and today, these objects have enabled a transnational field of thought and action by universalizing notions of sameness and difference, and the sharing of “best practices” between diverse actors, localities, and temporalities.

Bringing together pedagogical past and present makes visible an irony of contemporary reforms’ efforts to include and uplift target populations (i.e., to provide “knowledge for all”). The gesture to include first requires seeing its target population as the “not all” who is made up as pathologically different (Hacking, 1986; Popkewitz, 1998). The reforms, in this way, differentiate and divide individuals and groups on a hierarchy of cosmopolitan values (Popkewitz, 2008). These reforms make up kinds of people and modes of life as backwards, problematic, or dangerous, and make them subject to intervention to eliminate those negative qualities.

Methodologically, the paper is a history of the present that explores the “reason” of schooling (Foucault, 2003). Reason refers to the shifting set of logics, knowledge and practices that define the problems of education reforms, past and present. “The mind,” “the child,” and “the African” are studied as made up of intersecting sets of practices that come together as seemingly natural ways to address the problems of schooling and child development.

Studying difference as the practices and principles that classify kinds of people is to reveal the processes by which selective comparisons secure relations of power (Stoler, 2009), and that make (im)possible particular ways of being, seeing, feeling, and acting in the world. Historicizing the objects of schooling makes visible durable ontological hierarchies, developmental narratives, and humanitarian warrants to intervene. It is a strategy of resistance in that it makes the authority of existing systems of reason contestable—and makes necessary the consideration of alternatives other than those already present

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas