Life Education, Curricular Reflections, and Radical Educators

• In Event: A Decolonized Curriculum Future: Toward Geopolitical Traditions of Educational and Cultural Criticism

Abstract

Objectives
This essay examines Chinese educator and democrat, Tao Xingzhi, whose civic engagement helped build a nation, and national poet Raúl Ferrer, leader of the legendary Cuban National Literacy Campaign (1961). The question(s) posed are: when studying Tao Xingzhi and Raúl Ferrer, what is revealed in the relationship between education, democracy, literacy, and revolution?

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
Currently, Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) is drawing new adherents (Paraskeva, 2011). ICT sounds a clarion call to deconstruct the English-only writing and Statesian scholarship canon. Curricularist João Paraskeva is provoking a complicated conversation on the Reconceptualization existential crises (Malewski, 2010) in the hopes of birthing a radical reorganization of the curriculum archive.

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
Using primary source texts and interviews/documentary footage as data, critical hermeneutics (Regan, 2012) as a mode of inquiry helps to make meaning and broaden the Reconceptualization boundaries. ICT also serves a laudable and thoughtful analytical perspective in this process. Diverse texts, photos, and reconstructed words form a more just world.

Findings
Tao Xingzhi embraced progressive education, yet criticized Dewey’s Pragmatism for failing to meet educational needs in the Chinese countryside (Brown, 1987; Yusheng, 2007). Several scholars extoll his selfless dedication to the cause of modernizing China’s educational system. Only one scholar questioned where Xingzhi ultimately received his influence (Brown, 1987).
Raúl Ferrer, cut from the same cloth as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (2000), embraced “conciencia.” Ferrer noted that in revolution nothing, including education, could be left to chance. A contemporary, Dr. Roberto Oscaris, stated that material incentives began to compete with moral sentiments, lending to the consideration that revolutionary aims do not entirely transform the material conditions of individualism.

Scholarly Significance
This essay renders those figures and movements visible and viable once again, and asserts that local and regional knowledge(s) foster/cultivate essential wisdom that opens up the field from its current stasis into metastasis. A blossoming of alternative ideas and varied discourses, a robust, substantive, interdisciplinary field of inquiry, and a hopeful future for curriculum theorizing are set in motion.

References

Brown, H. O. (1987). American Progressivism in Chinese education: The case of Tao Xingzhi. In R. Hayhoe & M. Bastid (Eds.), China’s education and the industrialized world: Studies in cultural transfer. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.

Malewski, E. (Ed.) (2010). The curriculum studies handbook: The next moment. New York, NY: Routledge.

Paraskeva, J. M. (2011). Conflicts in curriculum theory: Challenging hegemonic epistemologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Regan, P. (2012, December). Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics: Concepts of reading, understanding and interpretation. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, IV(2), 286-303.

UNESCO. (1965). Methods and means utilized in Cuba to eliminate illiteracy: UNESCO report. Havana: Editora Pedagogica.

Yusheng, Y. (January 01, 2002). The making of a national hero: Tao Xingzhi’s legacies in the People’s Republic of China. Review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, 24, 3, 251- 281.

Author

• Todd Alan Price, National-Louis University