Unequal Equality: A Postcolonial Review of International Research on Educational Policy and Equity in Maoist China

• In Event: Postcolonial Engagements With Education Around the World

Abstract

Maoist radical educational revolution during the 1960s China has drawn tremendous academic interests from the West, although Western representations of it appeared to be extremely polarized. On the one hand, it has been understood as the (dys)function of a totalitarian pedagogical state; on the other, it has been applauded as an iconoclastic revolution against the Western model of development. By reviewing the evaluations of the Maoist educational policies and praxis, I found how colonialist consciousness had been written into the demonizing or glorification of that particular history. In other words, the seemingly oppositional arguments in seeing the non-Western in the comparative studies of the West embodied particular epistemic principles that inscribe a normativity to the representation of “the Other”.

Author

• Feiran Dong, University of Wisconsin - Madison