Decolonising the School: On the Practical, Intellectual, and Political Integrity of Education

• In Event: Education's Autonomy: Perspectives on Locality

Abstract

If colonisation is the occupation by a foreign power, decolonisation can be nothing but an act of liberation or, in educational terms, of emancipation. In my presentation I will argue that the modern school itself has to a large extent become colonised, so that it is the modern school itself that is in need of decolonisation. The colonisation of the school is partly visible in all agendas that are being forced upon education. Some of these agendas are obviously problematic, for example when authoritarian regimes use the school as a vehicle for obedience and ideological reproduction, when schools are being tasked with ensuring that a country ends up in the top of international league tables (an official government ambition in Australia), or when the school is tasked with producing the workforce of the future. Some agendas look more benign, for example when they are about social justice or sustainability, or are couched in child-friendly notions such as development, growth and flourishing. But what unites bad and good agendas is that they all rely on the same gesture in which the school itself is seen as an instrument for the ‘delivery’ of a particular agenda, and where the question to what extent the school can be successful in doing so is merely seen as a technical matter that will be resolved once we have complete evidence about what ‘works.’ Yet what is forgotten here – one could call it the convenient absent-mindedness of the coloniser – is the question whether the school itself should have a voice in all this, or whether it should just be a docile servant of what ‘others’ want from it. The decolonisation of education thus needs to begin with the decolonisation of the school itself, also to make sure that decolonisation doesn’t become another ‘agenda’ for the school. All this raises the question about education ‘itself,’ which can be understood as the question of education’s autonomy, though in my presentation I will explore this in terms of the education’s integrity. My exploration has three parts. I will start with the practical integrity of education, which has to do with the question which forms are unique for and distinctive of education. I will take inspiration from the work of Klaus Prange (2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b) and his ‘operational’ account of education. Secondly, I will look into the intellectual integrity of education, where I will argue against the idea of education as an applied field of scholarship and research. Thus I will push back against the colonisation of education by ‘other’ disciplines, such as in the form of the psychology, sociology, and philosophy of education. Here I will take inspiration from German ‘critical pedagogy,’ particularly the work of Klaus Mollenhauer (1972, 1973, 1983, 2013). In a third step I will argue that all this culminates in the political integrity of education, which raises the question how the school can defend its integrity against ongoing colonisation, which I will discuss through the idea of ‘informed obstinacy’ (Meirieu 2007; Biesta 2019).

Author

• Gert Biesta, University of Edinburgh
  Presenting Author