Education under totalitarian regimes: The nexus of destruction, control, and terror

• In Event: Educating in emergency contexts: Schooling, curriculum, and innovation

Proposal

Education systems are subject to the dictates of evolving political regimes and their political ideologies. Totalitarian regimes share certain fundamental characteristics directly implicating education (Buriel, 2023): (a) the destruction of the existing educational system in order to redefine its contours entirely, (b) an attempt at total control of educational content in order to apply a global doctrine, (c) the infusion of terror by means of extreme violence and fear into all educational components, and (d) the forced solitude of individuals in order to annihilate their creative potential. Regimes can be characterized by "partial totalitarianism", which often begins with a "totalitarian embryo" (Delestre and Lévy, 2016), which is the act that emanates from an individual or group of individuals who has or have, with impunity, the power and/or duty to terrorize, humiliate, (almost) totally subjugate (psychically and/or physically) one or more voluntary (initially or trapped) or involuntary persons.

In this paper, I will analyze some of the contemporary educational issues linked to totalitarian challenges. I will consider their implications on different scales: from political situations linked to "totalitarian temptations", "totalitarian attempts", "partial totalitarianisms", to the specific characteristics of totalitarian regimes impacting educational systems. Our emblematic examples will focus on the education system in Afghanistan since the Taliban took power, the specific case of re-education centers dedicated to Ukrainian deported children in Russia, and the totalitarian enterprises of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group from 2014 to 2017. These emblematic examples will ultimately serve the conceptualization of education under totalitarian regimes.

Author

• Albane Buriel, Université Rennes 2