Schooling and the Genre of Man: Anti-colonial Approaches in Comparative and International Education

• In Event: Attending to the Colonial and Racial Natures of Comparative and International Education and Development

Proposal

Following Sylvia Wynter, this presentation offers practices aimed at an anti-colonial deciphering of the logics informing representations of schooling within the field of comparative and international education (CIE) (Wynter, 2015; Scherrer, 2022; 2023). The coding and reproduction of educational practices based on the economic nature of the Western human can be traced to the roots of scalable industrialized schooling and longer histories of colonial inhabitation (Ferdinand, 2021). I argue that perpetuating forms of schooling based on the ideal (or genre) of Western Man (Wynter, 2015) creates epistemic problems that rely on the perpetuation of the practices of quick technological fixes, endless economic growth, and access to (Western) education as the ultimate solution to global inequality and crisis amongst others. Wynter points to past historical movements as evidence for the need to rearticulate the nature of humanity beyond the current genre. As she tells it, shortly after the anti-colonial uprisings of 1950 onward, postcolonial nations around the world went under social transformation but rather than turning to a plurality of socialites, they “fell into the mimetic trap” of being reincorporated into neocoloniality, shifting from the language of “native” to becoming “underdeveloped” (Wynter, 2015, p. 20). The postcolonial native Other, in order to be recognized by the West, had to be recoded within the logics of development. Wynter and others suggest that this ongoing human homogenization has resulted in knotted socio-political-ecological crises with solutions requiring systemic anti-colonial shifts towards new onto-epistemological genres of the human. Furthermore, Snaza & Singh (2021) argue that Western forms of schooling act as projects of induction or how to master being Western Man as a genre, engaging in practices of devaluing those who cannot or will not master this form. Such an educational induction into being Man offers a reprogramming of the ways of interacting with one another and inhabiting the planet.

Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, UMass Amherst