Beyond the Schoolhouse of Modernity: Interrupting the Educational Architecture of Defuturing

• In Event: Reimagining Education for Planetary Futures: Refusal, Relationality, and Radical Renewal

Proposal

This paper introduces the concept of the Schoolhouse of Modernity as both a material and conceptual architecture that sustains colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric logics under the guise of education. Drawing from and extending the work of Stein et al. (2017, 2020) on the “House of Modernity,” we argue that the Schoolhouse is a central apparatus through which modernity reproduces its core fantasies: ontological security, universal knowledge, linear progress, and individual mastery. Even in the face of planetary crisis, these fantasies are intensified rather than dismantled—repackaged through new regimes of measurement, techno-solutionism, and developmentalist reforms that continue to foreclose plural and regenerative futures.
Our analysis is grounded in Tony Fry’s (2003) concept of defuturing—the active elimination of viable futures through the reproduction of unsustainable systems. We argue that education, rather than preparing students for livable futures, often enacts defuturing through its disciplinary structures, epistemic hierarchies, and spatial-temporal logics. To illustrate this, we examine key “architecture” in the Schoolhouse: the Classroom of Hierarchy, which reproduces racialized, gendered, and ableist subjectivities; the Curriculum of Progress, which centers STEM-centric development, extraction, and speed; the Pedagogies of Separation, which sever mind from body, human from nature, student from teacher; and the Discipline of Individualism, which upholds meritocracy, autonomy, and competition over relationality.
Rather than calling for inclusion within this structure, we ask what it might mean to unbuild the Schoolhouse—to hospice its collapse, unlearn its attachments, compost its ruins, and walk with others toward emergent architectures of education. Drawing on decolonial critiques (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2012), posthumanist thinking (Haraway, 2016), non-Western knowledge traditions (Simpson, 2014; Mbembe, 2021), and speculative praxis, we explore gestures such as hospicing, which holds space for decline without rushing to rebuild; unlearning, which interrupts internalized fantasies of mastery; composting, which attends to ruins as sites of regeneration; and worlding otherwise, which makes space for plural, relational futures still taking shape.
We also engage the tensions of resisting the Schoolhouse from within. We reflect on the risks and impossibilities of transformative work within mainstream educational institutions, where resistance may be met with co-optation or punishment. At the same time, we lift up the relational knowledges and pedagogies sustained outside the Schoolhouse—through Indigenous land-based education, non-Western knowledge traditions, social movements, intergenerational learning, and informal pedagogies forged by those most harmed by modern schooling. By mapping its structural features and tracing its genealogies, we invite educators, researchers, and communities to move beyond reformist inclusion and toward a more radical undoing of education as we know it. We conclude by gesturing toward emergent architectures of learning—messy, plural, relational, and still taking shape amid the ruins.

Authors

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University