ABSTRACT
A form of Freirean “conscientization” is called for, but its purpose is not to entrench an unreflective or undertheorized form of ideology critique by demystifying the influence of imperialism on Western education. Encounters with the colonial genealogy of public education sustain and confront the double bind of attempting to lay out “the different ways in which imperialism was bent on taking a knowing possession of the world”. A sense of identity is constructed not only by schooling but in relation to pedagogical encounters with images and texts that misrepresent, valuate, and fix difference. A revisioning of the history of education is paramount, given the myopic perspective of a pedagogical history of human being conceived from the imperialist point of view of the Western colonizer. English as a world language is a language “worth knowing,” “worth having,” because it effaces differences and allows one privy access to the power and therefore the symbolic violence of a dominant culture.
