ABSTRACT
In education, knowledge is most often regarded as a cognitive process. This chapter extends the cognitive into a more complete uptake of politics and history by presenting three main frameworks and methodologies for understanding education as part of the colonial project. One, the chapter presents the insights of Frantz Fanon and Linda Tuhiwai Smith as they relate to the decolonization of schools, which includes interrogating the knowledge generated by social research. Examples include the challenge to mainstream education posed by ethnic studies and historical events like the creation of the Third World Liberation Front. Two, the authors explicate the innovations of decolonial thought, which scrutinize the Eurocentric functions and foundations of knowledge. As a form of epistemic resistance or disobedience, interrogating the coloniality of power in education and other social institutions locates the real effects and continuation of colonialism, even after the fall of its official, administrative form. Last, following Edward Said’s postcolonial analysis, the chapter ends by describing the ways that colonial-imperial knowledge reduces, distorts, and simplifies the Other through a politics of representation. The imperial function of representation includes epistemologies that infantilize, objectify, and pathologize the educational margins in the form of urban Orientalism.
