Abstract
By way of a conclusion, this chapter considers the foregoing genealogy of school and schooling subjects in terms of global development discourses and attempts at reform efforts that aim to “indigenize” school. Framed by the logic of so-called national and economic development, school is continually promoted as the solution to the problems of both developing countries as well as to individuals who live in those contexts; the most pervasive contemporary trend in the islands is to “reclaim” formal schooling by making curricula more “culturally responsive.” The effect of this indigenizing, I argue, in fact has the opposite result, in that colonial power relations are in fact strengthened by ignoring the various circulations of power that operate through schooling. Drawing on Spivak’s notion of catachresis, or the idea that a concept-metaphor in one context does not mean the same thing in another, I argue for a set of counter-discourses that will allow for a redefinition of “education” separate from the concept of schooling. Here I conclude that such counter-discourses also offer the various communities in the region the opportunity to exercise political and ethical self-determination, not according to the terms of development discourses, but rather in terms of alternative conditions of possibility for what we mean by education.
“A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage. ‘The Emperor is naked,’ he said.”
Hans Christian Andersen 1837
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Kupferman, D.W. (2013). Conclusion: The Emperor Is a Nudist: A Case for Counter-Discourse(s). In: Disassembling and Decolonizing School in the Pacific. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4673-2_7
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