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29 - Postcolonial Perspectives on Democratic Education

from Part Four - Challenges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2023

By
Penny Enslin  and
Kai Horsthemke
Edited by
Julian Culp ,
Johannes Drerup  and
Douglas Yacek
Julian Culp
Affiliation:
The American University of Paris, France
Johannes Drerup
Affiliation:
Universität Dortmund
Douglas Yacek
Affiliation:
Universität Dortmund
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Summary

This chapter explores the conceptual, educational and political challenges involved in articulating a postcolonial perspective on democratic education. It understands democracy as a universal aspiration, a critical practice with a deliberative range that accommodates particular, local contexts. Colonial rule has both provoked and rejected demands for self-determination, while rendering democracy difficult to establish in newly independent states after formal decolonization. Following a description of colonial education, a currently influential yet problematic approach to decolonial education is considered. While some sense might be made of the notions of postcolonial knowledge and epistemology, the decolonialist position – at its most extreme – is epistemologically unviable. The chapter ends by outlining a perspective on postcolonial democratic education as a form of liberal education, universal in some shared features, that needs to resist the universal presence of neoliberal capitalism as a recent form of coloniality that is universally inimical to both education and democracy.

Keywords

postcolonial educationdecolonialitydecolonial knowledge and epistemologyneoliberal capitalismuniversalism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Democratic Education , pp. 494 - 511
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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