Modernity/Coloniality and Eurocentric Education: Towards a Post-Occidental Self-Understanding of the Present

Abstract

This article sketches a post-Occidental interpretation of the historical/conceptual relationships between modern western education and European civilizational identity formation. Modern western education will be interpreted as a modern/colonial institution that emerged along with the sixteenth-century responses to the questions provoked by the breakup of medieval Christendom and the discovery of the Americas: What is man? Where does he come from? Where is he going? Modern western education and European civilizational identity, as distinct from Christendom, emerged together (simultaneous and interrelated) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the initial formation of a global structural dynamic designed for governing the social world, both within and beyond Europe. Modern western education is a central institution within the ongoing disciplinary projects of modernity and its differentiated reproduction of particular subjectivities. This perspective problematizes the Euro-American historiography of modernity along with the contemporary historical self-understanding of modern western education. From this perspective, the self-understanding of modern western education (both metropolitan and colonial) emerged and remains largely embedded within the conceptual and historical framework identified here as Occidentalism. This article concludes with a proposal for rethinking education within an ecology of knowledges, articulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Post-Occidental reasoning contributes to the recognition and inclusion of the multiplicity of knowledge systems occluded by the hegemony of western epistemology and Eurocentric education.Modern (European) civilization understands itself as the most developed, the superior, civilization; This sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative, as it were, to ‘develop’ (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped civilizations; The path of such development should be that followed by Europe in its own development out of antiquity and the Middle Ages; Where the barbarians or the primitive opposes the civilizing process, the praxis of modernity must, in the last instance, have recourse to the violence necessary to remove the obstacles to modernization. (Dussel, 1995, p. 75)