Pedagogical Content and Political Control: Education for Omnicide?
2023; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/723491
ISSN1545-701X
Autores Tópico(s)Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeEditorialPedagogical Content and Political Control: Education for Omnicide?Bjorn H. NordtveitBjorn H. NordtveitPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIn reviewing submissions to the Comparative Education Review (CER), I see few that address structural racism and the environment. I am juxtaposing these two since they are considered as connected by some scholars. The first topic, that of structural racism, has been the theme of a special issue on Black Lives Matter that is being published jointly with this issue. We also have a special section on the African Diaspora that will be published in November 2023. As for the topic of the environment crisis, the 2023 theme of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) encourages us to reflect on the coalescing challenges of the "global emergency of climate change, in an uncertain era post-Covid" in which "the people and communities most impacted by these crises are already vulnerable."1 Moreover, the August 2022 issue of CER curated by Elizabeth Sumida Huaman had as its theme "Comparative Indigenous Education" (2022), and many essays dealt with indigeneity, colonialism, and land.The CIES 2020 Annual Meeting had as its theme "Education beyond the Human," with "comparative education as a space of attuning to and engaging with multiple, more-than-human worlds—the worlds of Nature's seasons and spirits, of ecosystems and environments, of cyborgs and goddesses, or artificial intelligence and ancestors—the worlds that at present remain beyond the horizon of mainstream comparative education."2 Iveta Silova, who was central in developing the theme, in her CIES presidential address describes "the impacts of colonial devastation and the effects of destructive development projects, exposing the deep fault lines of colonialism and their direct linkages with environmental exploitation, resource extraction, and extermination of Indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples" (2021, 589). Both Silova (2021) and Sumida Huaman (2022) demonstrate that structural racism and environment degradation are intimately connected and related not only to the historic processes of colonization but also to current political structures of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. Likewise, in his new book The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh argues that "colonization was thus not merely a process of establishing dominion over human beings; it was also a process of subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe that was once thought of having agency, powers of communication, and the ability to make meaning—animals, trees, volcanos, nutmegs. These mutings were essential to processes of economic extraction" (2021, 190). He characterizes this need to subjugating people and nature as a willingness to omnicide, signifying the inclination and even desire of killing—and extracting—everything in all ways or places, for short-handed economic benefit. The purpose of white supremacy is, he argues, to create people living according to specific norms, in a hierarchy based on race, living in a controlled landscape. This landscape is not seen a living entity but as an economic resource to be mined for profit.I'm writing this on a beautiful winter day in Massachusetts. In our part of New England, many, if not most, geographic names support white supremacy. For example, the name of my institution (the University of Massachusetts Amherst) honors Jeffrey Amherst, who suggested exterminating the local population: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of [smallpox infected] Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race" (Ghosh 2021, 61–62). Just south of Amherst lies Belchertown, commemorating Jonathan Belcher, a large landowner and royal governor of Massachusetts from 1730 to 1740 who owned enslaved workers (Batinski 1996). Belchertown's website proclaims that "Black Lives Matter," but this message is fading against the historic violence and the underlying hypocrisy of the town's very name. Just north of Amherst lies Turner's Falls, celebrating Captain William Turner, who orchestrated and led a massacre on a sleeping village of Native Americans, killing men, women, and children. These are just three names of very many: in their Historical Atlas of Massachusetts, Richard Wilkie and Jack Tager (1991) estimate that 30.2 percent of the city and town names in Massachusetts originate in English counties, cities, and towns and that 14.8 percent are named after "Englishmen." Then, 22.7 percent are named after what they call "Distinguished Americans and early settlers," all White men, many of whom were slaveholders, murderers, terrorists, and thieves. Only 4.3 percent of the geographic names are Native American.The Native American geographic names were erased, just like Native populations and indeed the landscape itself. The genocide of the Native American population was necessary to establish the white supremacist order and to conquer the landscape, making it a mirror of England reflected in the British geographic names, a "New England" in which the native population had or has no place. Hence, the renaming of nature was—and is—a way of conquering the landscape—it erased the meanings behind the former names and thus eliminated the cultural past of the original inhabitants.What does this have to do with Comparative and International Education? With Silova (2021), I argue that there are several connections. Worldwide, names and geographies have been erased by colonizers, together with the mining of natural resources and genocide. Amitav Ghosh (2021) describes Europeans' conquest of the Banda Islands in Indonesia in 1621, when the original inhabitants were massacred and the colonizers altered the island so they could extract and harvest nutmeg, which at the beginning of the seventeenth century was immensely valuable. When the prices for nutmeg dropped, the invaders burned the nutmeg trees to keep prices high by artificially controlling supply. Likewise, Davi Kopenawa with Bruce Albert (2014) demonstrate the past and current connections between white supremacy and the mining of natural resources in the Amazon rainforest.3 The forest is described as a living and spiritual entity, not as an economic resource without life and agency.European mining of the environment, accompanied by the enslavement and/or extermination of local people, was implemented worldwide and accelerated through colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the North and South American continents.4 Amitav Ghosh (2021) suggests that it still happens—through our lack of protection of the natural environment and through the prioritization of economic extraction and mining of natural resources, together with disrespect of human life. Silova (2021, 589) notes that "the climate crisis impacts are exposing our broken political, economic, and social systems built on centuries of slavery, oppression, and racism."Education systems support this system of extraction of natural resources and racism.5 In some US states, the study of structural racism is seen as "anti-American" and criminalized under memory laws. The practice of banning remembrance and history is not limited to the United States. In October 2022, Columbia University hosted a 2-day conference, "Memory Laws: Criminalizing Historical Narrative," that dealt with memory legislation internationally, discussing how governments in various countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been tackling the problem of historical narratives, memory, and reparations. A new book edited by Ariella Lang and Elazar Barkan, Memory Laws and Historical Justice: The Politics of Criminalizing the Past (2022), reviews the politics of shaping the past to reinforce official narratives. Education is a major component in this effort. Yet few submissions to this journal deal with the ways education content shapes the minds and to what extent it is reinforcing stereotypical images of race and gender, together with a normalization of economic extraction and exploitation of both humans and nature. Instead, content is often evaluated through assessing performance at grade level, the degree to which young children can read or perform mathematical operations at a certain age. In this issue, Sharon Wolf and Esinam Ami Avornyo (2023) provide a useful overview in "Cultural Considerations in Defining Classroom Quality," using "Ghanaian preschool teachers' agreements and disagreements with standards-based instruments" as a case study. The authors show how teachers normalize yelling and shouting at children—and even bullying (Headteacher "F," in a chilling quote, notes that teasing children "adds to the fun"). The school system in Ghana, similar to that of many other countries, is inherited from a colonial past and learning is based on rote memorization. The children are being taught to accept a specific narrative of race, of the necessity of economic extraction, and of relegating nature to subservience of the economy: "We become increasingly aware that education, including comparative education, continues to aggravate ecological catastrophe and injustice" (Silova 2021, 602).The CIES 2020 Annual Meeting questioned this approach: "Our current preoccupation with global education trends—student achievement tests, competitive education league tables, global ranking exercises, and "best practices"—needs to be carefully reexamined and put into a broader, planetary and more than human perspective. Our own survival on the damaged Earth will depend on our capacity to engage with and learn from a wide range of interdisciplinary research and education practices, drawing on diverse voices, sources, methods, theories, evidence, and perspectives." The narrative of learning from "non-Western, indigenous, feminist, and marginalized 'Others'" is in stark contrast to the official discourses, often focusing on the need to teach, learn and study Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, including Computer Science (STEM).6 In October 2022, the US Department of Education launched "YOU Belong in STEM," an initiative to "implement and scale equitable and high-quality STEM education for all young people from PreK to higher education."7 Similar discourses and programs are found worldwide.In November 2022 world leaders convened at the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference (COP 27), but little is changing—we are still treating each other and the nature as commodities. Davi Kopenawa said that White people are only listening to themselves: "Yes, they [i.e., White people] have many antennas and radios in their cities, but they only serve to listen to themselves. Their knowledge does not go beyond the words they speak to each other wherever they live (Kopenawa and Bruce 2014, 620; my translation).8 Davi Kopenawa is asking that we expand our knowledge and stop listening only to ourselves. The narratives from historically marginalized populations—the spirituality of Nature—are starting points, as exhorted by Davi Kopenawa and reflected in the CIES 2020 theme. We need to reassess the field of Comparative and International Education in light of these progresses, and we must begin the project of "positioning humans in direct relationship with each other, other species, and Earth" (Silova 2021, 602)—the "interwoven strands of land, community, people, and education" (Sumida Huaman 2022, 393).Notes1 See https://cies2023.org/wp-content/uploads/CfS_2023_brief_Eng.pdf.2 See https://cies2020.org/wp-content/uploads/CIES-2020-Theme-ENG-2p.pdf, 2.3 In The Falling Sky or La Chute du Ciel: Paroles d'un Chaman Yanomami. Davi Kopenawa received the Right Livelihood Award—also called the "Alternative Nobel Price"—for this book in 2019 (Greta Thunberg was the other recipient of the award in 2019).4 I am not suggesting that Europeans were the only colonizers that have engaged in genocide and terraforming—however, (white) Europeans have engaged in these activities worldwide, and at a different scale compared to any other population group.5 See, e.g., Teaching White Supremacy, America's Democratic Ordeal and the forging of our National Identity by Donald Yacovone (Pantheon Books 2022), a useful resource for the US.6 See https://cies2020.org/wp-content/uploads/CIES-2020-Theme-ENG-2p.pdf, 2.7 See https://www.ed.gov/stem.8 "Certes, ils possèdent beaucoup d'antennes et des radios dans leur villes, mais elles leur servent seulement à s'ecouter eux-mêmes. Leur savoir ne va pas au-delà de ces paroles qu'ils adressent entre eux partout où ils vivent" (Kopenawa and Bruce 2014, 620).ReferencesBatinski, Michael C. 1996. Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGhosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKopenawa, Davi, and Albert Bruce. 2014. La chute du ciel: Paroles d'un chaman Yanomami. Paris: Terre Humaine Poche.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLang, Ariella and Elazar Barkan. 2022. Memory Laws and Historical Justice: The Politics of Criminalizing the Past. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSilova, Iveta. 2021. "Facing the Anthropocene: Comparative Education as Sympoiesis." Comparative Education Review 65 (4): 587–616.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSumida Huaman, Elizabeth. 2022. "How Indigenous Scholarship Changes the Field: Pluriversal Appreciation, Decolonial Aspirations, and Comparative Indigenous Education." Comparative Education Review 66 (3): 391–416.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarWilkie, Richard W., and Jack Tager, eds. 1991. The Historical Atlas of Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarWolf, Sharon, and Esinam Ami Avornyo. 2023. "Cultural Considerations in Defining Classroom Quality: Ghanaian Preschool Teachers' Agreements and Disagreements with Standards-Based Instruments." Comparative Education Review 67 (1), in this issue.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 67, Number 1February 2023 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723491 Views: 441Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryReceived November 15, 2022Accepted November 15, 2022 © 2023 Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Bjorn H. Nordtveit Transition and Change: A Decade of Comparative and International Education, 2013–2023, Comparative Education Review 67, no.44 (Dec 2023): 701–709.https://doi.org/10.1086/726616Benjamin D. Scherrer and tavis d. jules Renewing Protest and Earth Day at School: Thinking with Recent Texts on Anticolonial Methods and Climate Change Education, Comparative Education Review 67, no.44 (Dec 2023): 890–904.https://doi.org/10.1086/727431
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