What’s history got to do with a critical and scholarly investigation of international education?
Privatization and the Education of Marginalized Children is a welcome and stimulating collection of studies from a multinational team of authors capably edited by Bekisizwe S. Ndimande and Christopher Lubienski. Together it reviews available empirical evidence to critically assess the claims made for market reforms of schooling. Read cumulatively, chapters by Àlvaro Hypolito (on Brazil), Rita Verma’s (on India), Pauline Lipman and Patricia Burch (on the United States of America) and Javier Gonazlez (on Chile) make clear that the claims made for market reforms, that they increase efficiency, introduce pedagogical innovation, improve pupil attainment and promote social mobility, are rhetorical devices. In each case, the authors present evidence to show that market reforms have, at best, inconclusive outcomes and often serve to entrench and enhance existing inequalities in access, experience and outcomes of schooling. A longer review, published in the journal Educational Review, is available free (to the first hundred readers) here.
My review briefly raises questions about whether, and how, history or historical perspectives can illuminate studies of educational policy and practice. Lubienski and Ndimande note in their introduction the failure of market ideologies to consider ‘unequal fields of power’ or the ‘historical social exclusions’ by which marginalized groups have been disadvantaged (p.6). If the theoretical point is well made, its empirical or practical consequences are less clear.
For one thing the temporal range of these studies tends to the short term. School segregation policies are dated to the early twentieth century (pp.184-85), the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s get a fleeting mention (p.68) and there are a smattering of references to historical figures ranging from Adam Smith and Milton Friedman to Tom Paine and Paulo Freire. This line up of intellectuals and activists is not a coincidence. It accurately captures a politics, established in the immediate post-1945 period, in which the neo-liberal right lines up against the democratic left. This is the politics that pervades the book.
The implicit chronology of the text also conditions its conceptual choices. This is a book about nations and states, about policy initiatives and trade-offs, and about the structural inequalities that remain in systems of education around the world. But it remains silent about the imperialism that is a crucial feature of the histories of all the countries that appear in the text. One of them, Australia, was the subject of a chilling series of reports this month publicizing the violence, massacres and atrocities that accompanied state building and colonization.
The histories of educational practices in these countries included, for example, the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes. This was a commonplace practice in settler colonial societies where residential and days schools operated programmes of assimilation specifically designed, according to one historian, to extinguish indigenous cultures and amounting to an ‘educational genocide’ (Fear-Segal, 2009).
Jacqueline Fear-Segal. White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; 2007.
The scale, detail and consequences of those forms of education, the child abuse that they routinely practised, and whether they can be meaningful interpreted as part of wider programmes of cultural genocide are matters of ongoing historical and public debate. How these histories affect critical studies of education remains an open question but one that urgently requires discussion, response and, as far as university students are concerned, a decolonised curriculum.
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