“Schools are sites of political struggle in this civilisation because they are the main vehicles for establishing the grand narratives needed to make progress possible”
(Yunkaporta 2019, p. 133)
Through the analysis and yarning about yarns - “meta-yarns” - Yunkaporta (2019) disrupts the westernised and Eurocentric narratives that have shaped systems of education internationally since the early 1800s. He highlights through eloquent exploration of anthropology, story-mind, yarns and history a counter-narrative to the dominant colonising narratives of progress, imperialism, white supremacy, white exceptionalism and globalisation that have insidiously been embedded into systems of education since ‘public education’ begun. It brings forth other themes I have already discussed in previous Blogs about ownership, placeship, agency, self-determination, decolonising and democratising learning and the inherent capitalist monetising of humans and being human in systems of education. I want to further deconstruct these narratives and their influence through and across contemporary education settings, and pose also, as Yunkaporta (2019) does what narratives need to be dialogued meaningfully and what narratives could ‘education’ embody for an ecologically and socially just future.
Progress, what is progress? How is progress entangled through imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and education? Yunkaporta (2019) states progress is ‘grounded in the myth of primitivism - the widely held assumption that life before the industrial era was brief, brutish, savage and simple’ (p. 124). Yet these indoctrinated past narratives for the ideals of ‘progress’ are now evidence as integral to white supremacy and were/continue to be the justification for imperial colonialism, exploitation and enslavement of peoples, extractivism and the perpetuated global inequalities furthering the impacts of climate change and international social injustice (Patel and Moore, 2017 ). Globalisation now being the contemporary label and narrative of the imperial colonial progress ‘project’, and one that sustains and continues to embed the same narratives across contemporary systems of education.
Through exploring the historical roots of the Prussian Empire’s education system emerging in the early 1800s Yunkaporta (2019) explores how empire building ‘progress’ narratives directly influenced the domesticating of children and young people into obedience and to be a labour force for the national economy. Creating nations, empires, economic superiority and to be competing for land and resources directly influenced the systems of education imposed. I additionally perceive this as ‘cheap education’ if analysed through the perspective of Patel and Moore (2017) where ‘cheap is the opposite of a bargain - cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life’ (p. 3). ‘Cheap education’ leads to ‘cheap workers’ and ‘capitalists needed more labor and needed it to be educated and maintained as cheaply as possible’ (p.30-31), which additionally requires ‘cheap care’, ‘cheap food’, ‘cheap energy’ and the cheapening of lives as not deserving of their own agency or self-determination.
So what then could narratives of education be? How can the embedded narrative of progress, imperialism, colonialism, ‘cheap education’ and present globalisation and capitalism be disrupted and shifted? What are the “meta-yarns” we can bring into consciousness that sustain webs of life and eco-socially just futures? Yunkaporta (2019) suggests ideas around adopting yarns of histo-pluralism, cosmolocalism, agential-dialoguing-commons as relational to indigenous learning and knowledges. Patel and Moore (2017) propose in their manifesto recognition of our roles in the world-ecology, where we are conscious of the relational affect of systems which must de-centre the human and incorporate restorative systems (ibid), and I additionally add become regenerative systems (Whal, 2016). I also add here the imaginary of the education project can and must shift towards a philosophy of becoming (De Freitas et al, 2017) where learning is re/generative, emergent and responsive to place, peoples, ethics and needs.
First and foremost any narrative of education must transition from economic orientation and capitalist Neo-liberal priority towards potentialities of eco-socially just futures. This shift is succinctly and eloquently proposed through seven visionary declarations in 'Learning to become with the World: education for future survival’ (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). The first visionary declaration concludes:
“Through learning and teaching the principles of pluriversality - including the multiplicity of ways of knowing and being, the wisdom of Indigenous ontologies, and the animacy of worlds beyond the human -we have expanded our notion of justice. As a result, the practice of education is now infinitely more inclusive.”
(Common Worlds Research Collective 2020, p. 4)
References:
Common Worlds Research Collective (2020) Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival, in UNESCO Futures of Education initiative. Online at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374032
De Freitas, E., Seller, S. and Jensen, L. B. (2017) Thinking with Spinoza about Education, in Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(9), pp. 805-808.
Patel, R. and Moore, J. (2017) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
Whal, D. C. (2016) Designing Regenerative Cultures.
Yunkaporta, T. (2019) Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.