Decolonizing the Curriculum
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Decolonizing the Curriculum James Lindsay
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Nearly everywhere in educational circles we hear calls to “decolonize the curriculum” of our schools. This is part of a broad movement consistent with a program labeled “Social Justice,” and it draws heavily from the neo-Marxist “critical” tradition as well as postmodernist conceptions of knowledge, power, and culture. These theories were developed by postcolonial scholars drawing on French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as by critical education theorists. These traditions of radical activism slowly fused in higher education and coalesced into a push to “decolonize” just about everything, including the curriculum, the faculty, the university, literature, science, and even time and space. The purpose of this movement is, nominally, to create “justice,” at least as it understands that concept internally—as “justice for marginalized socially constructed groups” instead of individuals—but for all its vigor and indefatigability, it isn’t well understood outside of its own activism. This essay seeks to change that. This perplexing turn of phrase—“decolonize the curriculum”—immediately raises three questions: 1. what is the curriculum?; 2. what could possibly be meant by “decolonizing” it?; and 3. how did the curriculum come to be “colonized”? As none of this makes sense from a straightforward reading of one of the hottest buzz-phrases in education, ranging all the way from pre-K through the end of post-graduate education, these three questions are in desperate need of clear, straightforward answers.
James Lindsay has a doctorate in math and a background in physics; [email protected]. He is the author of six books and his essays have appeared in Time, Scientific American, and The Philosophers’ Magazine. He led the "grievance studies affair" probe and his new book with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, looks at the evolution of postmodern thought in scholarship and activism.
J. Lindsay
Making matters worse, this worldview is only ever communicated to us in reformulated perversions of our own concepts. I mean words like “racism,” which no longer only describes intentional acts of racial prejudice but instead sees what is generally understood as racism as just the most obvious symptoms of a mysterious set of systemic power dynamics that pervade all of society, always operating from “whiteness” and always oppressive. This understanding of racism is believed to be so deeply and permanently embedded in the system that even when no genuine racists or overt acts of racial prejudice are present, the system itself can and will be regarded as racist. These kinds of lexical issues apply just as much to words like “curriculum” and “colonize.” Decolonizing the curriculum is just one step in a “long march,” as it was originally described by the communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, to do away with liberalism and Enlightenment rationality and replace it with a ut
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