TOWARDS A POST-EUROCENTRIC MATHEMATICS & SCIENCE EDUCATION1

Eurocentrism and the Modern/Colonial Curriculum: A Critical Interpretive Review

Michael Baker

University of Rochester, New York, USA

Table of ContentsIntroduction 1

Methodological and Theoretical Rationale 7

Eurocentrism as the Epistemic Framework of Colonial Modernity 9

Towards a Post-Eurocentric Curriculum in Math & Science Education 41

Ethnomathematics 47

Ethnosciences 60

Conclusion: Towards an Epistemological Multiculturalism 79

References 82

At the end of the colonial era, people began to ask the West what rights its culture, its science, its social organization and finally its rationality itself could have to laying claim to a universal validity: is it not a mirage tied to an economic domination and a political hegemony? (Foucault, 1991, p. 12).

Confronting Eurocentrism requires ultimately a confrontation of history and the project of modernity as a whole (Dirlik, 2002, p. 8).

Introduction

1 Originally published as Eurocentrism and the Modern/Colonial Curriculum:Towards a Post-Eurocentric Math & Science Education – A Critical Interpretive Review, by Michael Baker, University of Rochester. Unpublished Paper, 2009. https://www.academia.edu/1517810/Towards_a_Post_Eurocentric_Math_and_Science_Education_A_Critical_Interpretive_Review. Accessed 30 November 2020.

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This essay reviews literature in science and mathematics education that assumes

the possibilities for knowing the realities of the world through the official curriculum are

reductively maintained within a Eurocentric cultural complex (Carnoy, 1974; Swartz,

1992; Willinsky, 1998). Eurocentrism will be described as the epistemic framework of

colonial modernity, a framework through which western knowledge enabled and

legitimated the global imposition of one particular conception of the world over all

others. Eurocentrism is an ethnocentric projection onto the world that expresses the ways

the west and the westernized have learned to conceive and perceive the world. At the

center of this ethnocentric projection are the control of knowledge and the maintenance

of the conditions of epistemic dependency (Mignolo, 2000a).

Every conception of the “world” involves epistemological and ontological

presuppositions interrelated with particular (historical and cultural) ways of knowing and

being. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute subjects (Santos, 2007a).

What counts as knowledge and what it means to be human are profoundly interrelated

(Santos, 2006). The knowledge that counts in the modern school curriculum, from

kindergarten to graduate school, is largely constructed and contained within an epistemic

framework that is constitutive of the monocultural worldview and ideological project of

western modernity (Meyer, Kamens & Benavot, 1992; Wallerstein, 1997, 2006; Lander,

2002; Kanu, 2006; Kincheloe, 2008; Battiste, 2008). The monocultural worldview and

ethos of western civilization are based in part upon structures of knowledge and an

epistemic framework elaborated and maintained within a structure of power/knowledge

relations involved in five hundred years of European imperial/colonial domination

(Quijano, 1999, p. 47). If our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world is

also to become more and not less democratic, schools and teachers must learn to

incorporate the worldwide diversity of knowledges and ways of being (multiple

epistemologies and ontologies) occluded by the hegemony of Eurocentrism. Academic

knowledge and understanding should be complemented with learning from those who are

living in and thinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies (Mignolo, 2000, p. 5).

Too many children and adults today (particularly those from non-dominant

groups) continue to be alienated and marginalized within modern classrooms where

knowledge and learning are unconsciously permeated by this imperial/colonial

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conception of the world. The reproduction of personal and cultural inferiority inherent in

the modern educational project of monocultural assimilation is interrelated with the

hegemony of western knowledge structures that are largely taken for granted within

Eurocentric education (Dei, 2008). Thus, in the field of education, “we need to learn

again how five centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an

imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that

were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to

educate the world” (Willinsky, 1998, pp. 2-3). The epistemic and conceptual apparatus

through which the modern world was divided up and modern education was

institutionalized is located in the cultural complex called “Eurocentrism”.

Western education institutions and the modern curriculum, from the sixteenth

century into the present, were designed to reproduce this Eurocentric imaginary under the

sign of “civilization” (Grafton & Jardine, 1986; Butts, 1967, 1973). Eurocentric

knowledge lies at the center of an imperial and colonial model of civilization that now

threatens to destroy the conditions that make life possible (Lander, 2002, p. 245). From a

post-Eurocentric interpretive horizon (described below), the present conditions of

knowledge are embedded within a hegemonic knowledge apparatus that emerged with

European colonialism and imperialism in the sixteenth century (Philopose, 2007;

Kincheloe, 2008).

Based upon hierarchical competition for power, control, and supremacy among

the “civilized” nation-states, imperialism is an original and inherent characteristic of the

modern western interstate system that emerged with the formation of sovereign European

territorial states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wallerstein, 1973; Gong,

1984 ; Hindness, 2005; Agnew, 2003; Taylor & Flint, 2000). Closely interrelated with

imperialism, colonialism involves a civilizing project within an ideological formation

established to construct the way the world is known and understood, particularly through

the production, representation, and organization of knowledge (Mignolo, 2000a; Kanu,

2006). Colonialism reduces reality to the single dimension of the colonizer. Colonialism

and imperialism impose on the world one discourse, one form of conscience, one science,

one way of being in the world. “Post-colonial analysis leads to a simple realization: that

the effect of the colonizing process over individuals, over culture and society throughout

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Europe’s domain was vast, and produced consequences as complex as they are profound”

(Ashcroft, 2001a, p. 24).

In yet to be acknowledged ways, the Eurocentric curriculum, and western

schooling in general, are profoundly interrelated with both modern imperialism and

colonialism.

The persistence and continuity of Eurocentrism rather leads one to see it as a part of a habitus of imperial subjectivity that manifests itself in a particular kind of attitude”: the European attitude – a subset of a more encompassing “imperial attitude.” The Eurocentric attitude combines the search for theoria with the mythical fixation with roots and the assertion of imperial subjectivity. It produces and defends what Enrique Dussel has referred to as “the myth of modernity” (Maldonado-Torres, 2005b, p. 43).

Western schooling reproduces this “Eurocentric attitude” in complicity with a globalized

system of power/knowledge relations, tacitly based upon white heterosexual male

supremacy (Kincheloe, 1998; Allen, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2006; Twine &

Gallagher, 2008; Akom, 2008a, 2008b). Eurocentrism is a hegemonic representation and

mode of knowing that relies on confusion between abstract universality and concrete

world hegemony (Escobar, 2007; Dussel, 2000; Quijano, 1999, 2000). Worldwide

imperial expansion and European colonialism led to the late nineteenth century

worldwide hegemony of Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2005, p. 56). Eurocentrism, in other

words, refers to the hegemony of a (universalized) Euro-Anglo-American

epistemological framework that governs both the production and meanings of

knowledges and subjectivities throughout the world (Schott, 2001; Kincheloe, 2008).

Eurocentrism is an epistemological model that organizes the state, the economy,

gender and sexuality, subjectivity, and knowledge (Quijano, 2000). The production of

Eurocentrism is maintained in specific political, economic, social and cultural institutions

and institutionalized practices that began to emerge with the colonization of the Americas

in the sixteenth century. The nation-state, the bourgeois family, the capitalist

corporation, Eurocentric rationality, and western educational institutions are all examples

of worldwide institutions and institutionalized practices that contribute to the production

of Eurocentrism (Quijano, 2008, pp. 193-194).

Eurocentrism as a historical phenomenon is not to be understood without reference to the structures of power that EuroAmerica produced over the

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last five centuries, which in turn produced Eurocentrism, globalized its effects, and universalized its historical claims. Those structures of power include the economic (capitalism, capitalist property relations, markets and modes of production, imperialism, etc.) the political (a system of nation-states, and the nation-form, most importantly, new organizations to handle problems presented by such a reordering of the world, new legal forms, etc.), the social (production of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, religious forms as well as the push toward individual-based social forms), and cultural (including new conceptions of space and time, new ideas of the good life, and a new developmentalist conception of the life-world) (Dirlik, 1999, p. 8).

Eurocentric thinking is embedded in the concepts and categories through which the

modern world has been constructed. “The West defines what is, for example, freedom,

progress and civil behavior; law, tradition and community; reason, mathematics and

science; what is real and what it means to be human. The non-Western civilizations have

simply to accept these definitions or be defined out of existence” (Sardar, 1999, p. 44).

The mostly taken-for-granted definitions and conceptual boundaries of the

academic disciplines and school subjects such as “philosophy”, “math”, “science”,

“history”, “literature”, “literacy”, “humanities”, “education” are all Eurocentric

constructions.

If Eurocentrism is intrinsic in the way we think and conceptualize, it is also inherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the disciplines of social sciences, from economics to anthropology, emerged when Europe was formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving the need and requirements of Western society and promoting its outlook. Eurocentrism is entrenched in the way these disciplines are structured, the concepts and categories they use for analysis, and the way progress is defined with the disciplines (Joseph et al. 1990) (Sardar, 1999, p. 49).

This hegemonic knowledge formation envelops the modern school curriculum within an

imperial/colonial paradigm legitimated by the rhetoric of modernity (i.e., equal

opportunity, mobility, achievement gap, meritocracy, progress, development, civilization,

globalization). Western education (colonial and metropolitan) reproduces

imperial/colonial, monocultural, and deluded conceptions of and ways of being in the

world (Mignolo, 2000a; Kincheloe, 2008). “The effect of Eurocentrism is not merely that

it excludes knowledges and experiences outside of Europe, but that it obscures the very

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nature and history of Europe itself” (Dussel, 1993). Understanding Eurocentrism thus

involves recognizing and denaturalizing the implicitly assumed conceptual apparatus and

definitional powers of the west (Sardar, 1999, p. 44; Coronil, 1996). Individually,

understanding Eurocentrism may also involve the experience of disillusionment and

culture shock as one begins to demythologize the dense mirage of modernity.

Yet, today, in the academic field of education, “Eurocentrism” is commonly

understood as a cultural perspective among political conservatives who ascribe to the

superiority of western contributions (e.g., scientific, cultural and artistic) to world

civilization that in turn justify the continued exclusion of non-European cultures and

knowledges in the curriculum (Collins & O’Brien, 2003). Understanding Eurocentrism

as a conservative perspective on western culture and education ignores the historical

claim that Eurocentrism is the framework for the production and control of knowledge –

that Eurocentrism is the way the “modern” world has been constructed as a cultural

projection. For many of us educated in the western tradition – within this still dominant

epistemological framework -- a Eurocentric worldview may be all we know. We may

not recognize that our enlightened, liberal versus conservative, university educated ways

of thinking, knowing, and being are a reflection of a particular historical-cultural-

epistemological world-view, different from and similar to a variety of other equally valid

and valuable ways of knowing and being (Santos, 2007; Battiste, 2008). In other words,

if we are “well educated”, we conceive, perceive, interpret, know, learn about, and

(re)produce knowledge of the “world” through an ethnocentric cultural projection known

as “Eurocentrism” (Ankomah, 2005).

This review begins therefore by situating Eurocentrism within the historical

context of its emergence – colonial modernity – and proceeds to define Eurocentrism as

the epistemic framework of colonial modernity. From this decolonial (or post-

Eurocentric) historical horizon and framing of Eurocentrism, the second part will frame

and review literature on the critique of Eurocentrism within mathematics and science

education that represent alternatives to the hegemony of western knowledge in the

classroom. This literature was searched for and selected because it provides critiques of

Eurocentrism that include specific proposals for de-centering and pluralizing the school

curriculum. The review concludes by summarizing, situating, and appropriating these

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two school subject proposals within a vision for a post-Eurocentric curriculum. In

framing, selecting, and reviewing literature that challenges and reconceptualizes the

underlying Eurocentric assumptions of the modern school curriculum, this literature

review adopts from critical philosophical (Haggerson, 1991), interpretive (Eisenhardt,

1998), and creative process approaches (Montuori, 2005). The rationale for this two-part

organization, as well as the type of review this rationale calls for deserve further

clarification, before analyzing the historical context of Eurocentrism.

Methodological and Theoretical Rationale

Conventional literature reviews seek to synthesize ideas as overviews of

knowledge to date in order to prefigure further research (Murray & Raths, 1994; Boote &

Beile, 2005). Eisenhardt (1998) however, describes another purpose of literature reviews

as interpretive tools to “capture insight ….suggesting how and why various contexts and

circumstances inform particular meanings and reveal alternative ways of making sense

(p. 397). Following Eisenhardt’s description, this unconventional literature review is

intended to situate and review an emergent literature on a post-Eurocentric curriculum

within an historical analysis of Eurocentrism. A post-Eurocentric interpretive horizon is

described that provides an alternative way of making sense of the curriculum literature.

Eurocentric modernity is the historical context within which the modern curriculum is

conceived. Most uses of term Eurocentrism within the curriculum literature have yet to

include analyses of the origins and meaning of Eurocentrism within the history and

project of modernity. This lack of recognition and analysis of the historical context of

Eurocentrism contributes to both incoherence and impotency in the use of this critical

concept (for examples see Mahalingam, 2000; Gutierrez, 2000; Aikenhead & Lewis,

2001).

The concepts Eurocentrism and post-Eurocentrism offer contrasting paradigms

through which the curriculum can be evaluated in relation to whether teaching and

learning reproduces or decolonizes the dominant modern/colonial system of

power/knowledge relations. The successful development and implementation of a post-

Eurocentric curriculum is dependent upon an adequate historical-philosophical

interpretation of Eurocentrism. As such, this literature review adopts elements from the

critical philosophical, interpretive, and creative process approaches (Haggerson, 1991;

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Eisenhardt, 1999; Livingston, 1999; Meacham, 1998; Schwandt, 1998; Montuori, 2005).

Eisenhardt describes interpretive reviews as presenting information that “disrupts

conventional thinking” and seeks to “reveal alternative ways of making sense”

(Eisenhardt, 1999, p. 392, 397). Haggerson’s critical philosophical inquiry attempts to

give meaning and enhance understanding of activities and institutions, bringing their

norms of governance to consciousness, and finding criteria by which to make appropriate

judgments (Haggerson, 1991). Montouri’s creative process model includes

problematizing the underlying presuppositions of a field of inquiry along with creating

new frameworks for reinterpreting bodies of knowledge (Montouri, 2005). This review

does not describe and compare different perspectives. This review instead presents an

alternative, post-Eurocentric framework for reinterpreting the modern Eurocentric

curriculum, with a specific focus on math and science education. This post-Eurocentric

framework provides an alternative way of thinking about school knowledge whereby the

entire spectrum of different perspectives can be re-viewed in relation to each other.

One purpose of this literature review is to situate and describe contemporary

critiques of Eurocentrism in mathematics and science education that contribute to the

creation of a post-Eurocentric science and mathematics curriculum. This review begins

therefore by characterizing Eurocentrism as the epistemic framework of colonial

modernity from a post-Eurocentric interpretive horizon. This analysis of Eurocentrism

from a post-Eurocentric interpretive horizon is a necessary precondition to selecting and

framing any school subject critiques that aim to contribute to a curriculum no longer

contained within the epistemic framework of colonial modernity. A post-Eurocentric

interpretive horizon and curriculum are possible through an analysis of Eurocentrism that

escapes its constitutive relations with the boundaries and conceptual presuppositions of

modernity. A second purpose of this review then is to layout a decolonial critique of

Eurocentrism in relation to the modern curriculum from a post-Eurocentric interpretive

horizon. A decolonial critique of Eurocentrism involves a confrontation with the history

and project of modernity (Dirlik, 2002; 2007).

If Eurocentrism is an expression of the conceptual apparatus that created the

modern worldview (western historical consciousness of the present), then Eurocentrism

cannot be adequately understood from within this worldview alone.

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The widespread assumption in our day that Eurocentrism may be spoken or written away, …… rests on a reductionalist culturalist understanding of Eurocentrism. Rendering Eurocentrism into a cultural phenomenon that leaves unquestioned other locations for it distracts attention from crucial ways in which Eurocentrism may be a determinant of a present that claims liberation from the hold on it of the past. What is at issue is modernity, with all its complex constituents, of which Eurocentrism was the formative moment. Just as modernity is incomprehensible without reference to Eurocentrism, Eurocentrism as a concept is specifiable only within the context of modernity (Dirlik, 1999, pp. 1-2).

So Eurocentrism cannot be adequately understood separate from its formation within the

history of western modernity. Yet Eurocentrism is the “formative moment” of

modernity. Most theories of modernity in fact, interpret the history and meaning of

modernity from within the perspective of modernity itself, from within the historical

horizon of Eurocentric consciousness (Mignolo, 2000a; Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2008).

The idea of modernity, first of all, has been conceived from the perspective of European history and has been framed based on the historical process and subjective experience of Western European countries and people – more specifically, on the complicity between Western Christiandom and the emergence of capitalism as we know it today. Europe and modernity have become synonymous and essential components of modern European identity (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2008, p. 113).

In recent years the history of western modernity has been interpreted from the

perspective of the history of colonial power/knowledge relations (Mignolo & Tlostanova,

2008; Escobar, 2007; Dussel, 2000; Quijano, 2000). This recent reframing opens up a

more global account of modernity that contributes to a more historical and critical

understanding of Eurocentrism. As the epistemic framework through which knowledge

and understanding are colonized, Eurocentrism must to be adequately understood and

clarified in order to think beyond its conceptual and epistemic boundaries.

Eurocentrism as the Epistemic Framework of Colonial Modernity

Until 1960s, the Eurocentric interpretation of modernity was the largely

unquestioned cultural-narrative background in the social and political imaginary of the

modern/colonial world-system. “Imaginary” here refers to the ways a culture has of

perceiving and conceiving itself and the world. The modern/colonial world system is a

socio-historical structure that comprises the dominant imaginary and material

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constructions of the modern historical period, from 1492 to the present. Occidentalism

became the dominant cultural imaginary of the modern/colonial world system in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Orientalism became the hegemonic cultural

imaginary when the image of the “heart of Europe” (England, France, Germany) replaced

the “Christian Europe” of the fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century (Italy, Spain, Portugal)

(Mignolo, 2000a). Broadly conceived, European civilizational and modernization

processes constructed the dominant intersubjective and material conditions that

constituted these two interrelated imaginaries. The variety of modern knowledge

disciplines, and particularly the field of education, (with their historical and intimate

interrelations with the state, the economy, and ethnocentric nationalism), are maintained

within this macronarrative of western civilization.

Self-serving institutionalized academic disciplinary boundaries, unexamined

nationalist ideologies in scholarship, and insufficient comparative research across the

social sciences and humanities have all contributed to a lack of critical awareness of the

presence and limits of this civilizational narrative in the historical consciousness of

western modernity (Taylor, 1999; Agnew, 2003). In addition, Eurocentric scholarship

and disciplinary divisions normally interpret modernity and colonialism as completely

separate phenomena, upholding the mythical march of modernity. In the United States

for example, the term “colonial” has been effectively appropriated in nationalist

historiography and the public consciousness to refer exclusively to the early “American”

historical period, i.e., “colonial history”, “settler colonies” (Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis,

1995; Greene, 2007). Colonialism is largely absent in the curriculum in most U.S.

schools and many universities. It is also largely absent in the historical consciousness of

the white population within the U.S..

This macronarrative of western civilization first emerged in the Renaissance and

consolidated during the Enlightenment, and today, it is tied to the historiography of the

Renaissance and the philosophy of the Enlightenment (Mignolo, 2000a). In the

nineteenth century, various German philosophers ensured its solidified extension into the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries, i.e., Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger (Maldonado-

Torres, 2005).

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Western civilization is supposed to be something “grounded” in Greek history as is also Western metaphysics. This reading, implicit in the Renaissance, became explicit in the Enlightenment. Occidentalism is basically the master metaphor of colonial discourse since the sixteenth century (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 327).

As the examples of math and science education described below illustrate, each of the

school subjects that comprise the modern school curriculum, are embedded within this

Eurocentric macronarrative. According to this narrative, western civilization originated

in ancient Greece and its foundations lie upon the universal principles of western

knowledge and interpretation.

This western civilizational narrative is both celebratory of its virtues and critical

of its failings. Toward the end of the twentieth century, with some important precursors,

i.e., Nietzsche, a diverse internal critique of western knowledge structures emerged that

contributed to the “crisis” of this once unifying mythology of the “modern” world

(Habermas, 1990; Rorty, 1989; Lee, 2004). Overall, the post-modern critique of

modernity has challenged the universal and ahistorical subject along with the

representational philosophy of language (Cadava, Connor, & Nancy, 1991; Rorty, 1979).

What emerged with these late twentieth century critiques of the foundations of modernity

was a theory of knowledge and interpretation in which all human meanings are situated

within cultural and historical contexts – contexts that are continually changing over time

(Gadamer, 1989; Malpus, 2006). Realities and knowledge of realities are therefore

cultural and historical constructions (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Knowledge is

interpreted as culturally and historically produced and organized. Today, modernity, as a

culturally neutral and universal (ahistorical) project of enlightenment and progress, has

lost much of its credibility (Habermas, 1975). As a triumphal way of interpreting the past

and projecting the future, modernity has largely lost much of its plausibility, particularly

in relation to the global ecological crisis, a consequence of industrial modernity.

The process of decolonizing knowledge is the source of the “post” in postmodernity, not because it put an end to modernity but because it put an end to the center’s self-interested and deluded understanding of modernity, provoking, among other things, a crisis in intellectual authority that academics are still struggling to confront and contain (Pratt, 2002, p. 22).

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What remains of modernity however, are efforts to sustain the colonial/imperial power

relationships that were its product under a neoliberal market ideology (Steger, 2004;

Dirlik, 2007, p. vii;), which in the midst of the current (2008-2009) global economic

crisis has seemingly lost all credibility (Jacques, 2009). As the examples of math and

science education described below also illustrate, the collapse of the coherence of the

narrative of Eurocentric modernity has yet to alter the modern educational mission of

assimilation into this now incoherent worldview.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, temporality was reconstructed as a linear,

progressive trajectory that positioned individual agency within a rational, unitary, self-

present mode of subjectivity (Venn, 2002, p. 68). These conceptions of time and

subjectivity are evident in contemporary thought such as the dichotomy between modern

and traditional, the predominance of (possessive) individualism, and presumptions of

objective truth.

History was conceived as an evolutionary continuum from the primitive to the civilized; from the traditional to the modern; from the savage to the civilized; from the pre-capitalism to capitalism, etc. And Europe thought of itself as the mirror of the future of the history of the entire species (Quijano, 1999, p. 50).

Western civilization was viewed as the model of “humanity” in the historical evolution of

the species within a linear succession of events that began with ancient Greece and

arrives in modern North America. In mid-nineteenth century classrooms for example,

Anglo-American teachers told their students that all non-Europeans were intellectually

inferior to them (Blaut, 1993, p. 3).

The fact that Western Europeans will imagine themselves to be the culmination of a civilizing trajectory from a state of nature leads them also to think of themselves as the moderns of humanity and its history, that is, as the new, and at the same time, most advanced of the species. But since they attribute the rest of the species to a category by nature inferior and consequently anterior, belonging to the past in the progress of the species, the Europeans imagine themselves as the exclusive bearers, creators, and protagonists of that modernity. What is notable about this is not that the Europeans imagined and thought of themselves and the rest of the species in that way—something not exclusive to Europeans—but the fact that they were capable of spreading and establishing that historical perspective as hegemonic within the new intersubjective universe of the global model of power (Quijano, 2000, pp. 542-543).

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This world historical narrative of “civilization” assumes that the achievements of the

west, i.e., mathematics and science, represent the pinnacle of progress and development,

and legitimate western dominance (Adas, 1989).

Eighteenth century European Enlightenment thinkers, for example, invoked a comparative method that differentiated its manners and conduct as the most advanced qualities of human civilizations from those who were at a less advanced stage of development. The latter are differentiated as ‘barbaric’ or savage, uncivilized, and thus disqualified for participation (Popkewitz, 2007, p. 67).

In this narrative, “man” was Euro-American man and the rest were “natives”.

Underlying this conception of civilized humanity was a particular form of subjectivity

constructed from the experience and perspective of the elite, white, heterosexual,

Christian, males.

The western subject (already gendered to subordinate the female and the feminine) is brought into being as a universal norm in the process of the West’s expansion. This norm denies the subject’s dependence upon ‘the other’ and produces the illusion of autonomy and freedom. In fact, this abstract and universal consciousness was always embodied, male, and European, whether indigenous or transplanted. Women and non-European men -- even if they achieved the required education -- could enter science only as surrogates, disciples, or through passing (that is, by adopting the languages, gestures, attitudes, values of Euro-American men) (Restivo & Loughlin, 2000, p. 137).

Bringing European forms of knowledge and ways of life to the “natives” was conceived

as the “civilizing mission” (“white man’s burden”) of the west, both within and without

Europe and North America. Like “globalization” is today, “civilizing” was the

overarching ideology behind the formation and reformation of mass schooling in the

nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century (Adams, 1988).

Euro-American man was supposed to possess a superior mode of reason. The

ideal of western rationality, through “proper” education, could be transferred to other

human beings (both within and outside of Europe and North America) lower in the

racial/intelligence hierarchy, unless they were determined to be incapable of being

civilized, which legitimized their exploitation, segregation, marginalization, and failure to

“succeed”. For example, in the United States, until 1940s, “Negroes” were believed to be

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incapable of being civilized, justifying their enslavement and subsequent subordinate

legal status, while some “Indians” could be civilized, legitimizing their removal from

tribal lands and justifying their cultural extermination through “education” (Goldberg,

1994; Adams, 1988; 1995). Pathologizing practices and the “cultural deficit” paradigm,

still prevalent in education today, are contemporary continuations of this civilizational

narrative (Shields, Bishop & Mazawi, 2005; Heydon & Iannacci, 2008).

Although the missions have changed from converting, to civilizing, to

modernizing, and most recently, to marketizing, western education institutions and the

modern curriculum are maintained within this predatory model of civilization based upon

a Eurocentric projection of humanity (Mignolo, 2006). By the early twentieth century,

“civilization” was no longer singularly western, but plural and planetary (Mazlish, 2004).

The recognition of multiple civilizations today continues within the Eurocentric

framework, as in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” classification, where non-

western civilizations remain in the past and need to be brought into the present

(Huntington, 1996). Knowledge and the curriculum however, remain within the

parameters of western civilization. Science, mathematics, social studies, and language

education continue to serve as the “core” subjects of this civilizational project (Kirch,

2007; Fasheh, 1991). Even the most alternative of the remaining alternative schools in

the U.S. are teaching a Eurocentric math and science curriculum, determined now by

state mandated standardized testing and a professionalized curriculum standardization

movement (Holgar, 2002; Hursh, 2008). The current “standards reform” movement can

be seen as an international effort by the white male power elite to reinforce the

Eurocentric curriculum and restrict alternatives that would further fragment the

macronarrative of modernity. Epistemic decolonization has yet to occur, but a global

movement to decolonize knowledge and education has been emerging since the 1960s

(Pieterse & Parekh, 1995).

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the historical legacies and

conceptualizations of Eurocentric modernity, particularly assumptions about knowledge,

have been critiqued and rewritten from a variety of perspectives associated with the terms

(among others) -- postmodern, postcolonial, post-Occidental, anti-colonial, critical race,

critical pedagogy, critical multicultural, cultural historical, sociocultural, subaltern,

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feminist, ethnic, science, technology, and cultural studies (Pratt, 2002; Dirlik, 2006; Dei

& Kempf, 2006; Harding, 2008). Broadly, these late twentieth century academic

discourses all contribute to the recognition of the cultural and historical contexts (or

social constructions) of knowledge and being.

The biopolitical epistemic shift surfaced instead in the US, during the Cold War but, above all, after and as a consequence of the civil rights movement. The question asked here was not the relationship between geopolitics and epistemology but, rather, that between identity and epistemology. New spheres of knowledge came into being (women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, gay and lesbian studies, Afro-American studies, ethnic studies, Latino/as studies, etc). What do all of them have in common? First, all of them incorporate the knower into the known, the personal and collective memory of communities configured around race, gender, and sexuality. Second, they all introduced into the social sphere of knowledge the perspective from the damnes, the disposed by colonial racism and patriarchy. And third, they introduced a new justificiation of knowledge: knowledge not at the service of the church, the monarch, or the state, but knowledge for liberation; that is, for subjective and epistemic decolonization (Mignolo, 2006, p. 328).

Since the 1970s, these and other interrelated historical and social constructionist

discourses have entered the field of curriculum studies and the specific school subject

disciplines (Banks, 1995; Young, 1971; Wexler, 1987; Pinar, et. al. 1996; Pinar, 2004;

Goodson, 1995; Kincheloe, 2001; Matus & McCarthy, 2003; Kanu, 2006). Together,

these various discourses have further situated the curriculum within cultural-historical

contexts and practices. Much of this historical and cultural contextualization of the

curriculum contributes (albeit indirectly) to the problematization of the Eurocentric

assumptions of universality, superiority, and cultural neutrality of knowledge within the

curriculum.

Largely as a result of ‘post’ scholarship (e.g., postmodernism, postructuralism, post-Enlightenment, postcolonialism), the Western prejudice at the core of virtually all education systems operating in the world today has been exposed, provoking curriculum initiatives that deconstruct and challenge the dominance of Western Eurocentrism in curriculum and making possible the theorization of curriculum from several alternative perspectives (Kanu, 2006, p. 3).

Although “several alternative perspectives” that challenge Eurocentrism have developed,

such as critical pedagogy, critical multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, and various Aboriginal

15

forms of knowing, an explicit critique of Eurocentrism and the Eurocentric school

subjects from the perspective of colonial modernity has yet to emerge. With the

exception John Willinky’s work, postcolonialism is noticeably absent in Pinar, Reynolds,

Slattery and Taubman’s comprehensive description of the curriculum field (Pinar, et.al.,

1995). The various discourses of postmodernism and multiculturalism remain largely

within the interpretive horizon of modernity (i.e., state-centric), offering no critique of

Eurocentrism within the world historical context of modernity/coloniality (Banks, 1995;

Appelbaum 2002; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). State sponsored

multiculturalism reduced ethnic/racial differences to a narrow culturalist interpretation,

eliminating the more challenging historical, economic, political, aesthetic, and epistemic

interpretations and further solidifying systemic and structural inequalities between

dominant and non-dominant groups (Huggan, 2001). As Buras and Motter recently

argued, critical multiculturalism must “go global” if its goals of transforming the

monoculture of schooling are to be realized (Buras & Motter, 2006).

In terms of understanding and providing alternatives to modernity, the

postmodern critique appears to have reached its limits. Modernity remains incompletely

understood, and its intellectual deconstruction is only one step in the process of

imagining and implementing an alternative. A global and relational account of modernity

is necessary now that is both historical-empirical and conceptual-philosophical. “Until

such an account exists, the term postmodern has no referent and remains a gesture of

premature closure on modernity, foreclosing the decolonization of knowledge and the

decentering of the center” (Pratt, 2002, p. 22). Remaining largely within the modern

ideologies of liberal/humanism, the problematization of the foundational assumptions of

modern knowledge has resulted in a theoretical impasse between universalism and

particularism in many of the subject disciplines (Laclau, 1992; Collins & Blot, 2003).

This “problem” of cultural relativism (persistent in contemporary postmodern curriculum

debates) is a diversion of the European pretense to ahistorical and universal knowledge.

Intellectual entrapment within this universal versus particular dichotomy is a

consequence of the continued hold of the Eurocentric imaginary, which is related to an

inadequate understanding of the colonial constructions of western modernity (Mignolo,

2000a).

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Cultural inquiry in curriculum studies and the cultural politics of education have

contributed to the deconstruction of Eurocentric assumptions underlying school

knowledge (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Aronowitz, 1992; Giroux, 1983; Apple, 1993;

Popkewitz, 2000). These important cultural critiques of education argue that the

curriculum is predominantly constitutive of the knowledge and values of particular

interest and power groups, and that schools function to normalize differences as well as

inscribe particular subjectivities that conform to the dominant culture (Apple, 1990,

1996; Kanu, 2006). What this scholarship has yet to articulate however is an adequate

interpretation of the historical context of these hegemonic

power/knowledge/culture/education interrelations. Much of this scholarship assumes a

theory of modernity (sometimes tacitly) that begins in the seventeenth or eighteenth

centuries, obscuring the colonial origins of the power/knowledge relations of modernity

from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Viewed from the sixteenth century,

ethno/racial relations are intertwined with the establishment of class relations structured

around capitalist forms of labor.

More recently, scholarship associated with postcolonial and subaltern studies has

contributed to historical and theoretical analyses of modernity that reveal European

colonialism was centrally involved in the construction and imposition of Eurocentric

ways of knowing and being (Said, 1979; Pratt, 2002; Castro-Gomez, 2008).

It is clear, nowadays, that beyond its economic and political dimensions colonialism had a strong epistemological dimension. And when one considers the resilience of such dichotomies as nature/society, savage/civilized, developed/underdeveloped one must ask how much of the colonial past remains in the post-colonial present (Santos, Nunnes & Meneses, 2007b, pp. xxxiv- xxxv).

Postcolonial and subaltern thinking are both oppositional practices in the public sphere

and theoretical and epistemological transformations of the academy (Prakash 1994).

Post-colonial studies are defined as a set of theoretical and analytical currents, rooted in

cultural studies and present in the social sciences, that claim the unequal relations

between the North and the South were historically constituted by colonialism, and the end

of colonialism as a political relation did not end colonialism as a social relation (Santos,

Nunnes & Meneses, 2007b, p. xxxiv). “Colonial ways of thinking, thinking about

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thinking, and training in how to think, are still practiced, and these in turn, through the

education of each nation-state’s children, affect every aspect of economics, politics, and

social development …(Des Jarvais, 2008, pp. vii-viii).

The postcolonial and subaltern critiques of modernity in the 1980s, 1990s, and the

present by scholars and activists from around the world opens up a more penetrating,

critical, and global interpretation and understanding of modernity and Eurocentrism

(Pratt, 2002; Quijano, 2000; Dussel, 1993, 1998; Santos, 1999, 2007e; Adams, Clements

& Orloff, 2004). Postcolonial interpretations of multiculturalism for example, highlight

the Eurocentric nature of cultural comparison with its assumptions of universalism,

humanism, and bounded and homogeneous nature of national contexts, cultures,

identities, and knowledges (Huggan, 2001). Although these movements have brought

into the field of analysis the complex and paradoxical dimensions of European

colonialism, much of postcolonial and subaltern criticism has also remained within the

Eurocentric historical horizon in locating the origins of modernity in the eighteenth

century (Rizvi, Lingard & Lavia, 2006). The persistence of the Eurocentric interpretive

horizon within the discourse of modernity’s most challenging critics is one reason the

Latin American postcolonial critique (the modernity/coloniality research group)

distinguishes itself from postcolonialism, preferring instead the term “post-Occidentalist

reason” (Mignolo, 2000a).

Occidentalism is another name for western, thus the meaning of post-

Occidentalism parallels the meaning post-Eurocentism. The historical origins of both

Occidentalism and Eurocentrism are the sixteenth century, what some historians refer to

as the “early modern” period. From this post-Occidental perspective, “modernity”

includes historical events and changes that occurred within and beyond Europe in the

emergence and expansion of western (Occidentalist) thought and practice over the past

five hundred years. As a planetary phenomenon, modernity was constituted in the

emergence and global expansion of the first worldwide historical system created and

managed by white, male, heterosexual, Christian elites from western Europe and North

America (Dussel, 1995, 1998; Grosfoguel, 2002). The epistemic project of modernity

(including modern education) is intertwined with the history of European colonialism

from the sixteenth century to the present (Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Mignolo, 2000a,

18

2005; Dussel, 1993, 1995; Escobar, 2007; Castro-Gomez, 2008). The emergence of

Occidentalist reason is part of the emergence of European civilizational identity and the

imperial/colonial project that became known in the eighteenth century as modernity.

This recent analysis of modernity from the perspective of coloniality has

contributed to a more comprehensive (world-historical) interpretation of western

modernity, with significant implications for rethinking western education. Modernity is

seen as a hegemonic system of domination, oppression, and exploitation, rooted in the

earliest stages of European colonial expansion. From this vantage point, alternatives to

modernity are necessary today in the face of the interrelated neo-liberal and neo-

conservative projects to reassert the colonial power/knowledge relations of modernity

through the formation of a global market civilization (Brown, 2003, 2006; Gill, 2003).

Creating alternatives to modernity involves breaking out of and resituating the hegemony

of Eurocentric knowledge production and learning, through the recognition and

revaluation of the epistemological diversity of the world.

Probably more than ever, global capitalism appears as a civilizational paradigm encompassing all domains of social life. The exclusion, oppression, and discrimination it produces have not only economic, social, and political dimensions but also cultural and epistemological ones. Accordingly, to confront this paradigm in all its dimensions is the challenge facing a new critical theory and new emancipatory practices. Contrary to their predecessors, this theory and these practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is immense, as immense as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be at the core of the global resistance against capitalism and of the formulation of alternative forms of sociability (Santos, 2006b) (Santos, Nunnes & Meneses, 2007b, p. xviiii).

If coloniality was constructed along with the construction of western modernity,

then modernity and coloniality are two sides, or two interrelated aspects, of the same

cultural-historical-structural phenomena.

Coloniality is constitutive of modernity; thus, the triumphal march of modernity cannot be celebrated from the imperial perspective without bringing to the foreground that religious salvation implied the extirpation of idolatry; civilization the eradication of non-European modes of life, economy, and political organization; development within capitalist modernity and market democracy within Western political theory (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2008, p. 113).

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First theorized by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, “coloniality” or “coloniality of

power” is a global model of power/knowledge relations that emerged with and as a

consequence of European colonialism and European modernity in the sixteenth century.

Coloniality of power is a principle and strategy of control and domination that is

articulated though the modern/colonial world system and remains the most general form

of domination in the world today (Quijano, 2000). Coloniality identifies an overarching

structure of power that has impacted all aspects of social and political experience around

the world.

The phrase, modernity/coloniality therefore captures these historical structural

interrelations and consequences of colonialism, coloniality, and modernity. Since

modernity and coloniality occurred within and constituted the first world historical

system (Wallerstein, 1974), the phrase modern/colonial world system refers to both a

perspective for interpreting the present, and, an alternative name for the world historical

period and phenomena of modernity. Modernity/coloniality displaces the largely

Eurocentric and problematic conceptions of modernity and postmodernity (Pratt, 2002;

Escobar, 2007). The modern/colonial world system perspective offers a redefinition of

modernity as a sociohistorical system that began in the sixteenth century and continues in

the present. In other words, we live in the modern/colonial world system today, not

modernity or postmodernity; and, the unit of analysis for social inquiry is the

modern/colonial world system, not the nation-state or society.

Adding colonial in modern/colonial brings the interrelated power/knowledge

relations that emerged with colonialism and modernity to the surface, thus,

problematizing the structures of knowledge through which the modern world was

constructed. European colonization is the systematic imposition of the European

worldview through the organization and control of knowledge. Problematizing the ways

the modern world was conceptualized through the structures of knowledge includes the

entire range of western political philosophy, from left to right. From the perspective of

colonial modernity, modern western institutions, such as the structures of knowledge,

social and political theory, the nation-state, and western education are modern/colonial

institutions.

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The historical interrelations between (modern) colonialism and (colonial)

modernity can be illustrated in the history of the “modern/colonial” school curriculum.

Both metropolitan and colonial schools were organized within the same civilizational

ideologies and disciplinary practices. Since the end of the Renaissance, modern western

education systems have been understood or framed as part of the larger macronarrative of

western civilization (Butts, 1967, 1973; Mignolo, 2003; Grafton & Jardine, 1986;

Patterson, 1997; Rojas, 2002). The fact that European colonialism always operated both

internally and externally, and, that there was ongoing reciprocal borrowing of educational

policies and practices between metropolitan and colonial schools, also points to the

mutually constitutive interrelations between colonialism, modernity, and coloniality of

power (Raskin, 1971; Young, 2001, p. 9; Leersen, 2006; Foucault, 2003). The standards

of knowledge and their exportation were established mainly in Britain, France, and

Germany, in these three national and colonial/imperialist languages (Mignolo, 2000a, pp.

55-56). The curriculum and languages of instruction in colonial education remain largely

the same as the curriculum and languages used in European and North American schools

(Memmi, 1965; Fanon, 1968; Carnoy, 1974; Altbach & Kelly, 1984; Ball, 1984; Abdi &

Cleghorn, 2005; Abdi, 2006). The “modern” curriculum embodies the Eurocentric

interpretive framework through which the modern/colonial world was conceptualized and

organized (Willinsky, 1998).

The modern/colonial world system can be characterized in part as a structure of

exploitation and domination, conceptualized and legitimized within the epistemic

framework of Eurocentrism and the rhetoric of modernity. The conceptual legacies and

subjectivities that emerged in the early modern period have persisted and evolved into the

twenty-first century (Adams, Clements & Orloff, 2004). The very processes and

experiences of colonization for example, contributed to the construction of the modern

European epistemological framework. The epistemic model of the knowing subject was

constituted in part during the initial stages of Spanish contact with and colonization of the

indigenous peoples in the Americas. According to Argentine philosopher of liberation,

Enrique Dussel, the early modern form of European epistemic subjectivity was the

conquering self. Both warrior and aristocrat, the ego conquiro established with the

previously unknown other an exclusionary relationship of domination (Dussel, 1995;

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Maldonado-Torres, 2008). This relation of conquest and domination became part of the

emerging civilizational identity of the European elite and subsequently a central but

hidden dimension of western modernity (Maldonado-Torres, 2008).

Modern subjectivity combined some of the features of the existing humanism of the time with ideas that emerged from the discovery of the new world and the experience of warriors and conquerors (not kings or clergy) vis-à-vis peoples regarded as inherently inferior. From then on, a particularly modern sense of human freedom was linked to certain relations of power that affected not only the way in which subjects perceived themselves, but also the way in which they related to others whose bodies presumably carried the marks of inferiority. The myth of modernity is therefore simultaneous with the emergence of modern subjectivity itself: freedom and the ensuing sense of rationality that emanates from it were tied to a particular conception of power that is premised on the alleged superiority of some subjects over others (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 213).

The modern consumer market society (Slater & Tonkiss, 2001) and the destructive

western cultural attitude toward nature are a “logical corollary” of the early modern

European conquest, colonization, and destruction of people and cultures (Dussel, 1985, p.

114).

The civilizing violence enacted upon the “savages” via the destruction of native knowledges and the imprinting of “true,” civilized knowledge is performed, in the case of nature, through its transformation into an unconditionally available natural resource. In both cases, though, knowledge strategies are basically strategies of power and domination. In the case of the construction of “nature,” knowledge and power went hand in hand; this is not to say that knowledge was produced in advance as an instrument to justify the subordinate of nature to society, but that the latter is an effect of the joining of power and knowledge. The savage and nature are, in fact, two sides of the same purpose: to domesticate “savage nature,” turning it into a natural resource. This unique will to domestication makes the distinction between natural and human resources as ambiguous and fragile in the sixteenth century as it is today (Santos, Nunes & Meneses, 2007b, pp. xxxv-xxxvi).

The sixteenth century marks the formation of a historical configuration that

constructed new boundaries and identities for knowing and being in the world that

reached around the planet by the end of the nineteenth century.

We are living in a present whose historical foundation is located in the sixteenth century. And we live in a present in which the ways in which we

22

conceive the past and the present were shaped by the radical qualitative changes of that century – a century in which, for the first time in the history of humanity, European men explored and mapped the world, encountered unknown lands and people, and made human life dispensible in pursuit of the appropriation of land and exploitation of labour to produce commodities for a global market. Europe, and European men, were the historical agents of these changes and were also the epistemic agents who mapped and classified the world at the same time that they set the epistemic standard, supported by Christian theology, through which such mapping and classifying could properly be conducted (Mignolo, 2007 p. 115).

The historical context of the Eurocentric mode of production and control of knowledge

and subjectivity is the emergence and global expansion of the modern/colonial world

system, which centrally involves the modern educational apparatus, from the sixteenth

century to the present (Dussel, 1993, 1995, 1998; Mignolo, 2000a; Quijano, 1999, 2000,

2008; Hamilton, 1989; Popkewitz, 2008).

The sixteenth century marks the beginning of the consolidation and expansion of

the western worldview and institutions that comprise the modern/colonial world system.

Unraveling the historical narrative of the emergence of the modern/colonial world system

and its system of power/knowledge relations is beyond the purpose of this review. What

is relevant from this narrative is the emergence of Eurocentrism as the epistemic

framework of the modern/colonial world system. The formation of Eurocentrism is part

of a global model of power/knowledge relations that emerged with and articulated the

modern/colonial world system. The emergence of the modern/colonial world system and

coloniality of power can be conceived of as an epochal convergence and transformation

from the sixteenth century. Seven key interrelated elements included in this convergence

are: 1) the Atlantic commercial circuit and the capitalist world system; 2) the colonization

and discourses over the humanity of the Amerindians; 3) the expulsion of the Jews and

Moors from the Iberian peninsula; 4) the civilizational identity of Europe; 5) the Spanish

Empire as the first modern territorial state; 6) the modern imperial interstate system; 7)

the modern epistemological framework of Eurocentrism.

The historical foundation for both modernity and coloniality begins with the

connection of the Mediterranean with the Atlantic through a new commercial circuit in

the sixteenth century. The emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit involved the

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construction of European geopolitical knowledge and system of social classification, the

development of the worldwide economic system with variegated methods of labor

control, and the creation of a relatively strong state apparatus within a historically novel

imperial interstate system (Wallerstein, 1974, p. 38; Hindness, 2005; Tully, 2007). The

variegated methods of labor control were tied to the first racial mapping of the modern

world system (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 53).

Two historical processes associated in the production of that space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race,” a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others. The conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed. On this basis, the population of America, and later the world, was classified within the new model of power. The second process involved the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all historically known previous structures of the control of labor – slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production, and reciprocity – around and on the basis of capital and the world market (Quijano, 2000, p. 182).

Racial classification, the control of labor, territorial state formation, and the production of

knowledge all converged during the sixteenth century within the dynamic context of the

Atlantic commercial circuit. The emergence of a system of racial categorization, new

forms of capitalist labor control, and Eurocentric structures of knowledge combined to

produce an intersubjective configuration that became know as modernity and rationality

in eighteenth century.

During the same period as European colonial domination was consolidating itself, the cultural complex known as European modernity/rationality was being constituted. The intersubjective universe produced by the entire Eurocentered capitalist colonial power was elaborated and formalized by the Europeans and established in the world as an exclusively European product and as a universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world (Quijano, 2007, p. 171).

The structures of knowledge are one of the basic institutions of any historical

system (Lee, 2000; Wallerstein, 2004). The modern/colonial world system developed its

own epistemological assumptions interrelated with the structural needs of the capitalist

24

world-economy. The history of capitalism and the history of western epistemology since

the European Renaissance run parallel to and complement each other (Mignolo, 2002).

“The expansion of Western capitalism implied the expansion of Western epistemology in

all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along with capitalism and the

industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and

the state” (Mignolo, 2002, p. 59). “The structure of modern knowledge, and its divisions

into various disciplines, is a direct reflection of the Western worldview. How this

worldview perceived reality and what it considered to be its civilizational problems came

to be crystallized as disciplines” (Sardar, 1999, p. 51).

Beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for the first time, the entire

world began to be explored, mapped, and classified by a particular group of European

men whose official interests were tied to the state, the church, and the acquisition of land,

wealth, power, and knowledge (Osborne, 1999; Paty, 1999). In a sense, new boundaries

and identities were constructed for the ways in which the “new world” and “Europe”

became known and understood that eventually became globally hegemonic. European

civilizational identity was founded on ethnocentric knowledge of non-Europeans in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Delanty, 1995; Agnew 2003). With the invention of

the Americas and the growing sense of world mastery among European elites in the

sixteenth century, the idea of Europe increasingly signified a universal culture. Christian

European civilization became the agent of universality.

Western civilization was not (could not have been) yet conceived as a cultural entity in the fifteenth century. There Christiandom was located in something as ill-defined as Europe …, the land of Western Christians …. On the other hand it was precisely the imaginary of the modern/colonial world that began to build on the idea of Western civilization without which there would not (could not) have been a modern/colonial world system. Thus the imaginary of the modern/colonial world was the location for the ground of the very idea of Western civilization. I call Occidentalism, then, the Western version of Western civilization (its own self-description) ingrained in the imaginary of the modern/colonial world (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 338).

The only cultures that ever challenged the expansion of European civilization were

eventually defeated or assimilated, with the exception of China (Young, 2001).

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Never before the sixteenth century had the differentiation acquired the dimension that it had in the modern/colonial world, a world that was made, shaped and controlled by European powers, from the Spanish to the British empires and through Dutch, French, and German colonialism. The European Resnaissance (in southern Europe) and then the European Enlightenment (in northern Europe) did two things simultaneously. First, the self-image of the West began to be built by constructing the macro-narratives of Western civilization; second, the colonial difference began to be built with the philosophical debate around the humanity of the Amerindians (Mignolo, 2003, p. 82).

The emergence of the modern/colonial world system involves the geo-economic, geo-

political, and geo-cultural invention and management of the planet that centrally involves

the production and organization of knowledge. Theoretical and philosophical thought

during this early modern period laid the foundations for Eurocentric knowledge and

modern western education.

This hierarchical system of social classification emerged from the variety of

discourses on the rights of Europeans to occupy, dominate, and manage the conquered

and colonized peoples (Dussel, 1995; Quijano, 2008). The Spanish colonization of the

Americas initiated a debate within the Church and the state over the classification and

therefore legal status of the Amerindians.

The well-known debate of Valladolid – between Bartolome de las Casas and Juan de Sepulveda and, later on, the legal-theological scholarship in the School of Salamanca devoted to finding the place of the Amerindians in the chain of being and in the social order of an emerging colonial state – culminated in the enunciation of the “rights of the people” (a forerunner of the “rights of man and of the citizen”) as vassals of the king and servants of God. Labor was needed for two reasons: first, to facilitate the massive death of Amerindians and, second, for the partial implementation of the crown legislation, helped by the church vigilance over the liberties taken by the conquistadores with Amerindians under their tutelage (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 53).

In the months preceding the Columbus’s initial voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, the

Jews and Moors were being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the Spanish

Reconquista, under the alliance between Ferdinand and Isabella. Ferdinand and

Isabella’s backing of Columbus’s journey and the promises it held for the Spanish Crown

and the Holy Roman Empire were interrelated with the emergence of a “purity of blood

doctrine” and the Catholic Spanish Inquisition. “European colonial expansion began

26

simultaneously with the institution of the Catholic Inquisition that replaced centuries of

Islamic multiculturalism” (Young, 2001, p. 21). The debate over the humanity of the

Amerindians within a discourse known as “rights of people” combined with the “purity

of blood” principles in the construction of a new religious and racial imaginary that

became part the formation of European civilizational identity. The discourse of purity of

blood later became biological racism, while the discourse of the rights of people later

became citizen/foreigner. The sixteenth century ideas of purity of blood and rights of

people became the basic principles behind the classification and ranking of people all

over the planet, redefining their identities, and justifying the variety of new forms of

labor control (Mignolo, 2000a, 2006).

What emerged from this initial period in the formation of the first worldwide

system was a structure of knowledge that classified the peoples of the world according to

an ethnic/racial hierarchy. This hierarchy was based upon a linear, ascending and

progressive conception of history along a scale measuring the degrees to which

individuals and cultures possessed the characteristics of “civilization”. The differences

and identities constructed in this universalized system of classification became part of the

system of power/knowledge relations that transforms differences into values.

The geo-political configuration of scales that measured the nature of human beings in terms of an idea of history that Western Christians assumed to be the total and true one for every inhabitant of the planet led to the establishment of a colonial matrix of power, to leave certain people out of history in order to justify violence in the name of Christianization, civilization, and more recently, development and market democracy. Such a geo-political configuration created a divide between a minority of people who dwell in and embrace the Christian, civilizing, or development missions and a majority who are outcasts and become the targets of those missions (Mignolo, 2005, p. 4).

According to Quijano, the “colonial matrix of power” constituted the worldwide

existence and reproduction of geohistorical identities; a hierarchy between European and

non-European identities; and institutions, like education, that maintain and expand this

racially organized cultural-historical system. Through coloniality of power the entire

planet was conceptualized in the production of knowledge and classificatory apparatus,

linking capitalism to labor, race, and knowledge.

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With the emergence of European colonial domination came the European

invention of a wide range of new social and geocultural identities, along with new forms

of labor control and exploitation within the Atlantic commercial circuit and the “New

World”.

The process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following centuries gave way to the imposition of such a “racial” criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first place, new social identities were produced all over the world: “whites”, “Indians”, “Negroes”, “yellows”, “olives”, using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their “racial” nature. Then on that basis the new geocultural identities were produced: European, American, Asiatic, African, and much later, Oceania. During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same “racial” lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world (Quijano, 2007, p. 171).

The political and philosophical thought emerging with colonialism invented race as the

pivotal notion that supported the process of world classification. The issue of race

became the rationale used to support, justify, and perpetuate the practice of imperial

domination. Race became the central principle for classifying and ranking people,

redefining their identities and justifying European slavery and other forms of capitalist

exploitation and domination. Race, according to Quijano, is “a mental construction that

expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important

dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism” (Quijano,

2000, p. 533). Racism here refers to classifications and ranking of human beings

according to a model that corresponds with Euro-American ways of life and sensibilities

(Mignolo, 1999b, 2003a).

With the emergence of this system of social classification came the need to

transform and design institutions that would maintain the knowledge/power relations

structured and implemented in the sixteenth century. Maintaining or reproducing these

racially organized knowledge/power relations is the heart of redemptive-civilizational

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missions of colonial modernity. The constructions of modern/colonial schooling and the

modern/colonial curriculum are institutionalizations of this civilizational ideal.

Initially, the civilizational ideal was enveloped within and propelled by the

Christian worldview and its mission of Orbis Universalis Christianum. The Spanish

Empire and the Roman Papacy were partners in the universal mission to expand

Christendom, as well as the power of the Spanish Crown relative to other emergent and

competing European territorial states. In complicity with the emergence of the capitalist

world system and ethnic/racial system of classification, Christianity became the first

global project of the modern/colonial world system.

With the shift in the leadership of the Atlantic economy from Spain and Portugal

to England and France, the rhetoric of modernity changed from Christianizing to

civilizing the world during the eighteenth century. The ideal of civilization was no

longer contained within Christianity and became European civilization itself. The

hierarchy of European civilization was based in part upon western educated sensibilities

and modes of comportment, in contrast to “uncivilized” people, both within and outside

of Europe and North America, understood through anthropological knowledge categories

such as “savage” and “primitive”. The basic idea of advancement along a linear

conception of history continued, but history was now seen as the story of man’s (instead

of God’s) progressive movement toward civilization (instead of salvation). From its

original meaning in the eighteenth century until the twentieth century, the concept of

“civilization” remained singular, referring only to Europe (Mazlish, 2004). After World

War II, U.S. led development and modernization projects displaced the missions of the

British and French Empires. As the U.S. led modernization mission reached a global

crisis point by the end of the 1960s, the project was reformed into the current mission of

market democracy, guided by the philosophy of neoliberalism. All four missions are

expressions of the coloniality of power and the system of social classification based upon

the Eurocentric conceptions of knowledge and being (Lander, 2002).

The civilizing missions of the modern/colonial world system involve the

selection, production, organization, and control of forms of knowledge and education

(Young, 1971; Apple, 1982) within and between nation-states around the world.

Eurocentrism is embedded in the very structures of western knowledge and the colonial

29

construction of cultures of scholarship (Sardar, 1999; Mignolo, 1997). The subjectivities

and knowledges produced and reproduced through schooling are therefore narrowly

confined in order to legitimately reproduce the racially stratified hierarchy that comprises

the divisions of labor within the capitalist world system (Bowles, 1971; Chase-Dunn,

1989).

The new historical identities produced around the foundation of the idea of race in the new global structure of the control of labor were associated with social roles and geohistorical places. In this way, both race and the division of labor remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing, in spite of the fact that neither of them were necessarily dependent on the other in order to exist or change (Quijano, 2000, p. 536).

This linkage between the systems of social classification and labor stratification is

a central component of a global model of power that emerged with the convergence of

events and discourses from the sixteenth century and continues within the rhetoric of

globalization in the present. This model of power is inherent in the structures of modern

knowledge and thought. Coloniality of power in other words, refers to the way the world

was divided up and hierarchically classified within the constitution of a European

centered cultural complex referred to by Quijano as “modernity/rationality” (Quijano,

1999). This cultural complex of rationality was put in place as a universal paradigm of

knowledge and of hierarchical relations between rational humanity and the rest of the

world.

Coloniality of power implies and constitutes itself through interrelated systems of

social classification, institutions like schools that construct and manage these

classifications, capitalist sociospatial relations (Lefebvre, 1991), and an epistemological

framework that controls the production and organization of knowledge. Thus, coloniality

is a system of domination and control that operates according to a particular “logic”.

According to Quijano, the “logic of coloniality” works through four domains of human

experience: economic (appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of

finance); political (control of authority); civic (control of gender and sexuality); and

epistemic and subjective/personal (control of knowledge and subjectivity). Each domain

is interwoven with the others. All four spheres are integrated into the logic of domination

and exploitation. Within each sphere there are ongoing struggles for control,

30

accommodation, resistance, and change. For the past five hundred years, different

worldviews have been in collision with one another, but the Eurocentric worldview has

created the internal and external borders for the world.

Coloniality of power is manifest in the global class, racial, gender, sexual

orientation, and religious hierarchies of the present day. Coloniality of power manifests

itself in social hierarchies, economic, racial, and sexual inequalities, economic and

cultural dependencies, “achievement gaps”, high school dropout rates, etc. Coloniality of

power is manifest in the class and racially stratified outcomes of mass education systems.

This universalized system of differentiation is evident in the dichotomous categories of

ordinary language and the discourse of schooling, e.g., superior/inferior,

rational/irrational, literate/illiterate, modern/traditional, developed/underdeveloped,

educated/uneducated, civilized/primitive, normal/abnormal, etc. Barbarians, primitives,

underdeveloped, people of color, children, illiterates, uneducated, at-risk, minorities,

underachievers, etc., are all educational policy categories of people subjected to the

ongoing civilizing, assimilating, educational missions of modernity/coloniality.

The system of social classification that comprises the coloniality of power forms

the foundation for the basic assumptions of Eurocentric knowledge. The epistemic

foundation of the modern/colonial world system can be summarized as a Eurocentric

knowledge framework for classifying, ranking, and organizing people and places within a

patriarchal and racial hierarchy interlinked with the capitalist system of production

(Quijano, 2000). Coloniality of power is evident in four main assumptions underlying

Eurocentric knowledge (Lander, 2002). First, Eurocentric knowledge is based on the

construction of multiple dichotomies or oppositions, i.e., reason and body, subject and

object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine (Berting 1993; Quijano 2000; Lander

2000). Second, European regional or local history is the model or reference for every

other history, the apex of humanity's progress (Dussel 2000; Quijano 2000). Third,

cultural differences are converted into value differences (Mignolo 1995), time-space

distances (Fabian, 1983), and hierarchies that define all non-European humans as inferior

(Lander, 2002). Fourth, and finally, science and technology are both the source and the

proof of western advancement toward greater control of the environment.

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Within the sphere of knowledge production, the epistemic framework of colonial

modernity maintains six epistemological assumptions: formality, intractablility,

decontextualized, universalistic, reductionist, and one-dimensional (Kincheloe, 2008).

Formality refers to the primacy of abstract methodology as the guarantor of truth

(Gadamer, 1989; Kincheloe, 2008). Intractability refers to the ontological assumption

that the world is an inert, static entity. Decontextualized refers to the assumption that

complete knowledge can be produced from phenomena removed from their diverse and

interrelated contexts of meaning. Universalistic refers to the requirement that the

production of true knowledge apply to all domains of the world. Reductionist refers to

the focus on phenomena that can be measured and captured in concepts, while one-

dimensional refers to the assumption that there is one true discoverable reality. These

foundational epistemological assumptions comprise the Eurocentric framework for the

production of rational knowledge that determine and control the selection and

organization of knowledge in western and western-influenced systems of education

(Kincheloe, 2008, p. 22).

Eurocentrism, as a perspective on knowledge, is inherent within the very structure

of knowledge that comprises the modern academic disciplines and school subjects.

Historically, the western knowledge disciplines, both conceptually and ideologically,

emerged within and served to promote the project of modernity/rationality or the

expansion and penetration of western civilization, both within and beyond Europe.

The humanities and modern social sciences create an imaginary with respect to the social world of the “subaltern” (the Orientals, the blacks, the Indians, the peasants) that not only served to legitimize imperial dominance on a political and economic level but also helped to create epistemological paradigms within these sciences, as well as to generate the (personal and collective) identities of the colonizers and the colonized (Castro-Gomez, 2008, p. 264).

“The structure of modern knowledge, and its divisions into various disciplines, is a direct

reflection of the Western worldview. How this worldview perceived reality and what it

considered to be its civilizational problems came to be crystallized as disciplines”

(Sardar, 1999, p. 51).

If Eurocentrism is intrinsic in the way we think and conceptualize, it is also inherent in the way we organize knowledge. Virtually all the

32

disciplines of social sciences, from economics to anthropology, emerged when Europe was formulating its worldview, and virtually all are geared to serving the need and requirements of Western society and promoting its outlook. Eurocentrism is entrenched in the way these disciplines are structured, the concepts and categories they use for analysis, and the way progress is defined with the disciplines (Joseph et al. 1990) (Sardar, 1999, p. 49).

Eurocentrism is intrinsic in the way western educators think about and

conceptualize knowledge, in part because it is also inherent in the way modern

knowledge and education were conceived and organized. If the very structure of modern

knowledge and the construction of the knowledge disciplines are entrenched within a

Eurocentric framework, then formal educational institutions and curriculum practices are

also deeply embedded within the Eurocentric milieu (Kanu, 2006). Western organized

knowledge and education, from preschool to graduate school, have successfully

enculturated Eurocentric forms of knowledge and subjectivity. Eurocentrism is intrinsic

to the ways western educators think and is inherent in the way they organize and teach

knowledge. The western school curriculum is thoroughly Eurocentric. Only recently

have the deeply embedded Eurocentric assumptions underlying the various school

subjects and the organization of school knowledge been problematized (Willinsky, 1998;

Kanu, 2006; Kincheloe, 2008; Des Jarlais, 2008). Examining the basic assumptions of

Western education and understanding their effects on local ways of knowing is

particularly important today given the increasing global interactions in politics,

economics, and education (Des Jarlais, 2008).

With this critical analysis of western modernity from the perspective of

coloniality the modern/colonial school curriculum can be interpreted as effectively

defined and contained within an imperial/colonial paradigm. The modern school

curriculum is part of the epistemic framework of colonial modernity. As described

above, the modern/colonial curriculum represents and reproduces a Eurocentric

worldview based upon assumptions of the superiority and universality of knowledge

within the western knowledge system. The imperial/colonial paradigm of knowledge and

education constructs and maintains a hegemonic and totalizing view of and way of being

in the world.

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Modern western educational institutions emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries as part of a disciplinary revolution around the same Renaissance idea of

civilized “man” that underlies the coloniality of power (Gorski, 2003; Illich, 1978).

Since the sixteenth century, schools have been institutions that relate the state, civil (and

religious) authority and moral discipline (Popkewitz, 1997, p. 140). The sixteenth

century origins of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being created the conceptual horizon

within which all subsequent modern political ideologies and social theories emerged

(Schwarzmantel, 1988; Wallerstein, 1991; 1995). Over the past five hundred years, the

epistemic framework of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being (captured broadly as the

discourses of Occidentalism and Orientalism) was imposed upon the entire world,

subjugating all other forms of knowing and learning to the universalized standards,

concepts, metaphors, and ideologies of western knowledge and education. The

Eurocentric curriculum, along with the assimilating, civilizational ethos of modern

schooling, are the most overt illustrations of education’s direct and ongoing complicity in

this patriarchal and racial system of domination and exploitation.

Western modernity is constructed in part through particular cultural constructions

of knowledge and subjectivity that are largely taken-for-granted (especially in western

educational institutions) as universally applicable and valid for all peoples and cultures,

i.e., “scientific” truth, “objective” history, “human” being. “’Modernity’ was imagined

as the house of epistemology” (Mignolo, 2000a, pp. 93). Ethnocentric, epistemological

Eurocentrism is the intended outcome of modern western education, based on the central

myth of modernity that European reason and knowledge is superior to all other forms of

thought (Dussel, 1995). “Today, it is necessary for the ethics, politics, and epistemology

of the future to recognize that the totality of western epistemology, from either the right

or the left, is no longer valid for the entire planet” (Mignolo, 2002, p. 86).

Eurocentrism is a rationale that conceals the historical and contemporary relations

between knowledge and power – the power of modern/colonial oppression and

domination. This Eurocentric worldview is interlinked historically and conceptually with

the inherently violent racial classification of humanity and the control of labor within the

world capitalist system (Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Mignolo, 2003a; Dussel, 1993, 1995;

Grosfoguel, 2002). Modern mass schooling not only serves as a selection and sorting

34

mechanism for the global racial divisions of labor, but, through its Eurocentric

curriculum and civilizational ethos, modern schooling is a necessary apparatus for

reproducing the cultural worldview that legitimates and conceals the inherent violence of

the modern/colonial world capitalist system.

Thoroughly disguised behind the rhetoric of modernity (i.e., progress, freedom,

self-governance, civilization, scientific truth, rationality, equality of opportunity,

meritocracy, etc.), western schooling is a modern/colonial institution that effectively

reproduces a racially stratified social system (Goldberg, 1993, 1994; Omni & Winant,

1986; Dirlik, 2008; Mignolo, 2003a; Grosfoguel, 2002; Pepper, 2006; Giroux, 1998).

From this perspective, modern western schooling practices are modern/colonial

institutions responsible for producing “civilized” subjectivities, and, through the

imposition of this civilizing process, reproducing a racialized hierarchy of cultural

assimilation that comprises the national and international systems of labor. “The global

racial/ethnic hierarchy of European and non-European is an integral part of the

development of the capitalist world system’s international division of labor” (Grosfoguel,

2002, p. 206). The “global racial/ethnic hierarchy” and global racialization processes

(Grosfoguel, 2002; Winant, 2001, 2006; Maldonado-Torres, 2004; Macedo & Gounari,

2006, Da Silva, 2007; Dirlik, 2008) refer to classifications and rankings of human beings

according to a model that corresponds with Eurocentric ways of knowing and being

(Mignolo, 2006). Mass education systems are among the primary institutions responsible

for the enculturation of Eurocentric ways of knowing and being that rank order

individuals according to their degree of assimilation into the dominant cultural system.

In the taken-for-granted alliance between the state, business, and education, educational

degrees and diplomas exercise hegemonic control over access to employment and life-

course possibilities and identities. Eurocentric structures of knowledge and the

Eurocentric curriculum are at the center of these colonial, capitalist, and racialized,

civilizational, assimilation processes.

Race and class are interrelated through the underlying epistemic logic of modern

racism and the educational reproduction of the global racial hierarchy (Goldberg, 1993,

2002; Silva, 2007). Epistemic and ontological differences are European inventions that

secure the supremacy of western rationality and devalue what cannot be assimilated.

35

At the epistemic level, the Western notion of rationality became a universal measuring stick and a model of a rational human being. At the same time, it spilled over ontology, as those who are not quite at the level of Western notion of rationality are lesser being. This is, simply, the logic of racism: the invention of epistemic and ontological colonial differences to secure the supremacy of Western rationality and devalue what cannot be assimilated. And it is basically epistemological because it is invented and created rather than “representing” epistemic and ontological differences in the world (Mignolo, 2008, p. ).

Differences (coloniality of differences) are constructed and hierarchically organized in

order to eliminate the threat of difference to the effective reproduction of the world

system. The transformation of differences into values is a machine like process,

propelled by the energy of an unconscious cultural ethos, instituted and maintained by a

globally organized dominant white male elite class. The imposed value hierarchy reflects

the dominance of the Eurocentric ways of knowing and being (presumed to be universal)

of this capitalist, patriarchal, and racist culture (Grosfoguel & Cervantes-Rodriquez,

2002).

The parallels between the racial patterns of educational attainment (Dei, et. al.,

1997; Ladson-Billings, 1997, 1998; Orfield, 2004; Yosso, et. Al., 2004; Stinson, 2006)

and the racially stratified system of labor are part of a global model of power relations

that emerged in the sixteenth century. Aproximately twenty percent of all Hispanic and

African-American adults in the U.S. today have a college degree, compared to fifty

percent among white adults (Santora, 2009; Yosso et.al., 2004). “From kindergarten

screening through graduate level exams, minority peoples have struggled to compete

successfully with dominant populations (Bourdeaux, 1995; Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo,

1999, p. 27)” (De Jarlais, 2008, p. 43). Many school districts in the U.S. test all students

by the third or fourth grades and use the results to segregate students thereafter in ways

that correspond highly and consistently with racial and class differences (Oakes, 1985).

The latest round of international educational restructuring (Daun, 2002), is part of the

global restructuring of the international system of labor control, intertwined with the

reassertion of the authority of the Eurocentric worldview and structures of knowledge

threatened by the variety of critiques of western modernity since the 1960s (Crozier,

Huntington & Watanuki, 1975; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991). The Eurocentric

36

worldview and civilizational ethos, as well as the existing structures of knowledge and

western institutions of education, particularly mathematics and science education, are

integral to the effective governance and reproduction of the racially stratified

modern/colonial world system, undergoing an epochal crisis today (Wallerstein, 2008;

Grosfoguel, 2008).

Despite decades of “multicultural education,” assimilation into the dominant ways

of knowing and being remains the underlying purpose of western mass educational

systems.

…approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity in education have centered around a deficit-difference paradigm whereby the lifeways of nondominant groups (e.g., members of racialized ethnic minority groups, migrant and multilingual populations, the working class and the working poor, and stigmatized religious groups) are understood as a set of cultural traits that are ascribed moral and economic values (Lam, 2006, p. 215).

Based on the assumption and expectation of assimilation into a superior Eurocentric

system of knowledge and being, western education is inherently racist and reproductive

of a violent world system of exploitation and domination. Epistemic racism negates the

cultural capacity of marginalized groups to produce their own knowledge (Maldonado-

Torres, 2004). From this perspective, there is no way out of the globalized system of

western racism and capitalism without de-linking knowledge from western epistemology,

in part, through the creation of a post–Eurocentric curriculum.

Reframing modernity in relation to coloniality makes Eurocentrism a key concept

for denaturalizing the ways western educators and educational researchers learn to

perceive and conceive the world. Understood as the epistemic framework of colonial

modernity, Eurocentrism becomes a metaphor to denaturalize the modern paradigm of

rational knowledge inherent in the conceptualization and organization of modern

schooling. Eurocentric knowledge is not another way of conceiving the world that is

demonstratively or presumed to be better than other ways and therefore remains dominant

in the world today (Landes, 1999; Lewis & Aikenhead, 2001). The epistemic framework

that emerged during the sixteenth century was intended to marginalize knowledges,

languages, histories, and ways of being in order to prop up the emergent colonial cultural

complex that later became known as modernity and rationality. Once the correlation

37

between subject and object was postulated it became unthinkable to accept the idea that a

knowing subject was possible beyond the subject of knowledge postulated by the very

concept of rationality put in place by modern epistemology (Mignolo, 2000).

The world became unthinkable beyond European (and, later, North Atlantic) epistemology. The colonial difference marked the limits of thinking and theorizing, unless modern epistemology (philosophy, social sciences, natural sciences) was exported/imported to those places where thinking was impossible (because it was folklore, magic, wisdom, and the like) (Mignolo, 2002, p. 90).

Eurocentrism, as the epistemic framework of colonial modernity, involves the elimination

and subordination of other ways of knowing and being through a system of

power/knowledge relations that legitimates ongoing projects of violent exploitation,

domination, and subjugation (Rojas, 2002).

The epistemological privilege granted to modern science from the seventeenth century onwards, which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidated Western supremacy, was also instrumental in suppressing other, non-scientific forms of knowledge and, at the same time, the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such knowledges. In the case of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves, this suppression of knowledge, a form of epistemicide (Santos, 1998), was the other side of genocide. There is, thus, an epistemological foundation to the capitalist and imperial order that the global North has been imposing on the global South (Santos, Nunes & Meneses, 2007b, p. xviiii).

The power of European colonialism and, interrelated, the expansion of western

modernity, involved the extinction and marginalization of epistemic diversity. The

diversity of knowledge and understanding of the world is much larger and more complex

than the western monocultural and reductive Eurocentric interpretations that comprise the

school curriculum today. There are diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life

and spirit, as well as diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge and how knowledge

should be validated. There are also diverse ways of conceiving and organizing school

subjects and schooling in general. Much of this diversity has been destroyed with the rise

of modern knowledge. Londa Schiebinger argues that the destruction of cultures and

knowledge of flora and fauna has resulted in a net loss of knowledge of the natural world,

not an “explosion” of knowledge (Schiebinger, 1993, p. 209). Behind the European story

38

of discovery and progress are the histories, experiences, and silenced conceptual

narratives of those who were disqualified as human beings, as historical actors, and as

capable of thinking and understanding (Mignolo, 2005, p. 4). The violent elimination,

subordination, and marginalization of other cultural ways of knowing and being are

necessary consequences of the expansion of the Eurocentric knowledge formation. “…

the achievements of modernity go hand in hand with the violence of coloniality”

(Mignolo, 2005, p. 5). The history of the knowledge learned in Eurocentric schooling

includes both wonders and horrors. The survival of the world today is at-risk because of

the consequences of the “progress” of modernity.

Coloniality essentially names the hegemony of European knowledge and being

through the hierarchical incorporation of all other cultures into a Eurocentric cultural

project.

The incorporation of such diverse and heterogenous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe signified a cultural and intellectual intersubjective configuration equivalent to the articulation of all forms of labor control around capital, a configuration that established world capitalism. In effect, all the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global order revolving around European or Western hegemony. Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony (Quijano, 2008, pp. 188-189).

Coloniality of power is thus a principle and strategy of control and domination that is

constitutive of western modernity as a long series of political, economic, cultural and

educational projects. “The concept of coloniality has opened up, the re-construction and

the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges

and languages performed by the Totality depicted under the names of modernity and

rationality” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451).

The critique of coloniality must therefore entail the critique of its epistemic

nucleus (Eurocentrism), that is, a critique of the type of knowledge that contributed to the

legitimation of European colonial domination and its pretenses of universal validation.

Understanding Eurocentrism within the history of its emergence in the sixteenth century

calls forth the creative inclusion and integration of subaltern knowledges and

corresponding ways of being in the post-Eurocentric school curriculum.

39

The knowledge, critical insights, and political strategies produced from the subaltern side of the colonial different serve as point of departure to move beyond colonialist and nationalist discourses. Rather than underestimating the subaltern, we should take seriously their cosmologies, thinking processes, and political strategies as a point of departure to our knowledge production (Grosfoguel, 2002, p. 209).

If modernity is understood as a global (universalized) design produced from a local

(particular) history that, in the process of imperial/colonial expansion, has subalternized

other local histories, then alternatives to modernity become conceivable and necessary.

By recognizing the educational value of local knowledges that have been subalternized

within the globalized project of modernity, a post-Eurocentric curriculum is an alternative

to the hegemony of the western curriculum. A post-Eurocentric curriculum includes and

situates the modern Eurocentric curriculum as one among many other equally legitimate

cultural forms of knowledge and being.

An other logic (or border thinking from the perspective of subalternity) goes with a geopolitics of knowledge that regionalizes the fundamental European legacy, locating thinking in the colonial difference and creating the conditions for diversality as a universal project (Mignolo, 2002, p. 91).

Like the rationale behind the current conversion in the U.S. from analogue to

digital television signals, the space of schooling needs to be redesigned and opened up to

include the diversity of knowledges and ways of being that the current commodified,

monocultural, and Eurocentric system forbids. The narrowness and rigidity of epistemic

boundaries established and controlled in the process of building the modern colonial

world system must be transformed, in the name of equality and justice for all, as well as

in order to make education more relevant and useful in the world today. The diverse

array of epistemological perspectives that have been subordinated and excluded within

the Eurocentric curriculum provide a broader range and richer variety of thinking about

and intervening in contemporary problems. There is no single type of knowledge that

can completely comprehend an issue and account for all possible interventions in the

world. All knowledges are incomplete in different ways. “When there is no unity of

knowledge, there is no unity of ignorance” (Santos, 2007a, p. 68). Along with opening

up the space of schooling to include the plurality of the epistemic diversity, there is an

interrelated need to expose the limits (i.e., the ignorance) and power relations of modern

40

epistemology and the modern Eurocentric curriculum (Willinsky, 1998). Developing a

post-Eurocentric curriculum involves critiquing and displacing the western monocultural

epistemology with a multicultural epistemology more reflective of the diversity of ways

of knowing and being in the world (Abdi, 2006; Santos, Nunes & Meneses, 2007b).

From this perspective, there is no social justice without cognitive justice, and the

achievement of cognitive justice calls for a multi-epistemic curriculum. Educational

equality must include epistemic equality. There are numerous and various “multi-

cultural” and “critical” intellectual and social movements within education that contribute

to and compliment this post-Eurocentric curriculum project. The analysis of

Eurocentrism above is intended to further the critique of Eurocentrism by providing a

necessary historical and philosophical framework for imagining and implementing a post-

Eurocentric curriculum. This analysis provides a framework to bring these separate and

varied critical movements together around the shared goals of critiquing and going

beyond Eurocentric schooling. Partial but significant critiques of Eurocentrism have

begun to emerge in the various school subjects (Kanu, 2006). In the following section,

emergent mathematics and science education critiques of Eurocentrism are reviewed

along with their proposals for a post-Eurocentric curriculum.

Towards a Post-Eurocentric Curriculum in Math and Science Education

The mathematics and science education literature reviewed below was selected

because it initiates the task of critiquing and reconceptualizing the dominant

imperial/colonial model of knowledge, and contributes towards the development of a

post-Eurocentric curriculum. The literature reviewed here is not the only literature in

education today that is consistent with and contributes to the critique of Eurocentrism as

described above. Afrocentricity (Mazama, 2003; Asante, 1991a, 1991b) and critical race

theory in education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997) should be mentioned as

making similar kinds of (or complimentary) critiques of the Eurocentric paradigm in

education. Afrocentricity and critical race theory in education both offer important

contributions to the creation of a post-Eurocentric curriculum. The Afrocentric

curriculum provides a pedagogical model for and a component part within a pluriversal

curriculum organized within an ecology of knowledge. Critical race theory’s

interpretation of the interrelations between racial formation, capitalism, and education are

41

consistent with and inform the critique of colonial modernity offered by the

modern/colonial world system perspective (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Proponents

of Afrocentricity and critical race theory in education have not (yet) developed critiques

of Eurocentrism in the core school subjects, with the exception of the Afrocentric critique

of modern history (Karenga, 2003; Asante, 1991a; Tate, 1997). Because the focus of this

review is the Eurocentric curriculum, I have chosen not to include either the literature on

Afrocentricism or critical race theory in education. I have chosen instead to review the

critiques of Eurocentrism coming from within two core subjects that present specific

curriculum alternatives for students from multiple cultural backgrounds. Similar reviews

of literature critiquing Eurocentrism within other schools subjects (i.e., social studies,

English, foreign languages, physical education, art, etc.) will continue this post-

Eurocentric curriculum project in the future.

Challenging the foundations of Eurocentrism in education, I believe, requires a

sustained critique of and viable alternatives to the traditional school subjects that

maintain the Eurocentric worldview. With the recent emergence of the charter school

movement there are a proliferating variety of culturally distinct schools in some parts of

the U.S. today, i.e., Philadelphia. From my own sampling of the elementary and

secondary school curricula described on the websites of these varied and distinct schools,

they appear to offer the same kinds of courses, particularly in math and science, as those

offered in more conventional schools. The elementary and secondary school curriculum,

as well as the community college curriculum, are ultimately controlled by the university

curriculum, which in turn is controlled by the corporate capitalist-state alliance (Barrow,

1990; Currie & Newson, 1998; Bealey, 2001).

School subjects embody particular forms of reasoning, perception, and valuing.

Mathematics education for example, can support the development of an ideology of

certainty (Borba & Skovsmore, 1997). The effects or consequences of any particular

school subject depend upon the historical-ideological regime of power and knowledge

within which all school subjects are conceived and practiced. This is a primary reason

why interpreting and understanding the historical-cultural context of modernity is so

important for curriculum theory. The particular ways school subjects are conceived,

understood, and practiced contribute to the particular ways the social world is

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reproduced. Problematizing the Eurocentric assumptions intrinsic to the ways the various

school subjects are conceived, understood, and practiced problematizes the logic of

acculturation that contributes to the ambassador-like ethos of teaching these subjects, i.e.,

to enable students to think like scientists, mathematicians, historians, etc.

Once modernity is seen as intertwined with coloniality, educators are faced with

an intellectual challenge that calls for the redesign of teacher education programs, beyond

the confines of national accreditation controls and elite white male state education

boards. Teachers may no longer assume that their primary task is to bring students

uncritically into their subjects. Once the intrinsic links between the school subjects and

the history of modernity/coloniality are problematized, the primary tasks of teachers

include bringing students to an informed understanding of the historical contexts of these

subjects – to both their splendors and their horrors, along with their limits. Situating

school subjects within their historical contexts can no longer be a goal relegated to social

studies. A post-Eurocentric curriculum involves a critical epistemology where the

critique of what is learned is part of the learning process within all subjects (Helle &

Skovsmose, 2002, p. 255).

Western science, mathematics, and technology are an integral part of the colonial

and neo-colonial infrastructure as well as the civilizational ideologies that legitimate the

assimilation-civilizing missions of modernity (Pyenson, 1993).

This Baconian/Cartesian/Newtonian worldview posed science against magic, anyway and everywhere, and always. This world-view logically could tolerate the concept of civilization only in the singular. Those imbued with the scientific spirit were civilized and civilizing; all others were not. No doubt many resisted such implications in the name of humanism, or of relativism, or of the concept of original sin, but after five centuries it is hard to contend that science as the “disenchantment of the world” has not come to predominate our intellectual world in ways both obvious and overt and ways more hidden and deep-rooted (Wallerstein, 1991, pp. 218-129).

Although not normally included in the science, engineering, or history curricula, western

science and technology are at the center of western imperial expansion over and

colonization of much of the globe (Adas, 1989; Wallerstein, 1980; Osborne, 1999;

Vlahakis, et al. 2006).

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Science was coproduced with industrial capitalism in the seventeenth century northwestern Europe. The internationalization of what is now called “modern Western science” was enabled by the colonization of other places in which the conditions of its formation (including its symbolic relationship with industrialization) was reproduced (Gough, 2007, p. 40).

Science is intertwined with the industrial and military technologies that enabled European

movement and expansion around the world (Restivo & Loughlin, 2000, p. 135). The

conventional histories of both science and mathematics and the ethos of math and science

education continue to reinforce the continual improvement (meliora) narrative of western

civilization. Until recently, for example, historians of science uniformly defended

western rationality and provided justification narratives for Western imperial expansion

(Pyenson, 1993, p. 329). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mathematics

and the natural sciences were seen as two pillars of western culture, a significant part of

any cultured or civilized person’s education (Bishop, 1990). “The power of western

hegemony rests on the claims of superiority, universality and ethical neutrality of western

math and (positivist) science and technology, extending to claims of western superiority

in the social, cultural, moral political and intellectual spheres” (Fasheh, 1991). In their

assumptions of abstract universality and civilizational self-understanding, as well as their

direct, but obscured, historical links to geopolitical power and identity, science and

mathematics are among the most overtly Eurocentric subjects among the western

knowledge disciplines (Adas, 1989; Bishop, 1990; Gough, 2007).

Mathematics and the natural sciences are today still represented as the most

objective, neutral, and universal of all disciplines (Joseph, 1987).

Mathematics and the natural sciences are the only areas of study presented with little or no historical, cultural, or political references. This ahistorical approach is essential for what Alkalimat (1990) identifies as a process of “indoctrinating an elite with the metaphysical myth of eternal Eurocentric domination of the world” (p. 2) (Anderson, 1990, p. 297).

Today, the so-called “best” science and mathematics education and teacher education

practices continue to reproduce an ahistorical, instrumental, and ethnocentric mentality

that ignores the important geopolitical and cultural-historical realities of both these

subjects.

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There are few aspects of the “best” science educations that enable anyone to grasp how nature-as-an-object is always cultural… These elite science educations rarely expose students to systematic analysis of social origins, traditions, meanings, practices, institutions, technologies, uses, and consequences of the natural sciences that ensure the fully historical character of the results of scientific research (Harding, 1993, p. 1).

These presumptions of universality, objectivity, cultural neutrality, and cultural

superiority in math and science education are interrelated with their “gate keeper”

functions within the capitalist/patriarchal/racial hierarchy. Erudition, abstraction, and

compartmentalization are the cornerstones of Eurocentric mathematics and science,

enabling schools to “objectively” stratify students according to the racial-labor hierarchy

(Anderson, 1997, p. 297). Math and science education (at all levels of schooling) serve

as effective cultural gatekeepers that legitimately limit the numbers of non-dominant

group members from further access to particular educational opportunities and higher

wage employment (Ladson-Billings, 1997; Oakes, 1985). Among the math and science

related professions in the United States today, Latino/as and Blacks comprise two percent

Povey, 2001). “Mathematics education serves as a gate keeper to participation in the

decision making processes of society” (Volmink, 1994, pp. 51). The persistent

“achievement gap” between Black and White students in the U.S. in mathematics was 39

percent in 2000, as measured by the NAEP math test (Struchens, et. al., 2004). The

statistics of racial, class, and gender disparities in math and science education and related

professions abound. Math and science education and social stratification interact

(Skovsmove, 2004, p. 3), but these complex interactions are hidden behind the myths of

modernity.

The assumptions of Modernity hide any position in which it is important to be critical of mathematics and mathematics education. I find that much mathematics education has enjoyed a protective shield established by the assumptions of Modernity. But if the intrinsic link between mathematics and socio-political progress cannot be maintained, mathematics education must address the uncertainty with respect to what might be done through mathematics (Skovsmose, 2004, p. 8).

Only within the past decade have mathematics education researchers in the U.S.

begun to include the “sociocultural arena” in their efforts to understand these ongoing

and yet to be explained racial differences in standardized test results (Stinson, 2006).

45

“Historically, there has been a general lack of examining the specific mathematics school

experiences of African American students and other minority students, such as Latino/a,

Native American, Caribbean, low socioeconomic…”(Stinson, 2006, p. 478). This

occlusion of the cultural determinants of western science and mathematics contributes to

what Sandra Harding describes as the persistence of “Eurocentrism or androcentrism of

many scientists, policymakers, and other highly educated citizens that severely limits

public understanding of science [and mathematics] as a fully social process” (Harding.

1993, p.1).

Western scientists have for the most part been culture blind to the ways in which their science and they themselves have been occidentalized, and doubly blind to how the occidentalisms infecting science have been shape by the West’s role in the political economy, and the political economy of the West ‘itself’. Whether in their laboratories or as ambassadors of science abroad in the colonial and postcolonial world, scientists bring with them the occidentalized selves and sciences. This is the root of the dangers in talk about “universal truths” and “universal science”; for how far it this from talk about the universal relevance of the morality, logic, and world-view of the West? Scientists’ conception of themselves as practicing a neutral methodology has helped to shape their occidentalist consciousness (Restivo & Loughlin, 2000, p. 142).

Because of their direct links with the maintenance of the dominant structures of

power in the global political economy today, mathematics and science curricula are also

the most standardized internationally (Neyland, 2007; Gough, 2007; Carter, 2008a).

“Knowledge in the form of an international commodity indispensable to productive

power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the

worldwide competition for power” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 5).

Neo-liberal globalization is presided over by techno-scientific knowledge, and owes its hegemony to the credible way in which it discredits all rival knowledges, by suggesting that they are not comparable, in terms of efficiency and coherence, to the scientificity of the market laws. Since neo-liberal globalization is hegemonic, no wonder that it anchors itself in the knowledge, not less hegemonic, of Western-based modern science (Santos, 2008, p. 3).

In her ridicule of the social justice and cultural relevance rationales behind

particular teaching practices associated with “ethnomathematics,” conservative

educational historian Diane Ravitch reasserts the familiar assumptions of universality and

46

the realist interpretation of international power relations underlying Eurocentric

mathematics.

It seems terribly old-fashioned to point out that the countries that regularly beat our students in international tests of mathematics do not use the subject to steer students into political action. They teach them instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi, and Chicago. The students who learn this universal language well will be the builders and shapers of technology in the twenty-first century. The students in American classes who fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will not (Ravitch, 2005).

From the perspective of modernity/coloniality, the international system of states, (within

which the current global market civilization is being organized), is the very essence of the

coloniality of power (Anghie, 1996).

“Coloniality was essentially the creation of a set of states linked together within an interstate system in hierarchical layers….Coloniality was an essential element in the integration of the interstate system, creating not only rank order but sets of rules for the interactions of states with each other” (Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992, p. 550).

Positioning “our” students and their education within this competitive and hierarchical

interstate framework is a contemporary example of the imperial/colonial control of

knowledge and subjectivity under the pretense of universal knowledge and the market

ideology of “globalism” (Steger, 2002).

The emergence of ethnomathematics along with the postcolonial critique in

science education, are challenging the conventional definitions and assumptions of these

two “core” subjects. These various movements are contributing to the emergence of

decolonial possibilities for math and science teachers and teacher educators. In a

decolonial school curriculum, the modern/colonial history of science and mathematics

knowledge and education would be recognized and included at all levels of instruction

(Willinsky, 1998; Vlahakis, et al. 2006). A pluriversal curriculum exposes through

comparison with alternative (non-western) forms of knowledge, the modern/colonial

presuppositions underlying the standardized Eurocentric curriculum, and opens up the

possibilities for thinking beyond modernity/coloniality.

Ethnomathematics

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In the field of culture and mathematics, a tradition known as “ethnomathematics”

is contributing to the invention and implementation of such a pluriversal curriculum.

Ethnomathematics has exposed the Eurocentric biases and imperial/colonial history of

academic mathematics. By researching and implementing into the curriculum the diverse

cultural forms of mathematical reasoning from around the world, ethnomathematics has

directly challenged the monocultural assimilationist project of colonial modernity

(Powell & Frankenstein, 1997). Located in the middle of the “extremely diverse” field of

culture and mathematics, with its multiple definitions, divisions, and approaches (Barton,

1996), ethnomathematics is not easily summarized. The modest purpose here is to

provide an introductory overview that highlights the ways ethnomathematics proposes

and contributes to the making of an alternative to modernity.

Ethnomathematics emerged at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s out of the

confluence of a variety of world events and the joining together of the history of cultures

with cultural anthropology.

The failures of the “New Mathematics” curriculum, transplanted from the North to the South in the 1960s; the importance attributed in the new politically independent states of the Third World to education for all, including mathematical education, in the strive for economic independence; and the public unrest in the North about the involvement of mathematicians and mathematical research in the Vietnam war… are some of the factors that stimulated reflection about the place and implications of mathematical research and teaching (Gerdes, 1997, pp. 334-335).

In general, mathematics in colonial education was presented as “western” or “European,”

as an exclusive creation of “white men” (Gerdes, 1997). Trade, administration, and

education were the three major mediating agents in this process of cultural invasion in

colonized countries by western mathematics.

As in the case of other branches of knowledge, colonialism first suppressed and made invisible non-Western forms of mathematics and then constructed the fable that mathematics was in fact a European invention that it brought to the colonized Other as a civilizing gift. The colonial education system reinforced the idea that it was quite unthinkable for a non-Western culture or civilization to produce any form of mathematical knowledge (Sardar, 1999, p. 54).

Since the early modern period, this Eurocentric conception of mathematics was imposed

around the world and later accepted as the pattern of “rational” human behavior.

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The West defined mathematics, just as it defined other forms of knowledge, in a specifically Eurocentric way. This definition ensured that certain non-Western notions of mathematics could not be included in mathematics as it came to be seen by the West. Mathematics was reformulated as a deductive, aprioristic system, that proceeded from axiomatic foundations and revealed the underlying reality of the physical universe. In non-Western worldviews, mathematics is a purely human invention. Like music or literature, it is a product of human mind. We invent it, we use it, but we do not discover it. It has a practical and social function. The West, however, elevated mathematics into Platonic reality: it really exists, there is a pi in the sky, laws of physics are laid down in heaven in mathematical formulae and mathematics simply discovers them Sardar, 1999, p. 54).

In the 1960s, curriculum thinking operated largely within the framework of

modernization and development, the third of four successive redemptive-civilizational

missions described above (Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997).

The very concept of development was intimately related to technological development. As an implication, much interest was oriented towards the qualification of the future labour force. This was conceived of as an education problem, and a radical curriculum reform was suggested. This was all wrapped up in an optimistic attitude toward technology. Progress, both economical and political, was related to the development of technology. Parallel to a uniform conception of technology followed a uniform conception of mathematics education. So mathematics education came to have a central role as it became implicated in this modernization theory (Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997, p. 132).

During the 1960s, a “New” mathematics curriculum was transplanted from the highly

industrialized nations to Third World countries (Gerdes, 1997, p. 337). With the

consolidation and global reach of western modernity by the twentieth century,

mathematics was seen as central to the process of development. Mathematics became the

support for technological capacities at all levels of a society. In 1959, the mathematician

M.H. Stone gave the introductory lecture to the Royaumont seminar – the starting point

of the New Math movement in Europe – and argued in favor of a mathematical education

that could be:

Clearly recognized as the true foundations of the technological society which it is the destiny of our time to create. We are literally compelled by this destiny to reform our mathematical instruction so as to adapt and strengthen it for its utilitarian role carrying the ever heavier burden of the

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scientific and technological superstructure which rest upon it (OEED, 1961, 18) (quoted in Skovsmose & Valero, 2001, p. 39).

During the 1970s and 1980s, (the transition to the current market civilization

mission), teachers of mathematics in “developing” countries, and later in “developed”

countries, began to resist the racist and neo-colonial prejudices visible in the

Eurocentrism of mathematics education and its historical representation.

Ethnomathematics can be interpreted as a reaction to the cultural imperialism which is built into modernization theory. A main concern for ethnomathematics is to come to identify the culturally embedded mathematical competencies and, instead of thinking in terms of importing a curriculum, to think in terms of self-development. A curriculum can be related to an already existing competency in mathematics (Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997, p. 132).

This international anti-modernization movement in mathematics education coalesced

around the claims that (indigenous or local) forms of mathematics exist within all

cultures and these diverse forms of mathematical thinking should be part of any

“culturally relevant” math curriculum. Ethnomathematics thus began from a growing

awareness among mathematicians of the social, cultural, political, and historical aspects

of mathematics and math education.

Although for a long time there have been indications of a close connection between cognitive mechanisms and cultural environment, a reductionist tendency, which goes back to Descartes and has to a certain extent grown in parallel with the development of mathematics, tended to dominate education until recently, implying a culture-free cognition (D’Ambrosio, 1997, p. 14).

Ethnomathematics is viewed as providing the foundation upon which culturally relevant

curricula can be developed.

By the 1990s, with the increasing amount of literature on cultural, social, and

political dimensions of mathematics and math education, another alternative movement

known as “critical mathematics” emerged. Critical mathematics emerged among

mathematicians in Europe and North America and is rooted in the Frankfurt School

critical theory and neo-Marxist traditions, as well as more recently, the thinking of Paulo

Freire. Ethnomathematics and critical mathematics are interrelated and mutually

complimentary. Both have challenged the conventional view of the nature of

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mathematics as ahistorical and universal knowledge. Both have developed alternatives to

the conventional mathematics curriculum that express greater social awareness and

responsibility. The cultural relevance, equity, and social justice goals of both movements

are similarly shared, although social justice does not involve cognitive justice in critical

mathematics.

Although critical mathematics is complimentary and even a necessary

contribution to the limitations of ethnomathematics (Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997), it has

remained within the conceptual horizon (ideological environment) of modernity. In

general, critical mathematics expresses a (postmodern) critique of modernity from within

the interpretive horizon of modernity, while ethnomathematics expresses a (post-

colonial) critique from the margins of modernity. From the post-colonial interpretive

horizon described above, critical mathematics has not sufficiently interpreted and

challenged the Eurocentric foundations of colonial modernity.

It is possible to think beyond and against philosophy and the social sciences as the incarnation of Western epistemology. It is necessary to do so in order to avoid reproducing the totality shared by their promoters and their critics. In other words, the critique of modernity, Western logocentrism, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and the like performed in Western Europe and the United States cannot be valid for persons who think and live in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Those who are not white or Christian or who have been marginal to the foundation, expansion, and transformation of philosophy and social and natural sciences cannot be satisfied with their identification and solidarity with the European or American left (Mignolo, 2002c, pp. 85-86).

As such, I have chosen not to include critical mathematics in this review of critiques that

contribute to a post-Eurocentric curriculum. As stated in the introduction, a post-

Eurocentric curriculum is possible through an analysis of Eurocentrism that escapes its

constitutive relations with the boundaries and conceptual presuppositions of modernity.

In contrast to critical mathematics, ethnomathematics was developed from the

experiences and perspectives of non-dominant groups (e.g., the global South and the

colonized North), beyond the centers of western modernity. According to Munir Fasheh,

the differences between the ideological environment created by formal education and the

real or lived environment are easier to see in the non-western world (Fasheh, 1991, p.

61). Because of its geopolitical location from the borders or margins of modernity,

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ethnomathematics contributes to the reordering of the geopolitics of knowledge through

the critique of the subalternatization of knowledge from the perspective of subaltern

knowledges (Mignolo, 2000). The opening sentences of Marcia Ascher’s 1991 book,

Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas, illustrates this non-

western, subaltern focus of ethnomathematics.

Let us take a step toward a global, multicultural view of mathematics. To do this, we will introduce the mathematical ideas of people who have generally been excluded from discussions of mathematics. The people are those who live in traditional or small-scale cultures; that is, they are, by and large, the indigenous people of the places that were “discovered” and colonized by Europeans (Ascher, 1991, p. 1).

The critique of colonial modernity from the perspective of subaltern knowledges

opens up an alternative epistemological modality, identified by Walter Mignolo as

“border thinking” (Mignolo, 2000a). This alternative approach to knowledge, involves

the retrieval and comparative pluralization of the epistemologies occluded or suppressed

under Eurocentric modernity. According to one of the founders of ethnomathematics, the

field of academic mathematics is completely “integrated with Western civilization, which

conquered and dominated the entire world. The only possibility of building up a

planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers and, together, winners

and losers, moving into the new (Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, quoted in The Chronicle of

Higher Education, 6 October 2000). The contemporary interest in indigenous

epistemologies and educational practices are primary examples of this global trend

toward the retrieval and restoration of subaltern knowledges (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999;

Kincheloe, 2006; Dei, Hall & Rosenberg, 2000; Villegas, Neugebauer & Venegas, 2008).

In 1984, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio delivered a presentation at the Fourth International

Congress of Mathematics Education, entitled, “Socio-Cultural Bases for Mathematical

Education” and launched his ethnomathematical program. In 1985, an international study

group on ethnomathematics was founded at the National Council of Teachers of

Mathematics Annual meeting. D’Ambrosio, a Brazilian collaborator with Paulo Freire, is

considered to be the main progenitor of ethnomathematics (Frankenstein & Powell,

1994). Freire’s epistemology informs the theoretical basis of ethnomathematics

(Frankenstein & Powell, 1994, p. 74). This post-Eurocentric epistemology rejects the

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subject-object dichotomy (observer independent of experience) and its pretense of

objective, valid knowledge as a system of obedience and control. The presupposed

objective or neutral nature of knowledge removes it from all political and ethical

implications (Warnick & Stemhagen, 2007). In contrast, a liberatory ethos is adopted,

based upon the epistemological assumption that knowledge is constituted through the

doing (praxis) of observers. Knowledge, ethics, and politics are thus profoundly

interrelated. The coherence of experiences with other experiences constitutes the

foundation of all knowledges and explanations, not the representation of objects

independent of the knowing subject (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Mignolo, 2008).

From this cultural-historicist epistemology, D’Amborsio (1994) defines ethno-

mathema-tics as culturally embedded techniques of understanding. Mathema refers to

understanding and coping with reality. Tics comes from Greek notion of techne, and

refers to techniques and art, while ethnos refers to the cultural group and context, from

the assumption that every technique of understanding is cultural. D’Ambrosio proposes

his ethnomathematical program as a “methodology to track and analyze the processes of

generation, transmission, diffusion and institutionalization of (mathematical) knowledge”

in diverse cultural systems (D’Ambrosio, 1990, p. 78). As a research program,

ethnomathematics is now commonly understood as a comparative study of techniques

used by diverse cultures to explain and cope with reality in different natural and cultural

environments. For the Learning of Mathematics is one international journal in which this

ongoing cultural contextualization of mathematics is published today.

Ethnomathematics problematizes the particular ways Eurocentrism permeates

mathematics education.

The conventional view of the nature of mathematics, which has an entrenched position in mainstream contemporary Western culture, rests on taken-for-granted understanding of the nature of mathematical knowledge which accords it the status of absolute truth. The truths of mathematics are certain and unchallengeable, are objective, given, and unchangeable. Mathematics is free of moral and human values and its social and historical placing are irrelevant to its claim to truth (Povey, 2001, p. 190).

Eurocentric mathematics is understood to be based upon the following assumptions:

mathematics is the sole creation of European males and was diffused around the world

through European schooling; mathematical knowledge exists outside of and unaffected

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by culture; and, only a narrow part of human activity is mathematical and worthy of

serious contemplation as “legitimate” mathematics (Powell & Frankenstein, 1997, p. 2).

The challenge of ethnomathematics to the hegemony of Eurocentric mathematics, and in

turn, the myth of western civilization, is derived today from a wide array of western

knowledge disciplines: mathematics, mathematics education, history, anthropology,

cognitive psychology, feminist studies, and studies of the Americas, Asia, Africa, White

America, Native America, and African America. Ethnomathematics aims to decolonize

knowledge and learning of mathematics from the dominant conventional view and

practice (Warnick & Stemhagen, 2007).

Within the perspective of education perceived as praxis, the study of ethnomath becomes an avenue to recognize the fallacies and dangers of a universal conception of life and the world; to question established beliefs and convictions; to free our imagination from ready answers and solutions; to help us gain concreteness and new meaning of words and ideas through real life situations and personal experiences; to provide us with diversified ways of seeing the world and our environment and dealing with the fundamental problems we face; and to help us transform our assumptions and structures (Fasheh, 1991, p. 61).

Academic mathematics for D’Ambrosio, like “schooled literacy” for Cook-

Gumperz (1986), is socially constructed through the mechanism of schooling that selects

and replaces particular cultural group practices with codified versions that acquire the

status of school mathematics (D’Ambrosio, 1985, p. 47). Schooled mathematics

eliminates or devalues the existence and diversity of these “spontaneous” culturally

situated practices. As a consequence, “the early stages of Mathematics education offer a

very efficient way of instilling in the children a sense of failure and dependency”

(D’Ambrosio, 1985, p. 45).

According to Bishop (1990), there are four clusters of values associated with

schooled mathematics that contribute to its central role in the history of western cultural

imperialism. The first cluster is the “spirit of rationality” -- one of the most prized

cognitive achievements, believed to be responsible for the advancement of western

civilization. Second, “mathematics” promotes thinking without contexts -- a mode of

perceiving the world as if it were composed of discrete objects, removable and abstracted

from their contexts. “To decontextualize in order to generalize, is at the heart of western

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mathematics and science” (Bishop, 1990, p. 59). These first two values clusters combine

to produce a dehumanized, objectified world-view (Bishop, 1990, p. 59). A third value

cluster is the utility and power of “mathematics” to control the physical and social

environments. The fourth cluster is the presumed universality and cultural neutrality of

“mathematics”. For Bishop, “the cultural imperialism of western mathematics has yet to

be fully realized and understood” (Bishop, 1990, p. 59).

In contrast to “academic mathematics”, that is, mathematics taught and learned in

schools, D’Ambrosio calls “ethnomathematics the mathematics practiced among

identifiable groups” (D’Ambrosio, 1985, p. 45). “All cultures have generated

mathematic ideas, just as all cultures have generated language, religion, morals, customs

and kinship systems” (Bishop, 1990, p. 53). Different modes of thought may lead to

different forms of mathematics. Ethnomathematics recognizes the uniqueness of

traditional cultures by highlighting aspects of their complex knowledge systems and

showing them to be living and dynamic, and valuable and valid in their own terms and

contexts (Shehenaz, Alanqui & Barton, 2003). Mathematical ideas are constructed by

human beings, thus they have cultural history (Bishop, 1990). D’Ambrosio proposes his

ethnomathematical program as a “methodology to track and analyze the processes of

generation, transmission, diffusion and institutionalization of (mathematical) knowledge”

in diverse cultural systems (D’Ambrosio, 1990, p. 78).

All mathematical knowledges are interpreted as cultural products – symbolic

technologies, developed through engaging in various environmental activities. The

universality of mathematical thinking is not located in any one form of thought, but in the

practices of thinking themselves. Developing from Bishop (1988b), Rik Pinxten (2016)

identifies twelve such universally shared cultural activities: 1) counting – systematic

ways of comparing and ordering objects; 2) locating – exploring one’s spatial

environment and conceptualizing and symbolizing it with models, maps, and drawings,

etc.; 3) measuring; 4) designing (shape, size, scale, proportion and other geometric

concepts); 5) playing; as a tool for exploration; 5) explaining (through underlying

structures and rules; 6) moving, especially dancing and rhythmic moves; 7) ceremonial

actions; 8) generalizing by comparing; 9) logically operating; 10) exchanging and

marketing activities; 11) music making; and 12) story telling (Pinxten, 2016, p. 71) .

55

Across cultures, children and adults, before and after school, are engaged in and

developing a wide range of mathematical practices.

Within the field of ethnomathematics, Vithal & Skovsmose (1997) identify four

strands of research: historiographical, anthropological, sociocultural and educational.

The first strand centers on the historiographical critique of “western mathematics”. The

traditional history of “mathematics” is deeply enveloped within a Eurocentric

historiography, where everything begins with the ancient Greeks and progresses through

a triumphal history of western civilization into the glorious present. This

historiographical myth has been vigorously critiqued, such that the idea of mathematics

as something uniquely western is no longer historically credible, yet the myth behind the

concept of “western mathematics” lives on in schools today. What is referred as

“western mathematics” is a confluence of ideas and influences from numerous

civilizations over long periods of interaction and reciprocal influence.

Historians of mathematics are criticized, firstly, for ignoring, devaluing, distorting or marginalizing contributions of cultures outside Europe to that body of knowledge that is paradoxically referred to as ‘Western’ mathematics. China, India, North Africa and the Arab world are recognized not only for their contribution to mathematics but also in their own right as each having a mathematic history (Joseph, 1991).

In addition, if every culture has produced various forms of mathematical thought over

time, there are multiple histories of mathematics, even though many of these traditions

have not directly contributed to “western” mathematics.

A second strand is broadly categorized as anthropological and includes research

on a wide variety of mathematical ideas found in indigenous cultures (Ascher, 1991).

These cultures have been explored in relation to: number systems, gestures and symbols,

games and puzzles, geometry, space, shape, pattern, symmetry, art and architecture, time,

money, networks, graphs or sand-drawings, kin relations and artifacts.

Ethnomathematics recognizes the uniqueness of traditional cultures by highlighting

aspects of their complex knowledge systems and showing them to be living and dynamic,

and valuable and valid in their own terms and context (Shehenaz, Alanqui & Barton,

2003).

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A third strand, broadly categorized as sociocultural, explores the mathematics of

different groups in everyday settings showing that mathematical knowledge is generated

in a wide variety of contexts by both adults and children. Much of this research has been

generated through focusing on the connections between cognition, culture, and context.

Specific groups have been shown to develop efficient strategies for solving mathematical

problems in everyday situations. In particular, the everyday practices of different groups

are investigated such as dairy workers, construction foremen, farmers, child street

vendors, carpenters, candy sellers, shoppers, and fishermen. “This research has

broadened our understanding of the nature of mathematical knowledge and practices and

has forced us to re-examine the notions of mathematical competency and ability” (Vithal

& Skovsmose, 1997, pp. 134-135).

A fourth strand focuses on the relationship between ethnomathematics and

mathematics education (Pompeu, 1992; Vithal, 1992). There are now a wide and large

variety of curriculum materials illustrating how an ethnomathematics perspective can be

used in a mathematics education. There are relatively few detailed descriptions of the

actual implementation and the outcomes of the use of such an approach within the formal

school system. This is still an under-researched area compared with the above strands.

Vithal and Skovsmose (1997) suggest successfully implementing ethnomathematics into

the academic curriculum is the greatest challenge for ethnomathematics.

Overall, ethnomathematics is designed to be embedded within the cultural

environment of the students. The aim of this approach is to change the centrally

controlled canonical school mathematics curriculum to one that arises from and is closely

related to the experience of mathematics in particular local cultures. The Eurocentric

notion of mathematics is subsumed and situated critically within this broader

conceptualization of the discipline. “Ethnomathematics offers not only a broader view of

mathematics, embracing practices and methods related to a variety of cultural

environments, but also a more comprehensive, contextualising perception of the process

of generating, organizing, transmitting, and disseminating mathematics” (D’Ambrosio,

1994, p. 449-450). Known and current popular practices related to mathematics are

included and made compatible with the academic mathematics in schools. In order to

incorporate these popular and local cultural forms of mathematics into the curriculum,

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teachers must be prepared to learn about and articulate the underlying structures in the

variety of local cultural practices. Ethnomathematics aims to reveal for students how

different mathematical practices are related to different world-views, different aesthetics,

and different ways of living.

Adam, Alangui, and Barton (2003) outline five possible ways of organizing an

ethnomathematics curriculum. All of them are based on belief that the cultural aspects of

student’s milieu should be infused throughout the learning environment in a holistic

manner, including epistemologies of mathematics, the content, the classroom culture, and

the approach to learning. One of the ways an ethnomathematics curriculum can be

organized is what Adam, Alangui, and Barton (2003) identify as math in a meaningful

context. The aim of this approach is focused on how students think about mathematics

more than how or what they learn (Adam, Alangui & Barton, 2003, p. 331).

Epistemologically, mathematics is presented as a practical response to human needs and

can be found in nearly every culture. Mathematical reasoning and practices from the

cultures of the students serve as content for the classroom.

A second approach conceives ethnomathematics as distinct from conventional

mathematics. Culturally distinct forms of mathematics would be brought into the

classroom along with conventional mathematics. In a third approach, ethnomathematics

is viewed as a stage in the progression of mathematical thinking that a child goes through

during his or her education. Learning begins from the mathematical world of the child’s

personal world and moves into the world of his or her culture, and subsequently into the

mathematics of other cultures – “world mathematics”. A fourth approach looks at the

classroom itself as a situated cultural context and mathematical learning as part of this

context. This is a highly self-reflective approach to learning about the cultural aspects of

learning mathematics in schools – “mathematics enculturation” (Bishop, 1988). And

finally, a fifth approach integrates mathematical concepts and practices from the learners’

culture with those of conventional academic mathematics. By starting with mathematics

found in the local cultures, students learn how mathematical ideas are formulated and

applied as well as the relationships between familiar practices and mathematical

concepts.

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As these five different approaches suggest, ethnomathematics does not replace

academic or western mathematics. It does aim to change the conventional Eurocentric

account of mathematics and to situate academic mathematics within it own cultural-

historical context of colonial modernity. One example of an ethnomathematics course

illustrating the strong critique of Eurocentrism in ethnomathematics is an Algebra class

call “Math as a Human Endeavor”. Mathematics educator S.E. Anderson describes what

he teaches in this course at a U.S. college, largely serving working-class Black and

Latino adults. Anderson indicates that he aims to show the interconnections between

math and real world problems in all his courses. Anderson includes mathematical

practices form around the world, revealing ways different people throughout history have

created math techniques to solve particular problems.

The first two sessions are lecture-discussions on the historical, cultural and

sociopolitical implications of mathematics. Anderson outlines the interrelations between

development of mathematical ideas and techniques and humanity’s ongoing struggle to

understand nature. Anderson also delves into issues around the interrelatiosns between

the capitalist system and the control of nature. He presents evidence that women in

Africa, as the first farmers, were among the first to create and use particular forms of

mathematical reasoning. The variety of examples of different mathematical practices are

compared and contrasted, i.e., Egyptian, Chinese, and Indians all used different styles of

math generalizations. The goal of these first sessions, is to “shatter the myths that

mathematics was or is a ‘White mans’ thing’ and to show ….that all civilizations are

bound to each other” (Anderson, 1997, p. 301).

There are certainly many limitations of ethnomathematics as it currently exists in

theory and practice. One important critique argues that ethnomathematics identifies

“culture” as a center point of orientation, but the research in ethnomathematics does not

usually specify much about the relations between culture and power (Vithal &

Skovsmose, 1997). Vithal and Skovsmose continue with the recommendation that

political analysis of the concept of culture is “crucial”. Referencing the parallels between

the cultural specificity of ethnomathematics and the policy of curriculum segregation

based on “cultural” differences in Apartheid South Africa, they also suggest that the

students “must come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their mathematic

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knowledge and practices in relation to knowledge and practices of other cultural groups”

(Vithal & Skovsmose, 1997, p. 145).

There are also certainly many contributions of Ethnomathematics. One

contribution is ethnomathematics has provided indigenous mathematicians a platform to

understand the roles played by mathematics in colonization, as well as how to engage

with the discipline constructively. Ethnomathematics is also now an established

discourse through which all math educators can reflect on their practice, as well as on

how the discipline of mathematics contributed to an imperial/colonial culture of

“intolerance, discrimination, inequity, bigotry, and hatred (D’Abrosio, 2001) (Shehenaz,

Alanqui & Barton, 2003, p. 239). Ethnomathematics has also placed “culture” at the

center of mathematics curriculum analysis and reform. Situated within the historical

context of colonial modernity, ethnomathematics is contributing towards an emergent

post-Eurocentric curriculum.

Ethnosciences

In my search of the science education literature for postcolonial critiques that

contribute to a post-Eurocentric curriculum, only two authors appear to have articulated

this possibility within the field so far. Australian science educator, Lyn Carter, has

introduced a post-Occidental critique of science education that, like ethnomathematics,

aims to decenter modern western science and reposition it as one among many cultural

knowledge systems. Along with her Australian colleague, Caroline Janet Smith, Carter

has also described the implementation of a post-Eurocentric science curriculum for

science education teachers (Carter & Smith, 2003). Carter and Smith’s postcolonial

critique of science education is reviewed first, followed by their descriptions of a pre-

service general science unit for undergraduate primary teachers.

There are of course other calls for re-visioning science education in the literature

today, parallel with “critical mathematics”, that are complimentary to Carter’s and

Smith’s postcolonial critique. For example, Kyle’s (2001) “postmodern” call for a “new

political economy of science education” points to the central issue linking Eurocentrism

and modernity – “the ways traditional interpretations of knowledge have been connected

to power” (Kyle, 2001, p. xi).

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It is imperative for science educators to begin to reflect upon: the history of the discipline of science education and the ways in which it has been enacted in the process of schooling; the hegemony of logical positivism and technical rationality and its uncritical acceptance within the discipline of science education; the ways in which science and science education have marginalized both learners and citizens in society; the ways in which traditional interpretations of knowledge have been connected to power and the relationship between power and knowledge; and finally, the ways in which the discipline of science education can be transformed such that the political and social aspects of science are moved to the center of philosophical reflection upon the sciences, from its present position somewhere beyond the margins. Science education must articulate a vision and assume agency for an education in science that creates opportunities for self- and social-empowerment, whereby all learners are able to engage in participatory action-taking in a democratic society (Kyle, 2001, p. xi).

However significant such “postmodern” critiques and re-visions of science education are

today, to the extent that they remain within the horizon of modernity, they do not by

themselves, lead to a post-Eurocentric curriculum and the decolonization of modern

thought. Reflection on the “relationship between power and knowledge” will remain

ensnared within the Eurocentric knowledge framework without a critical interpretation of

modernity from the perspective of coloniality – a perspective that begins with the

emergence of the Eurocentric knowledge formation in the sixteenth century. Absent a

critique of the imperial/colonial knowledge foundations of Eurocentric modernity, the

possibilities for a post-Eurocentric curriculum will remain delimited.

In a series of articles on the implications of various intellectual movements for re-

visioning science education, Carter and Smith have articulated a decolonial critique of

science education that envisions a post-Occidental science curriculum (Carter, 2004,

2006, 2008b). Carter and Smith’s recent work interprets for other science educators

various contemporary intellectual critiques of modernity including: globalization theory,

sustainability science, future studies, cultural diversity or sociocultural perspectives,

science studies, and postcolonial critique. Carter and Smith also mention critical theory,

ecofeminism, permaculture, and deep ecology as intellectual influences on their eclectic

perspective. In addition to providing an interpretation of some of these intellectual

movements for science educators, particularly sustainability science, postcolonial science

studies, and postcolonial theory, Carter and Smith have critiqued the conventional

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meanings and practices of science and science education from these perspectives. Carter

and Smith are proposing a postcolonial approach to cultural diversity within science

education that they believe is necessary if science education is to become more than a

servant to the dominant system of power/knowledge relations in the “new economy”

(Carter, 2008a). Carter and Smith propose a pluriversal science education curriculum,

where “contrasting rationalities can work together without the notion of single

transcendent rationality” (Turnbull, 2000, p. 228) (quoted from Carter, 2008b, p. 174).

Carter and Smith’s work essentially involves re-visioning science education with

the capacity to contribute to a more just and sustainable world, a world facing

unprecedented political, cultural, and economic changes, including an ecological crisis

threatening the future of life on the planet. Adequately responding to contemporary

challenges and realities, science and science education would no longer be subservient to

the politics of profit, but would become part of the “politics of the practical” within a

larger project of redistributing power and knowledge. For Carter and Smith, the

overwhelming complexity of contemporaneity that includes greater recognition of

diversity, multicultural inclusiveness, the ecological crisis, along with science and

science education’s new role in the global economy, call for a re-visioning of science

education (Carter & Smith, 2003; Carter, 2006, 2008a, 2008b). “Science education

should not only work toward a deeper understanding of our planetary systems but also

toward the explicit goals of a more just, equitable, and sustainable world” (Carter, 2008b,

pp. 175).

questions about the ways in which science should be conceptualized and represented by science education not only invite debate about the complex issues of multiculturalism and diversity, and the epistemological parity between Western science and other non-Western sciences, but also promote reflection on moral and value imperatives, as well as our visions for the future (Carter, 2006, p. 678).

Re-visioning science education for Carter and Smith involves transcending the

epistemological and methodological limits of contemporary western science, and opening

up the cannon to include the “scientific” conceptualizations of knowledge that has been

excluded by the boundaries of western science.

…our vision contends that humans have always tried to understand and shape their world: sciences and technologies are as old as humanity. All

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cultures create their own stories or cosmologies that not only help explain but also provide a sense of wonder and awe about the universe and their place within it. This more inclusive view of science makes room for other local/indigenous, indeed multiple, and previously excluded conceptualizations of scientific knowledge (Carter, 2008b, p. 175).

Re-visioning science education for Carter and Smith also involves understanding both the

splendors and the horrors of western science, including science’s complicity with the

ongoing destruction of the natural world, along with the history of western imperialism

(Vlahakis, et. al., 2006).

“…enmeshed as it is in the global capitalist progress paradigm, Western science has also been coproductive of hegemonic interests resulting in many unintended consequences. This includes ecological devastation that threatens the future of planetary life and many forms of imperialism (Carter, 2008b, p. 176).

Like academic mathematics, science and science education are also complicit with the

coloniality of power. Postcolonial criticism has conceived the hegemony of modern

science (both natural and social) as a form of “coloniality of knowledge and power”

(Shiva, 1993; Ela, 1998; Quijano, 2000; Lander, 2000).

Carter and Smith’s re-visioning of science and science education draws

particularly on postcolonial science studies and sustainability science. In a series of

journal articles, Carter (2004, 2006, 2007, 2008a, 2008b) and Carter and Smith (1998,

2003, 2004) review and apply these recent ideas to both a critique of and an alternative to

traditional science education. Together, these varied critical discourses are another

example of the analysis and critique of western knowledge within their historical and

cultural contexts (Lemke, 1997; Kyle, 2001; Carter, 2002). The field of science studies

has been particularly productive in this effort to situate modern western science (Harding,

2008).

The new sociologies, histories, and ethnographies of science have revealed how scientific inquiry has been a social institution with many features of other social institutions … Subsequently, social constructivist tendencies in technology studies have shown how technologies are not merely value-neutral chunks of hardware; “artifacts have politics,”…The recent science wars provide on kind of testimony to how unsettling it can still be for many people – scientists and nonscientists alike, and whether they think of their political constituents as on the left, right, or center – to be asked to recognize that the highest achievements of the North’s natural sciences are

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deeply permeated by distinctively historical and social projects and practices (Harding, 2008, pp. 6-7).

Science studies argue that humans can know nature only through culturally constituted

conceptual or epistemological frameworks, enabled and limited by local cultural features

such as discursive practices, institutional structures, interests, values, cultural norms

(Turnbull, 2000; Carter, 2006).

These and other facets of Science Studies challenge science's mythological status as universal, value free and objective, and refract it through the prism of culture. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, far from being 'discovered' by disinterested scientists with nothing better to do, were instead the product of business investments needed to improve the efficiency of mechanical machinery within the developing context of the industrial revolution. In the 19th and 20th centuries, chemical knowledge was produced because it was needed to guide the growth of the chemical industry, with its present day spin-offs of pesticides and fertilisers. Today, the extent of biotechnology and nanotechnology knowledge is a result of high levels of funding being poured into these industries. Compare this with the relatively poor level of understanding of ecosystem processes and their relationship to agricultural production‹a result of poor funding and commitment. In other words, how and what science is produced depends on the cultural, economic and power interests of the day. Maximising shareholder value has far greater effect on the production of scientific knowledge than does the mythical, objective, disinterested scientist (Carter & Smith, 2003).

The accumulation of this work in science studies and other critiques of science

over the past several decades have challenged the traditional conception of science and

science education as abstract universal truth seeking through universal reason. Similar to

academic mathematics, modern science holds a conception of itself as universal and

superior to all other forms of knowledge and reasoning. As with academic mathematics,

this self-understanding of the superiority of science and scientific knowledge is

profoundly embedded within the Eurocentric imaginary of western modernity (Adas,

1989).

by constructing, creating, and defining science as absolutely different from and superior to other modes of inquiry and especially from non-western modes, the West has essentialized itself, science, and the non-western world. This essentialization (occidentalism) occurs in the everyday lives of ordinary people in the West and elsewhere, and among anthropologists and other students of society and culture. The West has appropriated this

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view of itself as politically, intellectually, and economically advanced beyond the rest of the world, simultaneously with its appropriation of science as its own (Restivo & Loughlin, 2000, p. 136).

Like the alternative perspective of ethnomathematics, an emergent postcolonial

critique of science education problematizes the standard account of “science” and

proposes an alternative conceptualization of modern science as an “ethnoscience”

(Harding, 1997). Science, like mathematics, has been reconceptualized as a

systematically organized cultural practice, produced in the universally human processes

of making sense of the natural world. Western science is one among many cultural

knowledge systems concerned with knowing and understanding “nature”.

scientific knowledge has arisen from local contexts and in response to local needs, science is a product of culture, and consequently there are as many sciences as there are cultures. Western science can thus be understood as a particular form of local knowledge tradition, shaped by and reproductive of, the culture and society in which it is articulated (Carter, 2005, p. 916).

For Carter, postcolonial analysis opens up thinking about the material and cultural

conditions in which science education is produced, circulated, interpreted, and enacted

(Carter, 2004, p. 821).

The postcolonial rethinking of modern science in relation to history and culture

has yet to infiltrate the enclosed cultures of science education (Lemke, 2001; Kyle, 2001;

Carter, 2004).

To date, science education has been reticent to engage with powerful discourses like postcolonialism. It has been largely silent on the whole question of the broader structural and cultural processes transforming the practical and theoretical landscape which shapes science education, and is expressed within it (Carter, 2004, p. 821).

Carter even questions whether science education is ready for the type of hybrid and

border epistemologies post-Occidentalist reason calls for. For Carter, this is the very

beginning of the process of thinking and acting differently about the type of science

education required for the globalized and postcolonial world of the 21st century (Carter,

2005).

Carter and Smith reference and describe literature that interprets science as a

central part of the Eurocentric cultural imagination, underpinning and pervading modern

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thought. Science is the embodiment of Enlightenment consciousness, characterized by

particular forms of rationality, western cultural values, and claims to universality.

Science is a form of consciousness (a mentality) that proffers itself as the most legitimate

source of knowledge and explanation of the world. The origin myth of modern science,

central to the narrative of western civilization as a whole, is the triumph of reason and

progress towards ultimate truth (Fuller, 1997; Hess, 1995). Passed from one great white

European male to another, this origin myth established the assumptions about science,

technology, nature, and modernity that constitute current practices. A false

consciousness, in other words, characterized in part, as cultural hubris, is at the center of

the discourses of contemporary science and science education (Carter, 2005, Carter &

Smith, 2003).

Carter and Smith also describe traditional approaches to science curricula as

reliant upon canonical knowledges that are fragmented into disconnected “subjects”.

Reproducing the triumphal narrative of Eurocentric modernity, science is represented as

universally applicable truth seeking (Carter, 2006, p. 171). Normative science education

recapitulates the dominant view of science as unproblematic sets of universally

applicable, epistemologically valid, repeatable truths steeped within its origin myth

(Carter & Smith, 2003, p. 48). “Mainstream science education continues its normative,

outmoded trajectory formulated around decontextualized abstract and theoretical

concepts and methodologies” (Carter & Smith, 2003, p. 48). My own student

experiences in science classrooms in a predominately white, middle-class high school in

the United States during the 1970s confirm this general description of universal,

ahistorical, abstract conceptual, soulless dissections, and fragmented knowledge, all

oriented toward a college curriculum and high status professions linked to unquestioned

narratives of economic progress and national competitiveness.

According to Carter and Smith (2003), the current international K-12 science

education curriculum came out of the education reforms in both the U.S. and Britain

during the 1960s. These science curriculum reforms were conceived in the early

twentieth century but their implementation was delayed until after the Great Depression

and World War II. The geopolitical and cultural contexts for the implementation of these

reforms were the Cold War and the unbridled confidence in the social benefits and utility

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of modern Western science (Carter & Smith, 2003). In the primary grades, science

processes and concrete “hands-on” experience were emphasized over content. In the

secondary grades, the science curriculum was oriented around more abstract, theoretical

topics that fit the university science curriculum focused on training scientists and

engineers. “The science curriculum became highly abstract and organized around

fragmented bodies of canonical knowledge, a sanitised understanding of scientific

method, and a conceptualization of science as objective truth-seeking within a unified

view of reality” (Carter & Smith, 2003, p. 48). The current standards reform movement

in science education is little more than a reiteration of this unified (Eurocentric) view of

reality (Hurd, 2002; Carter & Smith, 2003). The standards articulated and promoted by

the profession of science educators today, excludes all non-western knowledges.

The neoliberal, neoconservative and regressive forces of globalization have unfortunately envisaged school science as yet again, a steady induction into science formulated as a body of objectified knowledge and methodology (Hurd, 2002). These forces recapitulate the 1960s curriculum reforms into current standards-based science curricula that Hurd (2002) suggests is “simply updating the traditional principles and generalization of science disciplines”. The science curriculum derived from a previous generation has been found to well-serve new masters (Carter & Smith, 2003, p. 49).

Carter’s recent (2004, 2006) postcolonial critiques of science education were

partly a response to a debate in the journal Science Education that centered on the

Eurocentric conceptualization of science as universal knowledge (Aikenhead & Lewis,

2001). In their introduction to the articles in this 2001 issue of Science Education,

entitled, “Shifting Perspectives From Universalism to Cross-Culturalism”, Bradford

Lewis and Glen Aikenhead situate the debate within the context of Eurocentrism.

The arguments presented in the articles might best be understood against the backdrop of Eurocentrism, not because they advocate a Eurocentric perspective but, because, in some instances, they struggle against a Eurocentric notion of science. Eurocentrism refers to the idea that the people, places, and events of Western European cultures are superior and a standard against which other cultures should be judged. Conversely, non-Western cultures are inferior, and relevant only when they have a relationship to Western culture (Lewis & Aikenhead, 2001, p. 3).

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If Eurocentrism is the epistemic framework of colonial modernity, then Lewis and

Aikenhead’s “definition” refers only to the consequences of Eurocentrism, which

suggests the conceptual delimitations of the debates they introduce. The central issue in

these debates was the relation between western science and the knowledge systems of

non-western cultures.

How should nature-knowledge systems of non-Western science cultures be viewed in relation to Western science? If they are not inferior, should they be accepted in science classrooms? Should they be considered non-scientific external sources of critique for the work of Western science? Or should non-Westerners be left to determine for themselves how these nature-knowledge system will be used? (Lewis & Aikenhead, 2001, p. 4).

That some science educators are beginning to ask such comparative cultural knowledge

questions implies an opening within western science education to both critical self-

reflection and dialogue with non-western knowledge systems. Although these debates do

point toward an opening in the self-understanding of science education, even science

educators struggling against a Eurocentric notion of science education, according to

Carter, remain subtly and unwittingly ensnared within a system of thought that works

against the very attitudes they seek to promote (Carter, 2004, p. 821). For Carter, this is

one of the contributions of the postcolonial critique to science education.

Postcolonial interventions draws attention to the unconsciousness in textual practice that, despite author intentions, can articulate meanings constituted and disseminated through long-standing and hegemonic practices (Coombes & Brah, 2000). They can reveal the often obscured colonial practices and assumptions deeply sedimented into some of science education’s normative scholarship, emphasizing the need for vigilance, and recovering critical spaces for oppositional thinking and practice (Carter, 2006, p. 679).

In a 2004 Science Education journal article entitled, “Thinking Differently About

Cultural Diversity: Using Postcolonial Theory to (Re)read Science Education”, Carter

categorizes and summarizes the scholarship on cultural diversity in science education and

describes the multiple meanings of and four key ideas in postcolonial theory. Drawing

on one of the meanings of postcolonial theory as “oppositional reading practice”, Carter

then applies these key ideas to a reading of one of the articles from the 2001 Science

Education journal on western and non-western knowledge.

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In her account of the scholarship on cultural diversity in science education, Carter

distinguishes three main positions. The first position is focused on the

identities/subjectivities of the culturally and linguistically diverse students, while the

second position is focused on considerations of science as culturally located. A third

position is focused on science education in urban setttings. According to Carter (2004),

scholarship within the first position on the diversity among students acknowledges the

inherent Eurocentrism and hegemonic universalism of western science. Since science is

presumed to be humanity’s most “powerful” and “best” knowledge system, its

Eurocentric delineation within the school curriculum is sanctioned (Carter, 2004).

Essentially, this scholarship adopts the assimilationist model within a “science for all”

rhetoric, adapted to the diversity of learners with “culturally relevant” pedagogy. There

is widespread consensus that every student should have access to modern western science

in order to function in the mainstream, in a global economy and an information society

(Lee, 2001, 449) (Carter, 2004). “Despite these diverse backgrounds, the students

themselves are compelled to accommodate Western science, with the focus consequently

on developing pedagogical strategies and curricula to enable their ‘border crossing’ into

Western science (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee & Fradd, 1998; Michie, 2003)”

(Carter, 2004, p. 822).

The second position on cultural diversity in science education scholarship is

frequently identified as “multicultural approaches to science”. This scholarship is asking

questions about the cultural location of science and the relations between western and

non-western knowledges. To some extent this scholarship accepts multiple

conceptualizations of science. Drawing on the problematizations of modern science

raised by science studies, this scholarship acknowledges science’s Eurocentric

exclusiveness, and argues for the inclusion of indigenous and traditional science

knowledge. Much of this scholarship emanates from the First World, but increasingly,

contributions from non-western and/or Third World contexts are emerging. Many of

these non-western contributions are dealing with the tensions of multiple knowledge

systems divided between various pressures to maintain traditional/indigenous knowledge,

and national development priorities pushing for the expansion of Western techno-

scientific knowledge (Carter, 2004, p. 822).

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A third position in the literature is focused on science education for diverse

learners in urban settings. Carter describes this literature as drawing primarily upon “the

large normative educational literatures on multiculturalism and comparative studies, with

an emphasis on cultural pluralism, inclusivity, and equity” (Carter, 2004, p. 823). Carter

sites recent postcolonial education literature (Dimitradis & McCarthy, 2001; Crossley &

Watson, 2003) critical of the multicultural and comparative education discourses for their

Eurocentric philosophical and epistemological assumptions of universalism, humanism,

and the bounded and homogenous nature of national contexts and identities.

Comparison is seen to compartmentalize difference within culturally reasserting borders, paradoxically putting a break on those processes of intercultural understanding multiculturalism seeks to promote. Further, it does not take account of the newly emergent mixed, hybrid, and diverse identities consequent to intensified globalization and diaspora. Multiculturalism becomes an empty form of pluralism Dimitriadis & Cameron (2001) argue, a discourse of containment deployed to bring the eruption of diversity within institutional intelligibility and manageability. Prominent comparative education theorists Crossley and Watson (2003) call for a reconceptualization of comparative and multicultural education that moves beyond stable and unitary ideas about culture, tradition and identity. The profound challenges of transforming global processes when considered together with recent theoretical critiques like poststructuralism have challenged the embedded Eurocentrism within the field (Carter, 2004, p. 823).

After revealing the absence of the postcolonial perspective in this literature on

diversity in science education, Carter defines four meanings of postcolonialism. First, the

postcolonial is an epoch that acknowledges post WWII decolonization and names a

contemporary condition of existence. Secondly, the postcolonial perspective is the

development of a new aesthetic and cultural formations responding to these changed

historical circumstances. Within the second meaning, postcolonial critique is attempting

to rewrite history in order to foreground the complexities and hybridities of human social

and cultural realities. The third meaning of postcolonialism is a method of interpretation

and critique that draws from both poststructuralism and deconstruction and contributes to

cultural studies with a unique conceptual apparatus, including such notions as identity,

difference, hybridity, ambivalence, translation, etc. The fourth meaning is the

constellation of an ethical and political project. This project is concerned with critiquing

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and resisting hegemonic power and seeking redistributive justice. Carter argues that

postcolonialism offers science education an alternative perspective on cultural diversity.

Postcolonial perspectives can offer science education at once political analysis, cultural critique and philosophical insight that venture beyond critical pedagogies to disrupt the continuing Eurocentrism of comparison and multiculturalism with their philosophical and epistemological assumptions of universalism, difference and the Other. These assumptions bound to stable and unitary ideas of nation, culture, identity, comparison and difference remain embedded with much of science educations traditional discourse on multicultural education and cultural diversity. Postcolonial perspectives can help science education develop more complex conceptualizations of culture, identity, and difference better suited to contemporary transnational global culture, as well as approaches to science education reform. These areas are underacknowledged and undertheorized in science education Lemke, 2001, and Kyle 2001 (Carter, 2004, pp. 824-825).

After describing four key terms in postcolonial theory (representation,

recuperation, translation, and domesticating difference) Carter articulates a postcolonial

reading of one of articles from the 2001 Science Education journal on western and non-

western knowledges. G. Snively and J. Corsiglia’s “Discovering Indigenous Sciences:

Implications for Science Education” (2001) argues for the broadening of science to

include the significant contributions of Aboriginal cultures’ traditional ecological

knowledge (TEK). Including TEK in the science curriculum, for Snively and Corsiglia,

provides ecological knowledge able to address the environmental devastation caused by

western forms of science and development. Snively and Corsiglia (2001) envision a

cross-cultural approach to science education that includes indigenous knowledges

alongside western science to “better serve the needs of all students” (Snively & Corsiglia,

2001, p. 85).

The oppositional (re)reading that Carter provides centers on issues of

conceptualization, representation, and translation and their subtle and lingering colonial

referents.

While Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) call to include Aboriginal science has the potential to trouble the categories of Western science, their scholarship reveals lingering colonist referents that work as technologies of containment, paradoxically making power relations invisible and keeping dominant norms in place. The Other’s knowledge has been effectively translated into familiar cultural forms in ways that construct it

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as possessing knowable characteristics able to be apprehended and controlled. These processes of Othering work to domesticate and subsume, while simultaneously separating and regulating the boundaries, thus preserving the integrity and authority of Western science (Carter, 2004, p. 831).

Snively & Corsiglia’s conceptualizations and representations of TEK and Western

science, according to Carter (2004), suggest a traditional unitary view of culture

understood as inwardly cohesive and outwardly delineating. Positioning both knowledge

systems side-by-side implies border-crossing, a form of thought that perpetuates binary

thinking (Carter, 2004). In postcolonial theory, binaries are value-laden and conceal

hegemonic assumptions of superiority. Binary thought is central to the coloniality of

power, described above.

The very constitution of Western subjectivity depended upon the reciprocity expressed in identifiable binary opposites such as self/other, western/indigenous native, scientific/non-scientific, culture/nature, logos/spirit, and so on. Binary thinking references all forms against the self, generating alternative versions of sameness, and effectively defining the terms in which the Other is allowed to exist (Carter, 2006, p. 826).

For Carter, the separation of TEK and western science reinforces a distinction and

categorization that appears natural and preordained rather than “differentiated relations

produced and negotiated in complex material and social fields of historical processes”

(Carter, 2004, p. ). For Carter, postcolonial theory attempts to replace notions of unitary

cultures and identities with intercultural, hybrid and transcultural forms of thought. In

essence, Carter’s critique of Snively & Corsiglia’s proposed inclusion of indigenous

knowledge within western science education is a critique of their “unconscious”

epistemological and ontohistorical presuppositions, universalized and enculturated in the

expansion of Eurocentric modernity. No matter how inclusive the intent, understanding

the world through these deep seeded presuppositions hinders the possibilities of

understanding and learning from different realities in their own terms. According to the

post-Occidentalist perspective that Carter is articulating, the modern western regime of

power/knowledge establishes and maintains the epistemological and social conditions for

any action (discursive or otherwise) to be taken seriously as making “truth claims” or as

being reasonable.

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In a subsequent and related critique of science education’s interpretation of

science, entitled “Postcolonial Interventions within Science Education: Using

Postcolonial Ideas to Reconsider Cultural Diversity Scholarship”, Carter (2006) focuses

in part, on the ideas of boundaries and “border thinking”.

Boundaries are deeply implicated in western thinking, with the regulation of space by physical boundaries/borders a metonymy for the regulatory practices of western epistemology itself (Ashcroft, 2001b). The production of political and epistemological borders was essential to the Western colonial project of constructing and signaling the European, and separating out the Other. Once established, borders worked as signs of modernity, encoding a stable system of coordinates, where unambiguous and guaranteed boundaries differentiated, separated and regulated between social spheres, between nature and culture, and between the scientific and unscientific. Rationalisation and the autonomous knowing subject able to subsume the separated object as the known were the explicit foundations of bounded knowledge. Such boundaries have ultimately culminated in the universalized establishment of global forms of regulation spread from a Western center to the periphery (Carter, 2006, p. 682).

Carter’s (2006) critique of the boundaries of science and science education focuses on

two Science Education journal articles. One entitled, “Defining ‘Science’ in a

Multicultural World” by W.W. Cobern and C.C. Loving, is from the 2001 debate

described above. The second article is a continuation of the 2001 debate, entitled,

“Multiculturalism, Universalism and the Shortcomings of Curricular Multicultural

Science Education” by H. Siegal (2002). Both Cobern & Loving (2001) and Siegal

(2002) define and defend the traditional boundaries of modern science and the standard

account of science education.

Cobern and Loving (2001) focus on distinguishing a standard account of western

science from indigenous knowledges of the natural world. Cobern and Loving’s

description of a standard account of western science reiterates the Eurocentric origin

myth, starting from the Ancient Greeks to the present in a story of linear progress. They

argue that indigenous knowledges should be excluded from the definition of science, in

part, because non-western knowledges would be completely subsumed within western

science and loose their distinctiveness and autonomy. According to Carter (2006),

Cobern and Loving (2001) subscribe to the superimposition of the dominant group’s

perspective so that indigenous knowledges are configured as alternatives to modern

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western knowledge (Carter, 2006, p. 685). As alternatives, indigenous knowledges can

be appreciated only by the dominant group in whose cultural forms the difference has

been constructed and represented (Carter, 2006, p. 685). In other words, Cobern and

Loving reassert the superiority of western science over all other forms of knowledge.

“They argue outright that Western science’s ‘creative genius’ (p. 62) makes it rightly

dominant to other forms of knowledge” (Carter, 2006, p. 685).

Seigel’s piece (2002) is concerned not only with the superiority of western

science, but also its universality. For Seigel (2002), universalists acknowledge the

socially and culturally locatedness of knowing, but because “good” scientific inquiry is

based upon methodological criteria, knowledge produced by science is “objective” and

therefore less socially and culturally bound than indigenous knowledges. According to

Carter (2006), Seigel fails to locate these established criteria of scientific inquiry within

their historical and cultural contexts, obscuring their normative grounds. For Carter,

scientific discourses, including the language of research, are sedimented in the cultural

unconsciousness. For example, cultural codes, with lingering colonial referents, frame

the questions of research. “Modern science” is an institutionalized practice with a

particular history located in the emergence and expansion of colonial modernity.

Science is neither a special kind of thought, a method guaranteeing truth, nor a unique organization of work. In terms of social practice and discourse, the meaning of science came into focus only in opposition to the terms ‘pre-’ and ‘proto-science’. ‘Modern science’ makes sense, in part, by way of its opposition to ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’ science. All of these terms are created as part of a Europeanized history of the West and of the world. In the context of the anthropologized societies that would later be designated the East, the Dark Continent, the New World, the Third World, the South, the oppositions between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’, and increasingly in the 20th century between ‘science’ and ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledge, strengthened. We are not thinking here of the word ‘science’ being introduced into the English language, but of the process of integrating the word ‘science’ into vocabularies of meaning, action, and social institutions. It is during this process of integration(and institutionalization) that science takes on its (dis)guise of universality (Restivo & Loughlin, 2000, p. 138).

For Carter, all rational justifications involve choices. No matter how rigorous or well-

established, the scientific method is a cultural lens though which the modern world has

been constructed as if it were universal.

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Summarizing both Siegel’s (2002) and Cobern and Loving’s (2001) boundary

delimitations for science and science education, Carter argues that these boundaries are

part of “the colonial project” (Carter, 2006, p. 686). They “act to limit and control in

discourses of containment” and they are “symptomatic of the hegemony and imperialism

of Western epistemology itself” (Carter, 2006, p. 686).

Consequently, both texts display the assumptions of Eurocentrism with its stable and unitary coordinates where unambiguous and guaranteed boundaries differentiate, separate and regulate between nature and culture, and between scientific and unscientific. Moreover, the subject-object epistemology of the knowing subject able to specify criteria to know and judge the object is reiterated in Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts as the explicit foundations of bounded knowledge (Carter, 2006, p. 686).

As the epistemic framework of colonial modernity, Eurocentrism centrally involves the

control of knowledge and the maintenance of the conditions of epistemic dependency

(Mignolo, 2000a). From a postcolonial perspective these are the kinds of boundaries that

constitute who is inside and who is outside modernity.

For Carter, these “deeply sedimented colonial coordinates of Eurocentrism” are

embedded within much of science education scholarship (Carter, 2006, p. 687). These

assumptions of universalism, difference, and the Other, limit science education’s ability

to consider postcolonial conceptualizations of culture, diversity, hybridity, border

epistemologies, pluralism, and identity (Carter, 2006, p. 687). For Carter, these more

complex conceptualizations are “required for considering science education within

contemporary transnational global culture” (Carter, 2006,p. 687). Postcolonial readings,

according to Carter (2004, 2006), would deconstruct the boundaries between Western

science, science education, and indigenous knowledge, and between the epistemological,

political, and moral imperatives that western science invented and defends. Postcolonial

critique intends to renegotiate and replace boundaries, understood as arbitrary

epistemological limits that maintain the dominant system of power/knowledge relations.

For Carter, postcolonial critique holds the potential to develop a transdisciplinary

epistemology that acknowledges the need for new conceptual tools with which to cope

with contemporaneity (Carter, 2004). “Western canonical thinking entrenched as it is in

Eurocentrism, can no longer provide a starting point Mignolo (2000) argues, for a

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postOccidental epistemology that postcolonial difference requires at the intersection of

modernity and coloniality” (Carter, 2006, p. 688).

This recognition of the historical and social contingency of boundaries, and of the

limits imposed by the Eurocentric epistemic framework, implies, for Carter, that

canonical boundaries be considered provisional. Boundaries would be dismantled in

ways that deconstruct colonial discourse, and open up alternatives and even

incommensurable possibilities, pointing towards more diverse ways of conceptualizing

and performing knowledges, as well as possibilities for living. As learners mix western

science with other knowledges, intercultural, hybrid demands are placed on science

education that both challenges the boundaries of western science and subtly changes its

terms (Carter, 2006, p. 688). This opens up a pathway towards the equal co-existence

and mutual reciprocity between western science and non-western knowledges. Bringing

the plurality of different knowledges together, makes all knowledge less certain, more

probabilistic, more attentive to unanticipated consequences, and more cooperatively and

collaboratively organized at various political levels with various types of reasoning and

justifications (Carter, 2006, p. 688).

Carter references Walter Mignolo’s “border thinking” here as an attempt to move

thinking beyond hegemonic epistemologies that attribute to themselves a pre-eminence

and universality of reach. Border thinking involves interpretation and understanding

from the perspective of those whose knowledge and cultures have been marginalized by

the imposition of the dominant boundaries of colonial modernity.

The enchanting power of Occidentalism resides in its privileged geo-historical location, a privilege that was self-attributed by the growing hegemonic belief in its own racial, religious, philosophic, and scientific superiority. One of the most devastating consequences of such a system of belief is that the world seems to be what European (and later US) categories of thought allow you to say it is. The rest is simply wrong and any attempt to think otherwise opens one up to harassment, demonizing, and eventually, elimination (Mignolo, 2005, p. 36).

For Mignolo (2000), border thinking is possible when different local histories and their

particular power relations are juxtaposed and considered together. Connecting the variety

of geo-historical knowledges and their loci of enunciation together reveals the dominant

geo-politics of knowledge, which privileges western over non-western systems in the

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centralization and hegemony of principles of knowledge and understanding. Knowledge

is always geo-historically and geo-politically located. The recognition and autonomous

inclusion of the perspectives of moderity’s marginalized Others, border thinking disrupts

and breaks out of this geo-political hegemony of western thought.

“An other thinking” implies a redistribution of the geopolitics of knowledge as organized by Occidentalism (as the overarching imaginary and self-definition of the modern world system) and Orientalism (one particular instance in which the difference from the same was located), along with area studies and the triumph of the social sciences in the geopolitics of knowledge. It also entails an effort to escape the domain of Western metaphysics and its equivalent, the theological realm of Islamic thought (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 68).

For Mignolo, the geo-politics of knowledge is a necessary perspective to dispel the

Eurocentric assumption that valid and legitimate knowledge is sanctioned by Western

standards alone (Mignolo, 2005, p. 43).

As Carter and Smith have articulated, a post-Occidental thinking is formulated as

a response to the questions and issues that are shaking the world today, including those

arising from the globalization of western techno-sciences and new forms of imperialism

embedded in globalization (Gough, 2007; Carter, 2008a). Intercivilizational dialogue

today demands that the diversity of cultural knowledges and perspectives be recognized

and respected in their own terms. Carter situates and justifies her post-colonial challenge

to science education in an interpretation of the historical present where the monocultural

hegemony of western science and science education are part of the crises of modernity.

Post-colonialism is offered as a contribution towards better understanding and theorizing

the present as well as pointing towards alternatives to modernity.

Carter and Smith have begun to put their post-Occidental re-vision of science

education into practice with the development of a pre-service general science unit for

undergraduate primary teachers. This innovative course is underpinned by many of the

theoretical perspectives mentioned above, but particularly postcolonial science studies,

sustainability sciences, and future studies. Like Carter and Smith’s critique of science

education in relation to contemporaneity, their course aims to engage, empower, and

inform prospective teachers in how to tackle 21st century challenges. Six principles

guide the course: 1) inclusive of the history and philosophy of science; 2) socially

77

critical; 3) inclusive of postcolonial perspectives; 4) inclusive of new science of

sustainability science; 5) framed within a futures perspective; and 6) able to invoke a

sense of wonder and transcendence. The organizing framework of this course portrays

the development of science as cultural story. With this narrative framework, the course

aims to problematize the self-understanding of western scientific knowledge as universal,

value free, and objective truth. Themes of recognition, difference, and localism derived

from the literatures of science studies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science are

integrated throughout. The learning goals encapsulate the challenges of sustainability

science. Sustainability requires an understanding of not just a conceptual ecological

knowledge base, but also building of personal meaning and connectedness in relation to

the natural world, the ability to problem solve and a critical understanding of the

global/local nexus.

The course begins by exploring the cosmologies from various cultures.

Developing the postcolonial science studies notion that all human societies have creation

stories and worldviews that have arisen in local contexts and in response to local needs,

science is broadly conceived as any systematic knowledge of the natural world. An

understanding of the meaning of cosmology and the interrelations between knowledges

and cultures are emphasized. As expressions of the diverse ways humans make sense of

themselves and the world, different cosmologies are recognized for the sense of awe and

wonder they provide for different cultures. Other (non-western) sciences are studied in

their cultural-historical contexts for their usefulness and importance.

Next, the course includes the history of the development of western science from

a post-Kuhnian science studies perspective conceptualized within changing cultural,

economic, and political contexts. Western science is presented as a localized

ethnoscience that has transcended its immediate determinants through its reliability and

usefulness.

Students learn methods of exposing the historically and culturally specific determinants of “scientific ways of knowing” and of the means by which “scientific entities and ideas are constructed and validated”. This is partly a matter of historical reinterpretation – of understanding that, say, the apparent fruitfulness of Newtonian scientific community – and partly a matter of contemporary cultural critique, such as recognizing the extent to which ethnocentrism and biological determinism pervade the educational

78

philosophies of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Paulo Freire, whose work continues to inform constructivist educational reforms in many nations (Gough, 2007, p. 47).

The course emphasizes important conceptual ideas of Western science, i.e., the nature

verses culture dichotomy, going beyond a history and philosophy of science approach.

The aim of the focus on western science is for teachers to develop a critical contextual

view of western science that will inform their teaching at the primary level. This is

followed by an in-depth study of the central western science precepts of energy and

matter, both conceptually and within their historical context, as the necessary precursors

for the potent technologies of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The

more contemporary technologies of biotechnology and nonotechnology are examined and

placed within the globalizing capitalist ideology that is helping to shape their outcomes

(Carter, 2008b, p. 176).

And finally, students are asked to draw their images of the future. Typically these

images are dystopian. Carter and Smith present a more hopeful future for their students

to imagine through systems theory, ecological knowledge, citizen science and

sustainability science as ways to move toward a more just and sustainable future. Citizen

science is a bottom up, grassroots, collaborative, and local needs focused approach to

science. The course ends with an optimistic theme of empowerment about understanding

the place of science in their world and believing they can influence their futures. Like

Carter and Smith’s vision for science education overall, this course aims to transcend the

limits of western science, build upon its strengths, and contribute to a more just and

sustainable world. Carter and Smith are still developing this course, but they indicate

their students so far are finding it more relevant to their lives and the world today than the

typical text-centered science education courses.

Conclusion: Towards Epistemological Multiculturalism

The initial emergence of a postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism within the

teaching of specific school subjects represents the possibility that the school curriculum

will contribute to the unlearning of Eurocentrism and the creation of viable alternatives to

modernity. This postcolonial critique of the Eurocentric curriculum moves

transformative multiculturalism beyond national cultural diversity and into a relation with

79

the world’s epistemological diversity. Following Buras and Motter’s call for a “subaltern

cosmopolitanism”, multicultural education is global education (Buras & Motter, 2006).

The recent critiques of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, like ethnomathematics and post-

Occidental science education, are part of the emergence of critical global perspectives on

western education and curriculum. Critical global perspectives here means the

articulation of multiple interpretations with a consciousness of the limits of the

presumptive worldview of Eurocentric modernity. The emergence of critical global

perspectives on education and curriculum are part of a shift from epistemological

monoculturalism to epistemological multiculturalism.

This review is intended to situate two core subject challenges to Eurocentrism

within a larger project of developing a multi-centric curriculum organized as an “ecology

of knowledge” (Santos, Nunnes & Meneses, 2007b). Situating the Eurocentric

curriculum within an ecology of knowledge would de-center the hegemony of “western”

knowledge and Occidental ways of thinking and reposition them within a sustained and

dynamic “ecology” of heterogeneous knowledges (Santos, 2007a). The diversity of the

world’s knowledges would be placed together within a democratically derived

educational framework that does not compromise the autonomy of individual cultural

knowledge systems (Santos, 2007d). Ethnomathematics and a post-Occidentalist science

education both offer rationales and models for bringing western and non-western

knowledge systems together in the classroom.

A post-Eurocentric curriculum oriented by pluriversality within an ecology of

knowledge is intended to further diversify thinking and understanding through the

comparative and egalitarian integration of dominant and non-dominant cultural

knowledge systems (Bowers, 2006; Kincheloe, 2008). Knowledge within this type of

ecology of knowledge is evaluated comparatively within particular pragmatic contexts.

Learning is focused on comparing and evaluating the relative value of different

knowledges for intervening in real-world problems or issues. In addition to the

acquisition of conceptual knowledge and skills, learning within an ecology of knowledge

is oriented towards imagining and evaluating the multiple possible consequences of

diverse interpretive accounts of human reality and the actions they entail. Preference is

given to the forms of knowledge that guarantees the greatest level of participation to

80

social groups involved in its design, execution, and control, as well as the benefits from

the intervention (Santos, 2007a, p. 73). The proposal for an ecology of knowledge calls

for and in turn would produce alternative forms of subjectivity that are no longer

confined within the Eurocentric cosmology.

A post-Eurocentric curriculum is intended to break the spell or hold of the

Eurocentric imaginary and Occidentalist reason through the study of modern world

history in relation to the assumptions and practices of the western knowledge and the

school curriculum. A pluriversal curriculum opens up and promotes additional

possibilities of knowing and being beyond the Eurocentric worldview, in part, through

dialogue (not just the study of cultures as objects of knowledge) with the diversity of

ways of knowing and being that have been eclipsed or devalued in Eurocentric education.

Such a curriculum is intended to contribute to the decolonization of modern thought and

thus can be understood (for pedagogical purposes) as part of a decolonial paradigm in

opposition to the existing imperial/colonial paradigm.

This critique of western modernity from the perspective of coloniality offers an

alternative macro-narrative of modernity as a Eurocentric projection. Interpreting

modernity as the imposition of a world, represented as universal, situates modernity and

the modern school curriculum as one among many possible ways of organizing

knowledge. A modern/colonial world system perspective holds significant implications

for re-narrativizing the history of “modern” western education. This critical review is

intended to contribute to a pluriversal and decolonial paradigm of knowledge and

education. As the modern western mathematics and science education curricula

illustrate, the dominant paradigm of knowledge and education is deeply embedded within

the discourses of Eurocentric modernity. Eurocentric modernity is a paradigm of

progress, universal truth, and newness. The de-colonial critique of modernity is a

paradigm of co-existence and mutual recognition where universality is replaced by

pluriversality. With the paradigm of co-existence, non-Eurocentric ways of knowing and

being are included in a trans-modern worldview where many different worlds can and do

co-exist. The diversity of ways of knowing and being are brought together in reciprocal

learning contexts of mutual respect, ongoing dialogue, and a principled, democratically

derived organization. Transcending the epistemic framework of colonial modernity by

81

bringing together different cultural knowledge systems is now necessary if the world

beyond modernity is going to more just and sustainable.

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