A Decolonial Future for Education and Schools

Recently, scholars and educators across Global North countries have started to reflect on the role of educational ideas and practices within colonial projects, and on their legacies to contemporary schooling, including as tools of epistemic oppression, physical control, and racialization. In this chapter, I argue that acknowledging and challenging these legacies is imperative to those seeking to rethink the future of education and schools from Global North spaces that have occupied a central position in colonial histories, such as Great Britain, where such legacies have been embedded in curricula, educational experiences of racialised communities, teachers’ education and work. In particular, I will first briefly outline such roles and legacies of educational ideas and practices within Western colonial projects across the last five centuries or so. I will then explore—through a coalition possibilities (or intergroup dialogue) approach—what different voices, practices and ideas from and surrounding the field of Decolonial Studies, such as radical southern, indigenous and Black pedagogies, can contribute to our endeavour across this book of rethinking the future of education, paying specific attention to what decolonial educational systems, pedagogies and curricula can look like.