Learning To Divide the World: Education at Empire's End.

The educational project of postcolonialism in the West is only beginning. Although decolonization began in earnest after World War II, the West is only starting to see beyond divisions generated by the same sensibilities that drove imperial expansion. This book examines one powerful source of those divisions--imperialism's influence on our educated view of the world. People need to understand how 5 centuries of studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation--conceptual instruments used by the West to divide up and educate the world. Chapters 2 through 4 explore how imperialism took knowing possession of the world, set that world on public display for the West's edification, and developed the principal forms of schooling serving both colonial state and colonized native. Chapters 5 through 9 examine five staples of school curriculum (history, geography, science, language, and literature), identifying traces of colonial imagination contributing to world divisions. Each chapter traces the subject's historical formation within the age of empire, discusses the legacy it assumed during the 1960s, and closely examines this legacy's lingering elements in today's classrooms. (Contains 559 references.) (MLH)