The school should educate for life: how education becomes reproduction, an instrument of a new colonization

Abstract

Many instruments, epistemological, political, ideological, etc., are used to perpetuate the power of certain social strata. What would be the role of formal education in maintaining privileged social positions? We will try to answer questions like this one from a critical analysis of the sociological thesis of Bour-dieu (1975; 1997) as well as decolonial proposals theorized by Quijano (2005) and Walter Mignolo (2008; 2020). Decolonial proposals, to overcome activities that enslave ways of being/thinking, can be summarized as follows: any discourse or activity that proposes to counteract old or restructured methods of controlling subjectivity. This control is processed through the manipulation of knowledge, the conditioning of behaviors, the autocratic appropriation of production and consumption processes of material and intellectual goods, etc.

Keywords

• colonization of being/knowing
• reproduction of knowledge/power
• education
• decolonial thinking/decolonization