Keywords

The body of scholarship on the intersections of education and culture has branched into multiple subfields in education studies. The move away from cultural deficit models, which on one hand blame low achievement on students’ culture and on the other on the problematization of Eurocentric approaches, has brought new approaches to the fore that consider the question of differences, especially as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, language, and religion. This chapter offers an overview of current discussions and discourses on cultural sensitivity, multiculturalism, and interculturality in education before focusing on the significant parallel development of decolonization.

Education as a practice and academic discipline has universal application. Knowing, thinking, learning, teaching, and studying have occurred in myriad ways and settings over time and across geographies, sharing much in common. The human lifespan itself is biologically organized for progressive learning that appears to diminish surprisingly slowly with age. A multitude of learning practices has been designed for all ages; in addition to primary, secondary, and tertiary education, the notion of lifelong learning has received growing attention. At the same time, education is no longer viewed as a neutral activity that can be replicated universally. Despite their commonalities, the ways in which educational activities are configured, expressed, and theorized differ. In its most bureaucratic form, education remains enmeshed in cultural practices, even if they have been rendered invisible. The rise of mass schooling in the modern era, closely connected to the ascendancy of Western countries and market economies, has prescribed education as a key index of civilization, development, and democracy. Having emerged from Enlightenment ideas, modernity has conceived of education in universal terms with some variation while centering on certain modes of thinking (empiricism), as well as values and goals (individualism, secularism). Modernization policies have implemented these goals by way of mass education as state directives with support or in contention with the global doctrines issued by Western-based multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and UNESCO. However, contestations around the cultural content of educational policies occur at all levels, from ministries of education to classrooms. Education simultaneously remains a vehicle for reproducing culture as well as a site of resistance to hegemony. Teachers and students remain important actors in reinterpreting curriculum and questioning the efficacy of policies. Consensus on the normative claims of Western education collapsed long ago, and alternatives from the global South and minoritized groups in the metropole have been on the rise since the era of decolonization. Like other academic disciplines, the field of education in the metropole was slow to acknowledge this shift in thinking but has moved to the forefront today thanks in large part to indigenous scholars (McKinley & Smith, 2019; Smith et al., 2018; Watahomigie & McCarty, 1994).

Liberalism: Cultural Sensitivity, Multiculturalism, Interculturality

A longue durée view with respect to decolonizing perspectives, drawing chiefly on Césaire, Dussel, Fanon, and Wallerstein, provides depth for understanding the context of educational debates around culture. A centuries-long evolution  saw elite tutelage give way to mass schooling; the liberal arts curriculum of classical Western education, based on the trivium and quadrium, expanded and diversified to include more subjects aimed at the broader section of the population in working-class occupational structures. As a key arena of the modern state’s interface with its citizens, education has been a crucial force in cultural reproduction and hegemony. Groups that have been historically marginalized in society (i.e., women, working classes, and ethnic minorities) have also sought access to and representation in public education while pressing for inclusion and the transformation of educational paradigms. Contestation of power in the political order echoes in the social sphere as a site of struggle for recognition.

With regard to religious values, the rise of the modern nation-state (at least since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), and the Enlightenment, as well as the liberal political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Marxist revolutions, and state-led planning in the socialist bloc have promoted secularism as a central value of the West. With the post-Enlightenment divergence of reason and belief, the role of the church gradually diminished and was replaced with state power. The church-state separation confined religion to a severely limited sphere in terms of political power, while the state’s expansion into social and private life effectively replaced the authority of religion, particularly in regard to intellectual production as clerical authority shifted to university-trained experts. In the late modern era, educational discourses have retained a secularist outlook while making culturally appropriate adaptations that take into consideration a plurality of groups and recognize complexities derived from colonial histories and economic imbalances rooted in unequal power relations. International mandates for development as the ideology of modernization in the postwar era have sought to make more efficient rational bureaucracy located at the state and regional levels while designing a social order receptive to Western political and economic interests. Eventually, the tendency to assign more value to local culture has been aided by technological advances after trending toward decentralization in development policy. Today, cultural competence and respect for indigenous knowledge and heritage are key features of development models, but are not without their share of critics suspicious of modernizing agendas from above.

In Western countries, liberal approaches to the relationship of education and culture are premised on tolerance and strive toward inclusion as a key policy. Cultural sensitivity, multiculturalism, and interculturality seek to level the playing field or create a place at the table, as is said in the language of inclusion. In other words, such policies welcome historically excluded or marginalized groups on an ostensibly equal basis. Cultural sensitivity aims to heighten awareness of differences and neutralize intolerant behaviors in curricula and educational settings. Used primarily in the education of nurses, counsellors, and service industries, as well as in private enterprise that relies on clients’ trust, cultural sensitivity boils down to effective communication and the implementation of policies that take into consideration cultural differences.

Multiculturalism is an umbrella term for policies that dispense with overt Western (Euro-American/white supremacist) assumptions and engage different cultures in turn; this is seen in the recognition of heroes and holidays at one end of the spectrum, and state support for autonomous culturalist organizations at the other. Multiculturalism seeks to integrate long established minorities and recently arrived refugees and migrants into the social, economic, and political order. Its logic of assimilation without imposing uniformity is seen as an antidote to social problems related to alienation and poverty as well as to segregation and separatism. Inclusion policies have also created a backlash from conservative groups that valorize the heritage of the majority, into which they insist ethnic minorities should be enculturated.

Interculturality has a theological background and practices direct engagement through dialogue based on the impetus to learn about the “other” and to forge mutual recognition around commonalities and differences. Due to its missionary origins, intercultural dialogue arouses suspicion of an ulterior motive of religious conversion. In the case of the first two approaches (i.e., cultural sensitivity and multiculturalism), criticism has been aimed at the framework in which inclusive practices are situated. The overarching structure is rarely called into question; rather, previously excluded groups are integrated into the existing order on presumably equal footing. The problem, however, is that the normative frame of secular liberalism does not challenge the roots of inequality and systemic racism. Instead, one has a seat at the table without any food, to paraphrase Malcolm X (1992, p. 97). Aside from psychological or symbolic effects, material deprivation has not been addressed adequately, let alone been ameliorated. The liberal project has lofty ideals and humanist values, but limited resources of critique as it is invested in a set of ideas that fundamentally privileges Western understanding and history. Particular notions of the individual, mind–body duality, materialism, empiricism, and other implicit assumptions filter into codified methodologies. In this respect, acceptance of difference occurs on a qualified basis. With invisible boundaries one must not cross, the politics and policies of tolerance only extend so far.

Another issue concerning multiculturalism is its definition of cultures as static rather than fluid, mutable, and nonessentialist. As a corrective, interculturality focuses on interaction instead of multiculturalism’s approach of co-existence. Interculturality, which has competed with multiculturalism since the 1980s, also identifies a different dynamic (Coulby, 2006, pp. 246–247). Proponents of multiculturalism offer a diagnosis, while those of interculturality offer a cure (Aman, 2017, p. 3). Some have stressed coexistence to represent living side by side rather than a deeper engagement: living with versus living in (Antonsich, 2016, p. 470). Others, however, have not detected any significant differences between the two approaches (Meer & Modood, 2012).

As a policy, multiculturalism fell from favor in a number of contexts, sparking predictable backlash from the right and criticism from the left. Perhaps no better example is found than the experience of the United Kingdom, which has become bitterly disunited over matters of cultural policy, immigration, religion, and education. In the 1990s, the Greater London Council implemented a policy of multiculturalism to offer institutional support to ethnic organizations. Since the 2000s, Muslims have also come under attack for immigration policies and multiculturalism gone wrong. Some of the responses to recent waves of immigration, including from Eastern Europe, have included the rise and mainstreaming of the far right, a governmental Hostile Environment policy meant to instill fear in immigrants, the Windrush scandal that threatened Afro-Caribbeans long resident in Britain with deportation, and the ongoing Brexit imbroglio. Of course, all of this cannot be laid at the feet of multiculturalism. Yet the reaction to cultural diversity has moved the national discussion to the right, wherein groups on the extremes of public debate have moved into the mainstream. In light of these developments, the shift of messaging from multiculturalism to interculturalism may have had an evasive aspect in jettisoning the old term and its associated baggage. The institutionalization of multiculturalism also led to a shift from solidarity across minoritized groups, once identified by the collective political label as “Black,” against a common enemy of racism to an archipelago of identities often competing for attention and resources. The late Ambalavaner Sivanandan of London’s Institute of Race Relations and other activists and academics also lamented the new approach as a postmodern surrender to capital. They argued that working-class struggle and ethnic solidarity remain the most important strands of identity with which to forge “communities of resistance.” Multicultural policies emblematic of Tony Blair’s New Labour led to “navel-gazing” identity politics (Sivanandan, 1990, p. 28). While warning of proto-fascism and the racism inherent in the conception of Fortress Europe, the left critique of multiculturalism did not predict the extent of the reaction to Muslim immigration in the following decades. While the left critiqued the policy, its stakeholders did balkanize to an extent, with minority groups pursuing agendas independently of one another. Coalition politics never vanished, however, and efforts to defeat the extreme right (English Defense League, Nigel Farage, and the Brexit Party) have breathed new life into activism at all levels.

The experiments of the 1980s and 1990s came to an end with the upheavals of the new millennium. With the War on Terror, the new liberalism focused on the issue of integration (i.e., assimilation into dominant society) to the extent of banning visible characteristics of Muslim culture in the case of hyper-secularist nations like France. Proponents of Islamophobia have converged into a powerful, well-financed network that privately monitors and vilifies Muslim groups and individuals, while the state’s surveillance apparatuses have also exercised coercive programs like Prevent (from the UK Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015), in which educators are required to report suspicious Muslim students to the government. Widespread concerns exist that such policies weaken free speech in the classroom, and more generally civil liberties and due process. In the United States, the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act have enabled the US military to detain citizens indefinitely without trial on the basis of secret evidence, effectively overriding 800 years of legal history. With the election of Donald Trump in the US, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction on the part of the establishment to support judicial independence and civil rights, which again united liberal, moderate, and traditional conservatives alike against the new popular rightist tendency.

The charge that multiculturalism leads to an illiberalism fundamentally incompatible with democratic order is usually furnished by a set of tropes, of Muslims immigrants speaking native languages only in “no-go” areas, where the hijab is worn, students attend madrasas, many mosques are found, halal restaurants abound, and the community supports terrorism to the extent of sending recruits to participate in jihad. In this scenario of multiculturalism gone wrong, the redundant Sharia law is right around the corner just past the kebab shop, and not far behind an Islamic state is viewed as the end game of immigration. In such projections, multiculturalism thus enables a fifth column by which Muslims are colonizing European countries; this has been proclaimed without irony or reference to the actual conquests, colonization, or military interventions that have historically driven migration. The appropriation of policies on pluralist tolerance for an illiberal agenda has had little bearing on reality; based on majoritarian discrimination, minorities actually face barriers to participation in many social arenas, including education.

Critiques of liberal and illiberal multiculturalism have advanced progressive perspectives that center on human rights, gender, and social equality and wish to make substantive changes to structural inequality. More radical approaches that oppose capitalist models of development or even the notion of development itself have also gained momentum (see Arturo Escobar, 2011; Lakshman Yapa, 1996). Renewed research into indigenous models have built upon the ideas of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon in taking a decolonizing approach to the problem of colonial difference as it relates to education.

Eurocentrism and Decolonization

Discourses around education and culture have evolved from the era of brute conquest and destruction of knowledge, archives, arts, and appropriation of culture and transfer of heritage to civilizing mission and the subsequent imperatives of development and democratization. On the surface, these modernization narratives emerge from humanitarian justifications for intervention and increasingly recognize individual human rights and collective self-determination. At the same time, practices that marked the formation of modernity have also continued, understood once as neocolonialism and more recently with some additional nuance as “coloniality of power.” The global designs that accompanied colonization are intertwined to the extent that modernization and colonization are indistinguishable to the subjects of colonialism in what is today called the global South. Thus, initial calls for independence from direct or indirect colonial rule have also sought dramatic change in the spheres of economy and education. With national independence, many schools and universities have continued to replicate a European model, even while striving to create a new nationalist culture in sync with the modernizing drive.

Within Western societies, the presence of ethnic minorities, particularly those groups that have experienced displacement from their ancestral lands as indigenous people or as a coerced labor force, remains a paradox for the state. Based on myths of progress and equality, the practice of extermination and exclusion has yielded to the expectation that minorities assimilate into the dominant order. However, these groups often face severe discrimination from the same bodies that require them to integrate into society. The modernity narratives of settler colonial states (Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, USA) provide justification for conquest while also disguising histories of the expropriation of land and resources, as well as exploitation of labor and culture, inhibiting the understanding of minority and majority alike.

Challenges to colonial practices and their associated narratives have been issued since their inception and have gained increasing force as global norms are called into question. Insurrections and social movements have challenged both the unequal dynamics of power as well as representations of marginalized groups. In the arena of education, ethnic groups have demanded control over schooling to teach history and culture, creating a new self-image and forging solidarity to change society. Steven Biko, student leader and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement in apartheid South Africa, stated that “the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiongo explained the rationale for writing in Kikuyu, arguing for Swahili as the lingua franca for Africa as opposed to French, English, or any other European language. Pioneering interventions such as these have gained force in the ensuing decades. In the United States, students successfully mobilized to demand ethnic studies in 1969, a struggle that continues today as K-12 schools and universities implement this curricular reform. From South Africa the Rhodes Must Fall student movement has spread globally and morphed into Fees Must Fall, pressing for decolonization of universities and state-subsidized tuition while changing the configuration of the cultural landscape. Of late, social movements in Western countries, made up largely of university and high school students, have also led the charge against overt racism and its symbols, calling for decolonization and an end to structural racism.

Islam, Culture, and Education

Multiculturalism draws attention to the histories of communities, while interculturality and cultural sensitivity respectively stress interreligious and interpersonal dynamics. As an example of a cultural paradigm of education, Muslim schools has been a source of intense debate in a number of contexts, chiefly for unsettling norms of modernity. The majority of Muslim pupils remain in public education in most countries; however, a parallel madrasa system largely depends on endowments (waqf, awqaf), local membership, and state support. In spite of the attention to Pakistani madrasas, only 0.3%–7.8% of students attend. At one time as a measure to promote girls’ education, madaris in Pakistan received USAID and World Bank funding. Policies since the military interventions in the Muslim world after 9/11 have focused on madrasas as a “breeding ground for radicalization” (Sas et al., 2020, p. 6). The introduction of the madrasa system or variants of it into Western contexts provokes anxieties about the limits of cultural pluralism. Islamic education is often viewed as a foreign, antimodern culture in Western (European and North American) contexts, while being regarded as a living tradition that has been localized throughout the Afroasiatic world. Over a wide expanse of the globe, Islam has provided a robust foundation for organizing formal and informal education in numerous arrangements, including variations of the halaqa, maktab, madrasa, university, and hawza. Muslim educationists assert that Islam since its inception as a coherent theological and cultural system has valued learning for all, particularly through the written word. It has the reputation of a rich textual tradition (Hirschler, 2011), mass literacy (Wagner, 1993), female education (Sayeed, 2013; Bano, 2017), translation movements (Gutas, 2012), endowed colleges (Makdisi, 1981), revival of science (Huff, 2017), and intellectual rebirth in Europe that, somewhat ironically, prefigured the concepts of modernity (Makdisi, 1990). In modern times the return to the sources of the Qur’an and Sunnah have been used as a blueprint for fomenting resistance to both colonial rule and postcolonial regimes, and for indigenizing education. The multifarious attempts to accomplish these aims have sometimes meant conflict between Western and Islamic education; however, it has often been the graduates of Western universities that have gravitated toward Islamic thought as an ideology.

With regard to advanced learning, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the foremost experiment in creating a new society, culture, and educational values based on particular scriptural readings and historical experience of Islamic scholarship. A focal point of resistance to the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979), the teaching establishment in Qom (hawza-yi ‘ilmiyya) continues to specialize in Islamic law as well as numerous fields in the traditional disciplines. Since the Iranian Revolution a significant expansion of colleges and institutes and an increase in enrollments have been seen; it made an impact on the international stage, with Islam becoming increasingly integrated with governmental authority to an unprecedented degree. Also closely aligned with the state is Al-Azhar in Cairo, which has long been the most prestigious center of learning in the Sunni Muslim world despite the challenges from the reformist approach of Medina, Saudi Arabia. Hybrid institutions such as Islamic universities seek the best of both worlds by integrating traditional religious learning alongside conventional approaches to the disciplines using a modern arrangement. The Islamization of Knowledge project has established universities and institutes in Malaysia, Pakistan, and the United States (Abaza, 2002). The post-secular revival in Turkey has seen the proliferation of religious schools and organizations dedicated to Islamic instruction like Diyanet and other foundations that have been remarkably successful.

The search for new models or third ways has led a variety of actors (clerics, politicians, scholars, activists, missionaries, students) to posit religious belief as a comprehensive ideology that offers rejoinders to agnosticism and atheism. The global resurgence of Islam serves as an alternative to secular liberalism, ethnic nationalism, scientific materialism, and traditional conservatism. The process of seeking truth that is involved in embracing faith can be understood as an educational activity unto itself. Promoting varieties of Islam such as Salafism, Shi’ism, and Sufism, proselytizing individuals and entities compete for adherents and spur debates on the nature and scope of interpretation and enculturation. If Islamic orientations toward culture are attached to the Qur’an, hadith and scholarly tradition, then to what extent one reinterprets these sources also depends on the overall goals. For Arkoun (2002), Kadivar (2008), Madjid (1994), Soroush (2002), and Ṭāha (1987) and others, modernist approaches borrow heavily from Western thinkers. The approach of decolonization also imports categories from the Western experience, albeit non-European sources such as ethnic studies, and brings them into conversation with Islamic ideas. Thus “Islamic feminism,” a recurring theme in progressive and decolonial interventions, provokes epistemological questions of practice regarding Westernization from the left side of the political spectrum. The argument that feminism is intrinsic to Islamic theology shifts the onus from acquiring a new orientation based on external influence to rereading sources for a new understanding of endemic traditions.

While not a serious competitor with public schools in many Western countries, Islamic education is thought to pose a challenge to the normative secular orthodoxy. However, Muslim schools have been incorporated into a semi-private network through faith-based initiatives within the mainstream that redirects public resources by way of charter schools, vouchers, and other neoliberal reforms in state education that promote school choice. From this angle, Muslim schools might serve as less of a force for Islamization than that of privatization. Meanwhile, in conventional state schools (e.g., in the United Kingdom), accommodations for religious attire and the provision of halal meals and facilities for prayer have made education accessible to Muslims and thus modified school culture if not the content and delivery of curriculum. At the tertiary level as well, one can take courses in Islamic studies and attend university as an observant Muslim, participating in Muslim student unions or other organizations. The integration of Muslims into mainstream institutions marks an evolution in societies toward accommodating differences without necessarily addressing inequality in the communities from which they hail. Tatari (2009) used a dynamic compound framework to explain the state accommodation of Muslims that draw on several theories such as resource mobilization and political opportunity structure theory.

The questioning of nation-states and the inter-state system as colonial impositions to divide and conquer with lasting ethnic divisions has led to the formulation of “border crossing” as a political, cultural, and disciplinary practice (Anzaldúa, 1987, pp. 10–13). Traversing the border subverts the fixed territorialities of colonial projects. Because culture cannot be confined to a nation-state, the frame of diaspora provides another way to explore how people maintain connections to a homeland, while recreating and hybridizing culture from the vantage point of their dispersal. Moreover, South-South linkages decenter Western hegemony and remove the hegemonic power as authority and arbiter.

The decolonial turn in education has yielded incisive studies on curriculum, pedagogy, and literacy (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010; McLaren, 2000; Paraskeva, 2016). Looking from afar has brought nuance to concepts such as interculturalidad, “to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary” in the Bolivia of Evo Morales and the grassroots movement that elected him (Aman, 2017, p. 12). That decolonial concepts emerged in the Caribbean and Latin America provides a rationale for “creolization” of theory, a fusion of ideas grounded in experience that uses “new methods and noncanonical interpretations” (Gordon & Roberts, 2014, p. 3). A locus of critique beyond the metropole has facilitated paradigm shifts that depart from Eurocentric models. While intercultural approaches privilege dialogue on the basis of equality of cultures, the rediscovery of precolonial ways of education has problematized multiculturalism and highlighted epistemic decolonization. These scholars and practitioners question narratives of modernity, the Enlightenment, and progress in both the capitalist West and the socialist East, seeking a “third way” that does not reinforce categories borne of European experience. In this way the periphery produces knowledge of the center. It is imperative too that the cart does not come before the horse; in other words, traditions that have withstood the colonial onslaught and survived into the present should not be reduced to a unidimensional framework of decolonization in which one size fits all.

Conclusion

Theorizing the intersection of education and culture has implications for all aspects of organized education, including curriculum, learning, pedagogy, administration, and policy. In spite of modernizing tendencies, education itself is not a neutral practice, but a cultural form embedded in sociocultural practices, languages, histories, and power relations. As with ideology, culture shapes systems at multiple levels rather than operating as a discrete variable. Like teachers in the classroom, actors within educational systems require a self-reflective ethos to meet contemporary challenges, paying particular attention to the ways in which schools reproduce inequality. While some ideologies have taken an instrumentalist view of culture that identifies it as superstructure, neoliberal policies have leveraged the idea that cultural models possess an internal dynamic of its own, which can be employed in strategies of privatization.

Returning to its etymology, culture conveys cultivation and is closely related to education and refinement. Classical liberalism offers a broad framework that aims to provide a balanced curriculum extolling virtues of understanding, reason, and tolerance as exemplified in the liberal arts. It remains the enduring approach to education and is based on assimilating difference by way of understanding into existing frameworks. However, in spite of recognition of minoritized groups, dominant frameworks tend to preserve established historical narratives of progress and order and thereby the grounds for perpetuating inequality. Challenging the myths of the majority, minorities voice uncomfortable truths by presenting counternarratives to that of the nation-state. A range of responses to such challenges include reinforcement of the dominant view by rejecting other voices (cultural backlash) or by establishing autonomous spaces for their expression (multiculturalism). The approach of interculturality offers relief from essentialist or primordial accounts of culture that on one hand may reject Eurocentric universalism or alternatively the contribution of minorities, including indigenous people whose societies prefigured the establishment of the modern state. Another approach currently riding a wave of popularity is found in the decolonial turn that has reframed debates, asserting coloniality to be the underside of modernity. Situating conceptual modernity in the age of the Iberian conquest of the Americas, rather than during the Enlightenment, contextualizes epistemic violence as the condition of possibility in the Western intellectual tradition, as well as the many responses to it. It raises the issue of epistemology (i.e., knowledge, theory, and methodology) and attempts to recover cultures of resistance to colonialism and coloniality without falling into nativism or primitivism. A new generation of scholars, educators, and activists has promoted decolonization in education by highlighting third (African, Arab, Asian, Islamic, Latin American) and fourth (indigenous, Pacific Islander) ways that yield new theoretical and practical engagements by questioning culture and education. In response to decolonial critiques, proponents of multiculturalism, interculturality, and cultural sensitivity are reinventing liberal discourses. More widely, public pressure to address legacies of colonialism and racism in educational organizations, theories, and methods has held forth the promise of reassessing conceptualizations of culture in future policy and research agendas.