Abstract
By conducting a Foucaultian genealogy of formal schooling in the islands, this chapter intends to demonstrate two things: first, how the narrative of schooling as an ahistorical and acontextualized phenomenon in Micronesia has been normalized in the popular histories of education in the region; and second, that a history of the present demonstrates the urgency of the operationalization of colonizing processes currently at work in an age of the so-call postcolonial through the institution of school. While the literature continues to claim that educational reforms to contemporary schooling “problems” are to be found in the past, often through a search for the “origin” of school, this chapter employs a Deleuzean analysis of series and event, arguing that in fact the school system currently in place in the islands is in fact not a product of long-ago colonization, but rather of a radical shift in US aims and strategies at work beginning with the ostensible “Solomon Report” commissioned by the Kennedy administration in 1963 and implemented by the exportation of Johnson’s Great Society programs to the region in the latter 1960s. This shift is in turn marked by increased American control of economic and social programs in the islands while at the same time the US was purportedly readying the area for political independence and self-determination.
“We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche 1874/1997
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Notes
- 1.
PREL served as the contractor for the Pacific Regional Educational Laboratory since 1990; in January 2012 it lost its bid for renewed funding ($24 million over 5 years) to Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) based out of Denver, Colorado, which operates a Pacific service center in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.
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Kupferman, D.W. (2013). Atolls and Origins: A Genealogy of Schooling in Micronesia. In: Disassembling and Decolonizing School in the Pacific. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4673-2_3
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