Learning with the Past: Racism, Education and Reparative Futures

Abstract

This paper sets out to show the importance of historical thinking for futures-oriented policy in education. The future has become a site of intervention, a profoundly significant theatre of human action. Whilst all past authorities have in some sense attempted to plan for the future – to realise unbridled opportunities or sidestep catastrophic changes – the ‘Age of Internationalism’ born in 1945 marked a distinctive turn towards coordinated and highly technocratic futures-thinking on a global scale. The Bretton Woods Institutions and the newly-minted UN agencies in particular were mandated to steer the future of human welfare globally – addressing, for example, disease and ill-health (WHO), acute hunger and agriculture poverty (FAO) unemployment and economic hardship (ILO) and the long-term educational needs of children and society (UNESCO). Today, as we face another global emergency, one that threatens the entire edifice of the post-War international order, collective projects of long-term planning must, we argue, learn from past future-making efforts. In this paper we investigate an earlier attempt to steer the future: UNESCO’s ambitious programme in the immediate post-War years to identify and install through education a universal humanism. Education – understood as a set of institutional policies and practices but also as an arena in which social and psychological theories are contested – is by definition a future-oriented activity; it shapes how people – often children and young people – prepare for and relate to what is to come. In this sense, imagined futures already ‘act’ upon the present through education. Efforts to manage, make and even ‘use’ the future through education reveal a great deal about its politics of knowledge: how educational problems are framed; what voices and institutions are presented as authorities; and what alternatives or ‘disobedient’ futures of education are undermined, dismissed or erased. UNESCO’s early search for a ‘new’ universal humanism remained constrained by racialized discourses precisely because of a knowledge-politics that closed down the emancipatory potential of reckoning with the past in the present. An historical lens, we suggest, can help understand the knowledge-politics of current futures-oriented policy in education, particularly to address the ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ that uphold systems of racial domination. As such, we submit that past futures can be a critical tool for futures-thinking in education. First, we show how history is not merely ‘background context’, rather, it has a constitutive force – past choices shape ‘possible’, ‘probable’, and ‘preferred’ educational futures. This is to say, the future of education is never outside of history. Second, history helps train our attention on the contingencies of the future – how the future has always been struggled over, and at critical junctures multiple visions of the future compete for a hearing. Indeed, history focuses our attention on the concentrations and mechanisms of power that made particular past visions of the future gain momentum and achieve dominance. Thirdly, history opens up a space for thinking about how educational futures can be reparative; how past injustices can be recognised, addressed and repaired through critical pedagogical practices. The possibilities for reparative futures, we argue, must be made central to global discussions on the futures of education. Learning from the past – and from past struggles over the future – is a key way in which education can be held open as a mode of critique. This is crucial if the future of education is to be democratic rather than delegated or predetermined.