Rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to Ansell and colleagues
URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa102004
DOI: 10.11143/fennia.102004
Reflections
Rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination
of the future – commentary to Ansell and colleagues
TATEK ABEBE AND TANU BISWAS
Abebe, T. & Biswas, T. (2021) Rights in education: outlines for a decolonial,
childist reimagination of the future – commentary to Ansell and colleagues.
Fennia 199(1) 118–128. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102004
In this piece, we reflect upon a recent article published in Fennia by Ansell
and colleagues. We identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational
research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and
subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in
education. Rights in education foreground the intrinsic value of learning,
inviting us to realign the purpose of education with the overall purpose of
life on this planet. It pursues a ‘bottom-up’ strategy for rethinking education
as community formation to incorporate complex sources of knowledge
and modes of knowing and becoming for children. In order to think about
rights in education, we uphold an analytical distinction between schooling
and education. The distinction enables us to raise some questions, reflect
on them and suggest preliminary ideas for decolonial, childist strategies to
envisage education, highlighting how education and the ‘future’ are
intimately woven and exploring what they mean for each other and for
childhood. We do so particularly by critiquing ‘western schooling’ as a
mode of learning which is a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted in
philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss.
Finally, we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial,
childist lens of reimagining education as community formation and
welcome further discussions on rights in education.
Keywords: rights in education, childhood, future, decoloniality, childism,
community formation
Tatek Abebe (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3811-0486), Department of
Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Paviljong A, Dragvoll Loholt Alle 7049 Trondheim, Norway.
E-mail: tatek.abebe@ntnu.no
Tanu Biswas (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4498-8703), Department of
Philosophy, University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstr. 30, 95447 Bayreuth,
Germany. E-mail: biswas.tanushree@gmail.com
© 2021 by the author. This open access article is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
119Tatek Abebe & Tanu BiswasFENNIA 199(1) (2021)
Introduction
The article by Ansell and colleagues (2020), on which this commentary is based, demonstrates how
schooling in rural peripheries of the global south perversely engages ‘aspiration’ only to generate
paradoxical outcomes for children and young people. One of these paradoxes is that whereas
schooling is a privileged practice through which new social possibilities and futures can be imagined,
it works as a hegemonic institution that shapes and often stifles creativity and ethical-moral
alternatives. A second paradox is that although education is considered a basic human right, it is
realized by making schooling an obligation that children cannot easily refuse. Nor is what children
learn in schools something that is co-developed in ways that attends to their needs and subjectivities.
Another paradox is that the task of educating future citizens in a common institutional framework
is understood as means to equalize social and economic differences. Yet, ongoing processes of
privatizing and commodifying education contributes to a reality in which schooling increases social
and economic inequalities not only of the present generation but also for the future. A further
paradox is the discrepancy between the (opportunity) cost of educating children in schools,
especially for low-income families and communities such as those in Laos, India and Lesotho;
and the insecurity and uncertainties — and sometimes ‘disjuncture’— about children's educational
outcomes and successes.
Ansell and colleagues (2020) ask the important questions as to why, despite these paradoxes,
schooling is invested upon and remains overloaded with economic, moral and economic expectations
and hopes. Which processes sustain schooling as a social investment and as a privileged model of
education for children in the rural peripheries of the global south? How and why the conditions of
exclusion from the global economy and production of surplus populations continue to be facilitated
by the project of schooling? The articles’ theorization on how schooling produces subjects who are
alienated from their communities’ ways of life and livelihoods draws attention to what other, possibly
relevant, knowledge systems are ‘out there’ that are not part of schooling, and consequently remain
unacknowledged as education. Global agendas on Education for All (EFA) and United Nations
development goals like Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) that have re-scripted the purpose of education globally, pressure nations and their citizens to
align themselves with a template of western schooling that is presumed to work everywhere. Schooling
is a mode of learning deeply rooted in and historically resonating with western colonial culture and
practices of knowledge transmission, contributing to the ‘exclusion’ of a vast range of knowledge
systems and traditions. The point with this critique is that the tendency to formalize or standardize
that which is otherwise informal, or ‘the everyday,’ has failed children and young people in many
social and cultural contexts of the global south. At the same time, as some of the most privileged
school-children in the world are now going on school strikes for climate justice – asking whether the
time they spend in school is pointless in the face of the planetary crisis – we begin to question whether
this model serves children in the global north too.
In this reflection piece, we build on these concerns of appropriate, relevant, and contextual
learning for the future. We uphold the significance of activating debates around rights in education
and facilitating a re-engagement with complex knowledge systems that are otherwise marginal or
are excluded from mainstream knowledge economy. We do so by embracing powerful impulses
from decolonial proponents and engaging with the education as community formation using the
childist lens. Our reflection begins by considering schooling through a critical decolonial lens which
is not limited to the global south and concerns a north-south continuum. We then discuss the
potential of the rights in education framework in challenging global knowledge orders that privilege
schooling as a singular form of ‘education’ based on the supremacy of ‘white scientific knowledge’.
That takes us to making a case for broadening pathways to rely on pluralist indigenous philo-
sophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future. Finally, we discuss education as community
formation in recognizing that in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies we risk embracing
a regressive ideal of education that reinforces adult-child hierarchies. In conclusion, we propose
four preliminary strategies and welcome engagement from stakeholders within the promising
framework of rights in education.
120 FENNIA 199(1) (2021)Reflections
Schooling through the decolonial lens of global epistemic (in-)justice
The valorization of schooling as an educational practice superior to other ways of knowing and
learning reflects the unequal power relations that engender the paradoxes of schooling. In recent
years, the notion of cultural imperialism has been invoked as a warning that knowledge and practices
of international development (including global development goals and EFA initiatives) are, in fact,
historically specific to the western world and do not necessarily reflect the realities of children
elsewhere. Postcolonial scholars have proposed the term ‘epistemological violence’ to highlight
hegemonic cultural interpretations of scientific knowledge that construct the ‘Other’ as problematic or
inferior, with implicit or explicit negative consequences for the ‘Other’ (Teo 2008; Mbembe 2016). As
Serpell (2018) argues, the institutionalized public systems of schooling that draw on competitive,
capitalist values not only promote an extractive definition of success but also inflict violence by
stigmatizing unschooled children as ‘incomplete’ and ‘incompetent’. Schoolchildren who are
intellectually competent by indigenous cultural criteria but did not meet the official criteria for
progression to the next grade often attribute their educational ‘failure’ to personal shortcomings
(ibid.). Santos (2014) argues further that the struggle for social justice today needs to move beyond
addressing political and economic inequalities to also attend to ‘cognitive justice’ or ‘epistemic justice’.
He notes that much of the knowledge produced in colonized and post-colonized societies has been
incorporated into the mainstream school knowledge economy only marginally. Contemporary
schooling renders certain types of knowledge invisible, unlearned, silenced, ignored, or made
irrelevant. This failure to include the knowledge systems of certain communities and societies or
perceiving their knowledge as “pagan, mystic, non-scientific” – “epistemicide” (Santos 2014, 30)— is a
pervasive problem that represents the depoliticisation of knowledge and learning itself.
Schooling propels childhood to an imagined future, viewing children as ‘embodiments of the future’
and a site of social investment (Kjørholt 2013). Yet, the significance of schooling and what it teaches
children is also nested in the culture and history of society. Arguably, western schooling produces
future workers who are servants of capitalism regardless of where in the world they are schooled. As
Ansell and colleagues (2020) systematically show with comparative examples from Laos, Lesotho and
India, schooling in the global south particularly produces subjects who are in many ways a “surplus
population” that is not necessary for the global capitalist economy or as Katz (2011, 58) puts it –
subjects who are rendered a “waste”. The future-working-child is meant to be schooled, but not
educated so that she can be deployed into labor whenever needed. However, she is often dismissed
and replaced or sits idle, hoping for fitting opportunities to arise that match her ever-increasing
aspirations. This reality has crystalized in the world-wide problem of schooled unemployed youth who
scramble for precarious jobs (Jeffery 2005; Jeffrey et al. 2010; Clemens & Biswas 2019). Research also
shows how schooling alienates children from rural futures and the physical environment, contributing
to a decline in their skills for resource conservation and environmental management (Abebe 2020;
Biswas & Sharma forthcoming). This is not only because children have limited access to land as they
come of age, but they are also learning about land in a socio-historical context that is characterized by
rapid population growth, land-grabbing, deforestation, and environmental degradation.
The destruction of the physical environment heightens young people's sense of displacement from
the future. Katz (2004) argues that this displacement is a consequence of rural communities’ insertion
into the capitalist system that erodes existing patterns of social reproduction. Thus, children learn
farming or herding, but they have no land on which to do it, or they attend school long enough to
learn skills that are inappropriate for non-agricultural employment (ibid). Yet, as Ansell and colleagues
(2020) show, schooling also stimulates unattainable aspirations and what Durham (2017) calls “elusive
adulthoods”. The problem of schooled unemployment and elusive adulthoods whereby young people
struggle to achieve their socio-economic aspirations are interlinked with the ‘academization of
education’. Schooling represents the academicization of education – a reductive practice that
contributes to the ‘narrowing’ of knowledge (also see Biesta 2015; Fitzsimons 2002). In other words,
we find that schooling abstracts societal knowledge in ways that disconnects learners from local
realities. This abstraction of knowledge, in turn, contributes to the narrowing of complex knowledge
systems that cannot be ‘scholarized’.
121Tatek Abebe & Tanu BiswasFENNIA 199(1) (2021)
We argue that schooling is inherently a western epistemological project in which Eurocentric
systems of thought are imposed upon and expected to presumably alter, ‘tame’ or ‘civilize’ the
subaltern and her ways of existing. We are particularly agitated by the pluralistic modes of knowing,
doing, and becoming that have been erased and continue to be erased by the universal promotion of
mass schooling under the pretext of fulfilling a ‘right to education’ which, in fact, concerns only the
‘right to schooling’. We mourn the alternative futures of childhoods that have been irrecoverably
displaced due to the ‘ideal white pupil’ model and, as a result, the various meaningful versions of
childhoods that have not been envisioned in both the global south and the global north. Drawing
upon critical comparative insights provided by Ansell and colleagues (2020) and our respective
scholarships on education and childhood over the past years, we find that schooling has contributed
to taking children out of community forming economies globally. This involves not only spatio-
temporal standardization of community life but also of childhood and children’s time so that their task
is re-scripted to become only participation in institutionalized public schooling. Yet, the incompatibility
of the school calendar with communal agricultural work cycles engenders the ways compulsory
schooling, for example, renders children – who must be absent from classes for sustaining the local
economy of coffee production in Ethiopia – as being problematic, ‘delinquents’ and ‘truants’ (Abebe
2011, 2015). Nieuwenhuys (1994) similarly argues that formal education led Indian children’s life to be
more burdensome as it did not relieve them from contributing to familial livelihoods but instead was
added on top of those activities. These paradoxes imply the economic and cultural significance of
childhood to society and reimagination of what meaningful education for children could be, invoking
ideas of rights in education.
Rights in education
We are interested in how communities strategize and push back against the supremacy of ‘white
scientific knowledge’ and the privileging of schooling as a singular form of ‘education’. That is to say,
the ways young people and their communities fight for rights ‘in’ education and not just right ‘for’
education. Rights in education evokes questions that not only challenge the global knowledge order
but also inscriptions of new practices through the mediums of resistance/revolution/activism so as to
re-politicize knowledge and re-introduce it in the debates around epistemic justice.
The ruptures in social reproduction require solutions in the projects of development and schooling
by reorienting educational institutions as sites for reimagining learning. Given that promises of
education for a better future are not met, it is time to rethink education outside the neoliberal
paradigm and delink schooling from market-driven requirements of the capitalist economy (Ansell et
al. 2020). A similar impulse comes from young climate activists from some of the most privileged
welfare states in the world; young activists for whom neither the right to schooling, nor future income
appears to be under threat. Despite their materially privileged positions they choose to go on school
strike and question the hours demanded of them in school, because the current fossil-fueled
neoliberal economy puts the future right to life for them and future generations into threat. Their
indirect challenge to economic priorities of their governments, too, persuades us to move away from
the discourse of rights ‘to’ education to instead inscribing rights ‘in’ education. Rights in education
activates an onto-epistemological politics that attaches intrinsic value to life and realigns the purpose
of education with the overall purpose of sustaining life on the planet. Unlike the right to education,
which is about access, rights in education attend to the basic social, economic, cultural and gendered
needs and subjectivities of learners as part of community formation processes. It draws attention to
alternative strategies of intergenerational sharing of knowledge which seem to be neglected in the
age-segregated context of schooling. Rights in education proposes to define schooling curricula
upward by including educational goals such as social justice, citizenship, diversity, values, learning in
a global context, and sustainable development (Wu & Geo-Jaja 2016). This ‘bottom-up’ approach to
create the content of curriculum is indispensable because it opens a space to contest what constitutes
knowledge and addresses the enduring legacy of colonialism that haunts schooling in the global
south. It also helps to locate learning at the heart of a decolonial approach to reach the possibility of
non-Eurocentric modes of education. Yet, given that the overheated planetary crisis that will continue
122 FENNIA 199(1) (2021)Reflections
to confront the lifespans of the authors and readers of this text, and those lifespans that go beyond
ours, there are additional touchstones of how a childist, decolonial analysis of rights in education
should unfold in our view.
The unprecedented case (Earth Justice 2019) filed by a transnational collective of 16 young climate
activists including Greta Thunberg under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
(UNCRC), asserts that the climate crisis is a children’s rights crisis in so far as high carbon-emitting
economic policies are violating the rights guaranteed to children by the UNCRC, for example the right
to life, health and prioritizing the best interest principle. Complementary to this (and similar climate
litigation cases filed by legal minors across the world) are courageous acts of non-violent civil
disobedience, organised globally under the umbrella of the Fridays for Future movement, which
appeal to profound pedagogical concerns that are directly linked to the rights of the future generation,
environmental sustainability and post-colonial global inequity, for example by asking, “Why study for
a future if there is no future?” (Biswas & Mattheis 2021). Their question not only evokes the crisis of
existentialism heightened by a capitalist system that is under the verge of collapse, but also the
childist dimension of deep interdependence (e.g. Joseffson & Wall 2020) and communities of care.
Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s advocacy for education that resonates with girls’
aspirations is another example of how young people are performing an educational task for their
communities that ‘adultist’ educational structures of instrumental schooling fail to do. Given these
and other struggles for climate justice and educational justice (e.g. Elaw 2017; EAUC 2020; Climate
Case Chart 2020); it is time to recognize the inseparable question of childhood and education,
acknowledging children as future-makers seriously (Spyrou 2020) and considering how to enable
their role in education for community formation.
Moving with the ‘relational ontological turn’ in critical childhood studies (Spyrou 2018; Spyrou et al.
2019) we understand ‘education’ as essentially an intergenerational relationship (see also Hoveid &
Hoveid 2019). While education involves an intergenerational transfer of knowledge, values, and skills,
we find that it also needs to be a reciprocal and co-generational process in order to enable younger
generations to be active parts of community formation. By co-generational, we refer to a childist
understanding of educational relationality that moves away from the hierarchy of adults as teachers
and children as learners to instead fostering horizontal educational practices, with children and adults
as co-learners. For example, by opening up to the philosophical richness that awaits adults if they
participate in children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests (Biswas 2020) or the courageous ways
of socio-political civic engagement that adult citizens can learn from young activists who choose to go
on school strike to fight for intergenerational climate justice, despite the harsh adultist reactions they
must face (Biswas & Mattheis forthcoming) or in a broader socio-political sense involving questions of
right to stay put (Aitken 2018) and how city governance could be directly realized with children’s
participation and perspectives (Sundhall 2017).
There is also a need for a shift from looking at intergenerational learning within families to harness
the potential for extrafamilial places of intergenerational encounters as sites of learning (Mannion
2018). A relational view on rights in education focuses on intergenerational dimensions of learning in
interrelated contexts and spheres of life. It includes learning that takes place, yes, in schools and
playgrounds, lecture theaters, and within school buildings but also with peers or siblings ‘at home’,
on-line (in virtual spaces) and, most intriguingly, through embodied mobilities (in cars, on trains, and
while walking, climbing, and playing) (Abebe & Waters 2017). Yet, there is a sense that learning, in
part, depends upon involvement in various activities: while herding, farming the fields, trading in the
marketplace, or at weddings and festivities and funerals. Rights in education also entails problem-
solving and transformative education which are predicated on designing programs nested in
progressive ideas of learning for the future. It foregrounds intergenerational dimensions of socio-
material practice and learning, including in issues such as children’s rights and participation, and in
wider society as it faces ecological and other challenges (Mannion 2018, 314). While such a view of
the intertwined question of education and childhood strongly resonates with the relational ontological
turn in critical childhood studies, the childist lens particularly demands that the adult-as-teacher and
child-as-learner hierarchy does not reproduce itself while ‘putting the child back’ into processes of
community formation.
123Tatek Abebe & Tanu BiswasFENNIA 199(1) (2021)
Making a case for pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education
Rights in education engenders the revitalization of indigenous knowledge and educational features
that were rendered meaningless by colonial and neoliberal conditions. It calls forth the imagining of
an inclusive education that is responsive to the subjectivities, contexts, and needs of multiple
generations, addressing such questions as what education as community formation implies. Our
engagement with questions of rights in education not only bring to light issues of resistance to an
unproblematized acceptance of school curriculum but also the need re-politicize knowledge, schooling,
and learning in order to reintroduce them in the debates on educational justice as part of a larger
global concern with epistemic (in)justice. On a pragmatic level this includes acknowledging the
pedagogical significance and reactivating practices such as multilingualism, musical performance, and
ways of transmitting collective memories like rituals, oral history, folklore, dance, art, handicrafts,
proverbs, poetry, drama as well as architectures and technology that reflect the histories, cultures,
and identities of pre-colonial societies (Tedla 1995). On a philosophical level, this includes confronting
the history of philosophical racism that has also seeped into philosophical commitments that underlie
what constitutes ‘being educated’ and ‘being knowledgeable’ across the globe today. In our view, a
way of confronting this history is by broadening scholarly and social pathways to rely on pluralist
indigenous philosophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future.
An example of a pluralist indigenous philosophy that embeds interdependent existence and can be
helpful to understand how rights in education, childhood and the future are intertwined is Ubuntu.
Ubuntu represents the worldviews of indigenous black populations of Sub-Saharan Africa, transmitted
from generation to generation through observation, experience, language, and art. The widely
acknowledged maxim ‘I am who I am because of who we all are’ indicates that a pluralistic relationality
is at the core of what it means to be a human being. The worldview of Ubuntu reveals that “what happens
to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the
individual” (Mbiti 1969, 106). Ubuntu is about socialization, that is, how one would not know how to
think, walk, speak, or behave unless s/he has learned it from others. At the same time, it is also about
the spiritual dimensions of how a person needs other human beings to be human (Tutu 2004, 25).
Ubuntu relationality is pluralistic as it is not about ‘I am ...because you are’ but rather ‘I am ...because WE
are’. Ubuntu suggests that – like every member of the family and community – children develop
personhood through social interactions, which means that they must “prize communal and harmonious
relationships with others” (Metz 2016, 324). This emphasis on the community over the individual does
not reject the individual but acknowledges that the two are co-creators, interdependent, and mutually
sustaining (see Chilisa 2020). This implies that adults also realize their personhood through relationships
with children, making room for a co-generational understanding of education for sustainable futures.
The philosophy of Ubuntu is consistent with the ideals of education for sustainable futures in so far
as it emphasizes values of interconnectedness, including interpersonal values (regards for others);
intrapersonal value (regard for self) and environmental values (regard for the environment) (Maphala
2017). We find that it serves a pertinent role to help us grasp pluralistic relationalities, human-nature
interaction and sustainable co-generational futures. Serpell and Adamson-Holley (2017) further invite
us to think about how the African traditional practice of assigning social responsibility to children from
an early age is highly compatible with contemporary goals (if not practices) of education elsewhere.
Their argument is that African societies prime children to learn about sustainability and interdependence:
knowledge about agriculture, environment, nutrition, sibling care and so on are not only part of learning
and socialization that school curricula overlook but also necessary for cultivating social responsibility
and peaceful coexistence. In calling for educational reforms, one ‘bottom-up’, ‘active learning’
educational strategy they found to be productive is what they call the ‘child-to-child approach’ (Serpell
& Adamson-Holley 2017). These forms of knowledge and strategies of learning push us into a space
outside the binding strictures of the classroom as well as adults as educators.
Yet, in arguing for education that reflects local and indigenous knowledge systems one needs to be
careful in how one advocates instilling pride in ‘local’ traditions, which can very quickly escalate to
large scale nationalisms. Sometimes such traditions need to be challenged in order to promote
progressive social change, to redress the intersectional, hierarchical relations between classes,
124 FENNIA 199(1) (2021)Reflections
genders and generations, exclusive injustices towards ethnic minorities, the differently casted and
abled, and to resolve conflict between ethnic and religious groups. In other words, we recognize the
philosophical value of Ubuntu for a decolonial, childist approach to global education, but we exercise
caution in so far as we do not automatically favor ‘local pride’. This is not the least because all forms
of knowledge are in some ways ‘local’ but shared across space and over time.
Another example of an extra-familial site of decolonial learning is education in spiritual contexts.
By spiritual learning, we imply the connection of humans with nature as well as a metaphysical
appreciation of the significance of traditions and affirmation of all life as a powerful, culturally
motivating force. What it means to be an educated person or a critical learning subject in spiritual
settings differs from how the dominant western model of schooling views the child as a ‘tabula-rasa’
learner. Across sub-Saharan Africa (as in most parts of the world), for example, western style schooling
replaced diverse forms of education that emphasize spirituality – and religious education as well.
Schooling in sub-Saharan Africa is practiced as an antipode to, not alongside with, religious learning
such as Qur’anic education, which traditionally were the main sources of knowledge, literacy skills,
and ethos of life for children as community members. Such forms of education are based on different
understanding of the purpose and goals of life, which include education, how to be critical learner as
well as the meaning of children and childhood. Islamic educational practices view children as a divine
gift to be honored as part of the spiritual practices of adults too. In the age-old educational practices
of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the child is viewed as spiritually endowed and as possessing
capacities that in certain ways exceed those of adults. The ‘Rinponche children’ of the Tibetan Buddhist
traditions (e.g., the Dalai Lama as a child) are similarly viewed as having onto-epistemological capacities
that exceed those of most adults. In addition to how children may be viewed, another defining
dimension of spiritual contexts is the relationship between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’. While
‘western schooling’ limits the value of inanimate objects to their usefulness for human beings,
indigenous worldviews understand life and resulting human-nature relationality in a wider sense.
Such views are not limited to the African or Asian continent but are also found, for example, in the
indigenous Sami spirituality of Northern Scandinavia too (Bunikowski 2015). Yet, doing away with
spirituality as part of the ‘western’ secularization project instigates educational structures that
chronically compromise on spiritual sensibilities that allow children to navigate the social, moral and
emotional landscapes of their societies throughout their lifespans. We view this as a ‘global
epistemological loss’ which is not restricted to societies in the global south like those that Ansell and
colleagues (2020) have studied. This is an important and often overlooked point; because spiritual
learning is not just integral to children’s wellbeing and well becoming but it also enables them to
develop meaningful and satisfying lives and fit constructively into their societies. Article 27 of the
UNCRC is particularly relevant here as it explicitly recognizes the role of spiritual development not
only in the realization of children’s ‘full potential’ and to flourish as human beings but also as integral
to an ‘adequate standard of living’. We often witness child rights advocates (who seem to rely on the
‘ideal white pupil’ imagination) drawing attention to the cultural reasons why children’s rights to
education are not fulfilled or the political economic and material deprivation that hinders effective
learning in schools. However, what is neglected is how children realize rights in education and develop
reciprocal and meaningful lives, as well as find happiness within a supportive community of educators
outside formal schools, including in spiritual contexts (Bourdillon 2014).
With the above examples we demonstrate that it is necessary to make in-roads into pluralist
indigenous philosophies of childhood and education by tapping into non-colonial histories and use
historical knowledges as inertia to move forward progressively. The examples reveal the significance
of the past in the present, invoking the notion of Sankofa – a West African (Akan) concept that means
‘to go back and fetch’ – lending interpretation for why history matters and its contemporaneity in the
present-day lives and experiences of childhoods (Tedla 1995). Having said that, the challenge for a
childist decolonial engagement remains that, in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies and
revitalization of the ‘global epistemological loss’ which is a direct consequence of colonialism; one
does not succumb to a regressive, adult-centric intergenerational ideal of education. What then could
be some progressive decolonial childist strategies to re-imagine education as community formation
that takes children as future-makers seriously?
125Tatek Abebe & Tanu BiswasFENNIA 199(1) (2021)
Reimagining education as community formation
Ansell and colleagues’ (2020) critique of schooling and the manipulation of aspiration that disappoint
today’s generation of children and the wider society has ushered us to reflect upon the issue of ‘what
beyond’ school systems globally. Their comparative empirical insights presented have been impulses
for us to connect ideas about educational philosophies, childhood, and the future as well as reimagine
education that attends to the question of generational segregation. We think that the unjust crisis
highlighted should not be tackled as solely a ‘global south’ issue but must be considered as part of a
north-south continuum. The critique of schooling that is implicit in the climate protests of privileged
children in the global north in conjunction with the dysfunctional implementations of the ‘right to
education’ in the global south led us to discuss ‘schooling’ through the decolonial lens of epistemic
injustice. The resulting global epistemological loss of various pluralistic indigenous philosophies that
could have guided educational practices is related to the upkeep of ‘an ideal white school child’ whose
present time is systematically claimed in the name of an education for a future that deters her from
negotiating that future. Rights in education, seems to be a promising framework for further
engagement for decolonial responses. However, we remain alert that proceeding on a decolonial note
that simultaneously minimises adult-child power hierarchies is a key hurdle in reimagining education
as community formation. In this concluding section, we lay out four preliminary strategies of moving
forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation.
The first strategy is restructuring and reclaiming the spatio-temporality of global childhoods. Since
schooling and its conspirator – capitalism – ejected children out of community forming economies by
separating social reproduction from that of economic production (e.g. Katz 2004), there is a need to
reclaim the space and time of childhood to develop children’s situated learning by facilitating their
participation in familial and community livelihoods. This appears to be too obvious a point to make
but it is an indispensable one. For example, learning through laboring-with-others is an integral part
of children’s identity and gives value to what it means to be a child in diverse socio-cultural contexts
of the global south. It increases children’s learning experiences through observation, the contribution
of material value so vital to the sustenance of life as well as the transference of complexly valued and
valuable skills that are rendered useless through schooling. This realization further persuades us to
consciously partake in the decolonial project by imagining education that does not take children out
of community forming economies. However, such practices need to be situated not only in the project
of relevant and useful education but also in the re-conceptualization of intergenerational education
as a co-generational exercise.
The second strategy is altering the global economic and political structures, including moving away
from capitalism as the modus operandi for which schooling is in service. As Ansell and colleagues
(2020) highlight, without schooling the capitalist system that creams off profit from the precarious
labor market would not exist. This implies that the strategies of education for the future cannot be
separated from delinking schooling from capitalism as well as the wider political and economic
structures of neoliberalism. This strategy also requires models of education that disengage from
western ideologies of international development that equate schooling with education. Among other
possibilities, such model should be realized with pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and
education because they offer very rich spiritual understandings of the meaning of life as well as
human-nature relationships. We also call for reimagination of education and learning beyond its
curriculum to incorporate a temporal dimension knowledge sharing/transmission in which, for
example, ancestral knowledge and philosophies such as Ubuntu are linked with the knowledge and
philosophies of the ancestors that the present generation will become. In other words, a reimagination
of children’s education and futures to unfold not in a linear sequence but rather as an interlocking of
pasts, presents, and futures or in which past and future resonate in the present.
The third strategy is to make existing institutions and educational systems work. This can be
achieved, for example, through cultivating educational practices for multiple generations and fostering
intergenerational learning encounters in familial and community settings. In the global south, this
might entail connecting more fully with aspects of learning that are situated in everyday livelihoods in
which multiple generations take part. Apprentice education can be one platform for intergenerational
126 FENNIA 199(1) (2021)Reflections
relating and learning. However, it requires systematic planning and adequate political will and economic
investment to facilitate its efficacy in transferring skills and knowledge across generations. In the global
north, the existing institutional settings of kindergartens and old homes can be used as intergenerational
learning sites where education and care for children and aging populations are combined. Such
intergenerational learning centers can potentially facilitate reciprocal learning and co-generational
care for early childhood and old age, enhancing the reality of generational interdependence.
Finally, whereas there are aspects of education that can be adapted to local realities; we need to
rethink the inseparable imaginations of childhood and education afresh, and address questions that
engender rights in education for the future, in both the global south and the global north. Promoting
rights in education for community formation is entwined with questions of educational policies and
practice. In tandem with fostering co-generational learning, there can be, for example, development
of policies for non-formal education where children actively acquire skills alongside other generations
outside schools. National educational policies could support shared community conceptions of a
good life that are culturally enriching and morally and ethically justifiable. They could also promote
diverse forms of education devised with children so that their learning is geared towards and is
responsive to the wider cultural, socio-economic and political changes within their societies and
beyond. The important role of language in schools and other contexts of education and in preparing
children and young people to deal with transient livelihoods cannot be overemphasized.
We propose these outlines to invite future discussions and debates on rights in education by
stakeholders of education including governments, international development actors, communities,
families as well as children and young people in different spatial scales and contexts.
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