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136: Intersecting Coloniality, Youth Autonomy, and Adult Supremacy w/ Drs. Tanu Biswas & Toby Rollo
18 Plays1 year ago
Today we’re joined by Drs. Tanu Biswas and Toby Rollo. Tanu is an interdisciplinary philosopher of education, focused on challenging children’s historical marginalization. She serves as an advisory board member of The Childism Institute at Rutgers, and is an associate professor of pedagogy at the University of Stavanger and an associate researcher at the Doctoral College for Intersectionality Studies at the University of Bayreuth.
Toby is an associate professor of political science at Lakehead University, whose focus is on the democratic promises and failures of modern institutions with a specific focus on the marginalization of young people. His chapter in the recent work, Trust Kids!: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, edited by carla bergman, focuses on centering the child in our ongoing intergenerational fight for peace, justice, and sustainability in our world.
In our discussion, we'll be talking about the connections between colonization, historical marginalization, youth rights, and adultism.
Guests
Drs. Tanu Biswas & Toby Rollo
Resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our podcast.
00:00:14
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the Progressive Education Nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:19
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Jenny Lucas, Peter Kratz, and Kristen Evelyn.
00:00:26
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Connecting with Human Restoration Project
00:00:28
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Meet the Experts: Drs. Tanu Biswas and Toby Rolo
00:00:35
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Drs.
00:00:37
Speaker
Tanu Biswas and Toby Rolo.
00:00:39
Speaker
Tanu is an international, interdisciplinary philosopher of education focused on challenging children's historical marginalization.
00:00:46
Speaker
She serves as an advisory board member of the Childism Institute at Rutgers and is an associate professor of pedagogy at the University of Stavanger and an associate researcher at the doctoral college for intersectionality studies at the University of Bayreuth.
00:01:00
Speaker
Toby is an associate professor of political science at Lakehead University, whose focus is on the democratic promises and failures of modern institutions, with a specific focus on the marginalization of young people.
00:01:11
Speaker
His chapter in the recent work, Trust Kids Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, which is edited by Carla Bergman, focuses on centering the child in our ongoing intergenerational fight for peace, justice, and sustainability in our world.
00:01:25
Speaker
So thank you both for joining me today.
00:01:27
Speaker
I'm glad that you're here.
Key Discussion Topics Overview
00:01:28
Speaker
And, you know, in this discussion, I figured we just talked about the connections between colonization, historical marginalization, youth rights, childism, adultism, all of these different spheres that you're working with.
00:01:39
Speaker
But before we start diving into the weeds and talking about that further, Toby, if you could just talk a bit about those key terms that we're talking about here, what's that connection between colonization, adultism and the like?
00:01:51
Speaker
Right.
Understanding Colonialism's Ongoing Impact
00:01:52
Speaker
So, um,
00:01:54
Speaker
Colonialism is often thought of as a historical period, the sort of historical period of colonialism, where the European powers went around the world and made claims to lands and territories and peoples.
00:02:09
Speaker
And that eventually colonialism gave way to an era of post-colonialism where we're sort of after colonialism,
00:02:19
Speaker
the colonial period and now in a period of liberation and emancipation from colonial trappings.
00:02:27
Speaker
But what theorists and historians and those who work in these areas
00:02:34
Speaker
try to emphasize that colonialism is an ongoing project, that it isn't an historical epoch, but more a ongoing process, and that anybody who sort of lives in the New World, especially the Americas or Australia, New Zealand, is still very much engaged, or at least part of, or living in the context of a colonial project.
Colonial Views on Children and Marginalized Groups
00:03:01
Speaker
Colonial projects are about making claims to land,
00:03:04
Speaker
and making claims to peoples and in order to exploit the lands and the peoples to divert wealth and prestige and to mostly European powers.
00:03:22
Speaker
There is a sort of
00:03:24
Speaker
researchers also like to point to not just the practices of colonialism, but the idea of coloniality, which is kind of the ideology or set of ideas, set of beliefs that sustain and inform colonial practices, sort of the rationales and justifications for colonial colonialism.
00:03:47
Speaker
that justify colonial projects.
00:03:50
Speaker
And it's important to understand this because even when it appears that a colonial period, the colonial period is over or a colonial project is coming to an end, coloniality, the logic of relationships between human beings that gives rise to colonialism,
00:04:05
Speaker
is still very much at play.
00:04:07
Speaker
And so peoples of color, indigenous and black, black and indigenous peoples throughout the world are still often dealing with the legacy of coloniality, the relationships, even after the project itself, even after the Western power has left, and the African nation, for instance, has liberated itself, there's still, coloniality is still very much inflected in laws and the politics and even the social norms.
Developmental Psychology and Colonial Perceptions
00:04:34
Speaker
I think for me, the relationship between coloniality and adultism, I've learned so much from Toby's work.
00:04:44
Speaker
And I mean, it's influenced me a lot and like seeing this connection where essentially, I mean, one is, you know, human beings who are defined as children or, you know, occupy, let's say, the structure called childhood.
00:04:58
Speaker
But on the other hand, the imagination of, you know, what is a child, that figure has been very, very, you know, almost like fundamental or, you know, key to colonizing, like the logic of colonizing, because, you know, the indigenous people of color and groups that have been colonized were seen as children.
00:05:26
Speaker
and they were seen as not developed.
00:05:28
Speaker
There's this developmental logic that one finds, let's say, in psychology that is practiced even today, defining childhood.
00:05:40
Speaker
So if you take a very classic, like Jean Piaget's developmental stages and what's supposed to happen and the evolution of childhood,
00:05:50
Speaker
growing from child to adult and that there's a developed stage.
00:05:55
Speaker
And then if you look at developmentalism as a place that is not yet developed, but there's another place that is developed and then somehow has the right or is legitimized in raising this developing place to a more civilized state.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so it's very interesting parallels there.
00:06:17
Speaker
And what's fascinating is, you know, in, let's say, like, Enlightenment philosophers like Kant, Immanuel Kant, his philosophy of education is based on the idea that, and he's referring to white children.
00:06:35
Speaker
So, like, white children...
00:06:37
Speaker
have to be disciplined and, you know, civilized.
00:06:41
Speaker
And then he writes, otherwise they will remain like inhabitants of Tahiti, you know, like all lifelong and things like this.
00:06:49
Speaker
And for me, like when I was reading this and also learning from what Toby has been writing,
00:06:57
Speaker
What was interesting to see is, okay, you know, one thing is what you think of, you know, others who are like not white, male, European, and are not fitting into everything that was supposed to be the educated state, the developed state.
00:07:13
Speaker
But the other fascinating thing in a warped way is, you know, what would you think of your own children?
00:07:20
Speaker
You know, like, what is the image of like white children, you
00:07:24
Speaker
And it almost seems like that is the metaphor and like the imagination of what's happening in those human states is being projected onto indigenous, you know, like non-European peoples.
00:07:37
Speaker
And this expands the understanding of coloniality.
00:07:44
Speaker
So not as the period, you know, that Toby explained now,
00:07:49
Speaker
But the mentality, the rationale, you know, and which is still going on.
00:07:55
Speaker
So we see that adultism, I mean, it's much broader than what is, than, let's say, people who are defined as children.
00:08:05
Speaker
Of course, it applies to them as well.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I'm sure we're going to talk more about that.
00:08:11
Speaker
I think what's interesting is to talk about how coloniality, adultism are intersecting and manifesting itself in both broad, I guess, federal or state ways versus also how it's also impacting the daily lives of kids, both from the scope of rising authoritarianism and how that's also connected to coloniality and how that's impacting kids.
Colonial Logic in Child Labor and Authoritarianism
00:08:36
Speaker
I think about
00:08:36
Speaker
The child labor laws ostensibly being put back into place after that was not a thing for what about a hundred years, all the way to the daily lived experience of kids in school and the ways that coloniality and adultism shape the curriculum, how teachers and kids interact, et cetera.
00:08:55
Speaker
Can we start by talking about authoritarianism in general, labor laws, but you also have the restriction and intersectionality here between LGBTQIA kids, black and brown and indigenous kids, and folks who are being doubly impacted both by the culture war facing people of various identities and historically marginalized identities, but also the fact that they're kids as well, which have been historically marginalized for many years.
00:09:20
Speaker
Well, I think it's interesting that the
00:09:24
Speaker
The colonial logic, coloniality itself is like, as Tenu was pointing out, is the child seems to be at the center of it because one of the colonialism requires in order for it to operate a kind of rationale or justification for the exclusion of peoples from decision making, first of all, and then the exploitation of those peoples for labor or what have you.
00:09:55
Speaker
In order to do that, you need a convincing category or a convincing hierarchy, natural hierarchy that you can apply to human beings that will relegate some to a lesser order or a lesser status.
00:10:10
Speaker
And one of the most influential and one that we can trace back as far as we have recorded history is the subordination of children to adults.
00:10:22
Speaker
And so one of the most prolific and influential and powerful, culturally powerful, in the West at least, tropes of natural subjugation and natural subordination is that of the child to the adult.
00:10:40
Speaker
And so this allows Europe to basically exploit its own children.
00:10:46
Speaker
And so we see this in the British Industrial Revolution, of course, right?
00:10:49
Speaker
We have
00:10:50
Speaker
factories populated with children.
00:10:53
Speaker
But even before that, going back to through a series of agricultural revolutions, right, we have archaeological and historical evidence that children were key to those revolutions as well, right, going back to the Neolithic period.
00:11:07
Speaker
And so those revolutions are the ones that are responsible for Western civilization itself.
00:11:12
Speaker
And so in a very real sense, Western civilization was built on the backs of, in part, of laboring children.
00:11:20
Speaker
And the West had to rationalize this somehow.
00:11:23
Speaker
And that was that they were either, you know, in the ancient world, it was because they couldn't be virtuous, right?
00:11:29
Speaker
Because they didn't have an experience or character to be virtuous.
00:11:32
Speaker
So they couldn't be included as citizens.
00:11:34
Speaker
And so the only thing they're good for is labor, right?
00:11:37
Speaker
And they have to be disciplined into becoming virtuous, because they're just full of vice.
00:11:42
Speaker
And then in the sort of medieval Christian period, this becomes piety and faith.
00:11:46
Speaker
They're
00:11:47
Speaker
The doctrine of original sin positions children as inherently sinful and incapable of acting piously, capable of faith, and they have to be disciplined into becoming faithful.
00:12:02
Speaker
And while that's going on, what are they good for?
00:12:05
Speaker
They're good as servants, right?
00:12:06
Speaker
And so children operate as servants in Western culture throughout the medieval period as well.
00:12:11
Speaker
Then comes the enlightenment, and now the sort of logic of exclusion is rationality.
00:12:18
Speaker
Children are irrational, and so they're lawless, and they have to be disciplined.
00:12:23
Speaker
And once you discipline them, then they become fully human adults.
00:12:28
Speaker
And meanwhile, they're only good for labor, right?
00:12:31
Speaker
That's about all they're really good for.
00:12:35
Speaker
So we have this historical subordination of children.
00:12:37
Speaker
So it's really no surprise that European nations seem particularly prone to forms of political authoritarianism, where the dictator is basically positioned as the father of a nation and
00:13:03
Speaker
It has to use discipline and violence sometimes in order to usher this nation into a new, mature civilization.
00:13:10
Speaker
It's the same sort of logic behind that subordinates children to adults that we find in form and colonial practices that we find in authoritarianism.
00:13:20
Speaker
And this is precisely what the Jewish scholars who escaped, who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and escaped to the U.S.,
00:13:29
Speaker
This is precisely what the warning that they gave us in the post-war period was that, look, German culture had this really strict, coercive, and often violent way of dealing with children.
00:13:44
Speaker
And they used a psychoanalytic method that's problematic, but
00:13:48
Speaker
I mean, you don't need to use psychoanalysis to come to the same sort of conclusion that the developmental psychology or just psychology in general.
00:13:57
Speaker
This is a sort of fertile breeding ground for authoritarian personalities and people who are attracted to this kind of
00:14:03
Speaker
domineering father figure who's going to like take care of them and sometimes discipline them, but that's what's morally necessary in order to make them into mature peoples.
00:14:13
Speaker
And those German Jewish scholars that came to America found the same, did their same sort of studies here or there in the United States and discovered the same propensities among American citizens toward fascism.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so they gave this warning and that's where we get the counter.
00:14:30
Speaker
They, in the post-war period,
00:14:33
Speaker
inform the counterculture movement.
00:14:34
Speaker
They inform a lot of the free and democratic schools that emerge.
00:14:38
Speaker
Educators and psychologists were paying attention to these, the warnings these Jewish scholars gave and also civil rights and women's liberation.
00:14:50
Speaker
And at the time, gay and lesbian liberation.
00:14:54
Speaker
That gave rise to, of course, a conservative backlash in the 1980s, which is still with us today.
00:15:00
Speaker
And now we see this sort of predictable...
Critical Theory's Backlash and Educational Influence
00:15:06
Speaker
attack on these Jewish scholars who escaped Nazi Germany because they were part of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, right?
00:15:14
Speaker
So now we see the big sort of scare tactic in public discourse in these reactionary circles is to sort of point to critical theory and especially critical race theory as having a degrading influence on American culture and politics.
00:15:32
Speaker
So they're very much connected.
00:15:34
Speaker
the systems of Western civilization and curriculum and schooling leading to this default mode of interpretation of who kids are and what they're capable of and how we treat kids generally.
00:15:48
Speaker
Like Western canon, we have Lord of the Flies, which practically every kid reads, which ostensibly says that kids, if left to their own devices, are going to end up, they're going to start killing each other.
00:15:59
Speaker
Which, of course, as people that have followed up on that story have recognized that
00:16:03
Speaker
the actual kids when they found these kids and they talked to kids about what it was like living on this island when they were discovered they ended up being cooperative and contributed to each other and they all you know they were actually good people I just think about the ways at which people as they read these stories and consume media about the myth of the child and who they are and the myth of human beings and their natural nature the way that they would rationalize treating people terribly knowing that
00:16:33
Speaker
you know, that's how they might end up.
00:16:35
Speaker
I wonder if we could briefly tease apart child development.
Amazonian Children's Skills and Developmental Views
00:16:40
Speaker
So living, learning, being a kid versus the subjugation of children and the ways that those are contributing to each other.
00:16:49
Speaker
Because I'm sure folks that might be listening in
00:16:51
Speaker
hear all of this, but then they're also saying like, well, kids are still kids though.
00:16:55
Speaker
Like they still are developing.
00:16:57
Speaker
They still are trying to figure out who they are.
00:16:59
Speaker
Um, so how do we balance between being that authoritarian figure in the sense of guiding a kid versus being an authoritarian figure?
00:17:07
Speaker
That's like subject eating a kid.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, since you mentioned Lord of the Flies, the very recent case of the children from the Amazonian forest, you know, who survived.
00:17:20
Speaker
This is such an amazing example.
00:17:24
Speaker
And like one has to really like if anyone takes science, you know, like a scientific temper seriously,
00:17:32
Speaker
You have to sit down with that kind of Piaget in developmentalism, you know, which would kind of feed into these imaginations where you go, but kids are kids, you know, they're still like Krenkru.
00:17:42
Speaker
And then take this empirical example of, you know, like four children who had, of course, indigenous, you know, they had indigenous knowledge.
00:17:52
Speaker
of course.
00:17:52
Speaker
And it's not like, you know, out of the blue, they were just surviving in their forest.
00:17:57
Speaker
Of course, it was hard.
00:17:59
Speaker
But there was cooperation.
00:18:00
Speaker
They did, you know, they survived.
00:18:03
Speaker
And they used, you know, everything like from presence of mind to the skills they had to what they had learned.
00:18:11
Speaker
And
00:18:12
Speaker
It's amazing how they manage.
00:18:16
Speaker
And these are the kind of skills that honestly, when I was following this news, I thought of, first of all, let's say if I were in that forest, I was around these children, like I would want to be their groupie and, you know, be like, can you also guide me here?
00:18:36
Speaker
Because I'd be just so lost.
00:18:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:40
Speaker
So it's not, there's nothing natural or, you know, like biological about, you know,
00:18:47
Speaker
a certain capacity, let's say, you know, I mean, and we, we are, we are interdependent creatures, all of us, and we cooperate, we have to, you know, we, we share knowledge, we apply when we're put into certain situations, we, we take what we know, and then we apply it in that situation.
00:19:09
Speaker
And if we don't have certain,
00:19:12
Speaker
We haven't learned certain things.
00:19:13
Speaker
You know, you could be like 25 or 35, but if you're put in a situation where you have no clue, you've never learned, you've never been exposed to that kind of a situation, you won't survive.
00:19:25
Speaker
You know, it's not like...
00:19:28
Speaker
And being alone is whether it's, of course, babies are dependent in different ways.
00:19:33
Speaker
So the group, this Amazonian group, did have an infant in there.
00:19:39
Speaker
And then the 13-year-old, the oldest sister, you know, she sort of was guiding the group and was taking on children.
00:19:47
Speaker
you'd say the parental role, but there was some kind of cooperation going on there.
00:19:54
Speaker
I think essentializing and saying something about children's nature, you know, like they're by nature, they are dependent.
00:20:03
Speaker
This is, it's too big a claim, because you also say something about human nature, you make claims about human nature.
00:20:12
Speaker
And it's totalizing.
00:20:14
Speaker
And I think it's also I wonder if it's scientifically also viable to hold such positions.
00:20:20
Speaker
So this is for people who sit there and think, but, you know, kids will be kids and they're growing up and they still have to learn and so on.
00:20:27
Speaker
But so do we, you know, in different ways.
00:20:33
Speaker
And another thing that also came to me while we were discussing, because you start with school, you know, the child labor laws coming in.
00:20:42
Speaker
And then we talked about authoritarianism and so on.
00:20:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:48
Speaker
There's labor is always involved.
00:20:51
Speaker
I mean, we are all economic beings and we share resources.
00:20:56
Speaker
And, you know, the word economy and ecology have the same root.
00:21:00
Speaker
It's oikos.
00:21:01
Speaker
And it has to do with sharing resources and how we divide also labor, so on and so forth.
00:21:09
Speaker
So what's interesting is the children in school are not seen as doing labor.
Children's Educational Work as Labor
00:21:18
Speaker
You know, I mean, and this is I'm not like I'm in no way supporting the kind of child labor laws that are coming to you as this is not the point.
00:21:26
Speaker
That's really not the point I'm trying to make here.
00:21:29
Speaker
But it's the recognition that work of work, you know, that that when you are in school, it's also labor.
00:21:35
Speaker
You are contributing to economy.
00:21:37
Speaker
So one of the, let's say, very adultist and also colonial moves here is not seeing children as economic beings.
00:21:47
Speaker
So it's not like, you know, you turn 18 and now we're all suddenly economic beings and we're participating, contributing to economy.
00:21:54
Speaker
We're always economic beings, just as much as we're always political beings, you know, so you don't have to understand the full humanity of children is also recognizing our own humanity.
00:22:10
Speaker
And then if we take, for example, feminist,
00:22:13
Speaker
insights into economic theory seriously and say that, you know, there's also something like emotional labor, for example, that also brings a whole different level of understanding into what schooling and education is about, because it is a lot of emotional labor in addition to, you know, physical, intellectual labor.
00:22:36
Speaker
And that's just to also broaden the understanding of what we mean by labor in the first place.
00:22:48
Speaker
You know, because, I mean, children could in some way, I mean, at least be acknowledged and compensated for their work for the economy and compensated, you know, children get grades.
00:23:05
Speaker
That's the compensation, you know, in many ways.
00:23:08
Speaker
And if we as adults got grades for our work, it would not, you know, we wouldn't accept that.
00:23:18
Speaker
It's interesting how the whole labor, the labor, child labor concept and the politics around it now with also, you know, this kind of labor being a certain kind of labor being allowed, but not recognizing that, I mean, children are already working, you know.
00:23:38
Speaker
It makes me think about how economically children are not only not being recognized for their political and economic capacity that they're contributing to in school, but also it's directly working against them.
00:23:51
Speaker
If you're growing up in the States and you're a kid and you want to go to college, it's going to cost you tens upon thousands of dollars.
00:23:59
Speaker
And that's a pre dealt hand.
Financial Burdens on Youth and Society Contributions
00:24:02
Speaker
You almost have to do that.
00:24:04
Speaker
So not only are you not being recognized for your potential to contribute to society in like a monetary sense, but you have to actually pay into it.
00:24:14
Speaker
You're almost pre born with debt in that sense, knowing that you're going to face that.
00:24:19
Speaker
I do want to steer this conversation slightly toward teaching and school.
00:24:25
Speaker
Just to kind of complete or round up that thought, you know, see the parallel with colonialism and coloniality right there.
00:24:33
Speaker
Because those who contributed to building these systems...
00:24:38
Speaker
you know, and contribute to the economy, you know, to get access to it is really hard and it costs, you always, it's almost like you're always paying, you know, in some way or the other.
00:24:49
Speaker
And you never really like get access to what you contribute, you know, to sustaining, to develop.
00:24:57
Speaker
And that's like, again, that's the parallel here, just to come back to this adultism and coloniality.
00:25:03
Speaker
dissection that we talked about.
00:25:06
Speaker
But yeah, let's move on to teachers.
Empowering Youth Against Authoritarian Structures
00:25:09
Speaker
I think that's a perfect segue because, Anu, as you were talking about children as political beings, as economic beings,
00:25:18
Speaker
When we're building a school system that enables young people to push back against these both pre-existing but also kind of newly constructed authoritarian structures, you have both the fact that it's always been authoritarian, especially in school and just generally for kids.
00:25:36
Speaker
But also schools more and more are enacting more carceral policies, more policies that discriminate against children of certain identities.
00:25:45
Speaker
All of these things are very much systemic.
00:25:48
Speaker
They're not just curricular.
00:25:50
Speaker
And it seems to me that if you're an educator and you're looking to change these things up so that we raise a generation of young people that can push back against these things,
00:25:57
Speaker
authoritarian structures that you're going to need to look at systems.
00:26:01
Speaker
You're going to need to look at the ways that you share power with kids.
00:26:04
Speaker
You're going to need to look at ways at which your classroom is constructed, both from the terms of like grading, discipline, and to an extent, the curriculum itself.
00:26:14
Speaker
Our fear has always been that
00:26:17
Speaker
A lot of well-meaning educators in an attempt to enact social justice in their classrooms throw in a few Zen education project or learning for justice curricular pieces that are awesome.
00:26:28
Speaker
They talk about like multiple perspectives.
00:26:30
Speaker
They do a lot of great work.
00:26:32
Speaker
But at the exact same time, children are being graded.
00:26:35
Speaker
They're still going through a carceral discipline system.
00:26:37
Speaker
They still have all of these systems in place that are not recognizing for them for their humanity.
00:26:42
Speaker
So what does that look like for a teacher to look at this body of work, to look at colonialism, to look at adultism, to see that intersection and implement it into a class?
00:26:53
Speaker
Like what is their role in all of this?
00:26:57
Speaker
Well, you know, I think the awareness of one's power in a system is
00:27:08
Speaker
can go a long way.
00:27:09
Speaker
I mean, I think I can't answer questions regarding, you know, how to implement it in class.
00:27:16
Speaker
But I think something in the implementation might, of course, change when you're aware of what this, how you're just positioned in that place of power and
00:27:33
Speaker
there's, you know, you don't, it can be kind of like overwhelming or, you know, these very, I would say, typical reactions of like not wanting to deal with one's privilege or, you know, like not identifying with a system where you are, you know, placed in a privileged position that I think when you look at this coloniality and adultism intersection, that's going to get,
00:28:01
Speaker
even more challenging.
00:28:04
Speaker
But by the same logic, even more rewarding, because there's more clarity, you know, you understand like, even more what that position is all about.
00:28:16
Speaker
And this awareness, I think, is a first step, because
00:28:22
Speaker
just to go back to what I said, for me, when I met Toby's work, his thoughts through what I was reading and understanding that
00:28:35
Speaker
just like how much I had not understood, you know, coloniality or I'd missed a huge part, like big piece of this puzzle.
00:28:46
Speaker
Even though, I mean, I grew up in a, you know, post-colonial country.
00:28:51
Speaker
I grew up in India and I mean, my education is, you know, it's, I would think of myself as kind of, I mean, this is not a great thing to say, but yeah, it is like, you know, one of like how colonial projects get become successful.
00:29:05
Speaker
Because you really like brainwash and westernize generations after generations.
Colonial Mentality's Impact on Education
00:29:13
Speaker
And so there's something that, you know, it broadens my understanding of what that coloniality is about.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then, you know, trying to understand it within the European context.
00:29:25
Speaker
context, linking it with education and so on.
00:29:28
Speaker
And then like really looking at how the adult, you know, is, is, I mean, it's the, the child, the, the figure of the child and all that is associated with it, you know?
00:29:40
Speaker
So you would say that which is emotional or not, not rational, you
00:29:48
Speaker
is free of... So I want to give you an example, not from the US system, but from the Norwegian system, where...
00:29:59
Speaker
I met a couple of educators who were visiting the university to talk about how children, what kind of pedagogies should be encouraged.
00:30:14
Speaker
And they presented a model of the brain.
00:30:19
Speaker
And it was green, red and yellow.
00:30:24
Speaker
Okay.
00:30:25
Speaker
It was literally traffic light divided.
00:30:30
Speaker
And so the top was green, which was the rational.
00:30:34
Speaker
The center was yellow.
00:30:37
Speaker
So that was like the cooperation part, the social part.
00:30:42
Speaker
And the red was like at the base of the brain where it's the emotional part.
00:30:48
Speaker
And the logic there was that when children, especially children who have, you know, are diagnosed with like ADHD or whatever, when they're getting restless, they are moving from green to red.
00:31:01
Speaker
And you have to, you know, bring in movement and, you know, help them to move or give them some activity because then from red, they'll start going back to,
00:31:12
Speaker
yellow and you have to go into the green zone.
00:31:15
Speaker
So you have to bring all the kids to the green zone.
00:31:18
Speaker
And I'm baffled, you know, I'm like, what is going on?
00:31:21
Speaker
And, you know, how is, where is this kind of science?
00:31:27
Speaker
What is this?
00:31:28
Speaker
What is the science?
00:31:29
Speaker
What is this obsession with the brain, first of all, you know, because there's the entire human body, but we're literally getting a picture, a very simplistic picture of
00:31:40
Speaker
of the brain.
00:31:41
Speaker
And the question there is, you know, how do we understand the human?
00:31:45
Speaker
I mean, because it's exactly, and I think this logic, you know more about the US system, Chris, and I don't have things, I guess they're similar where you are too, Toby, where this kind of rational reason, you know, that's really still the, it's at the top of the hierarchy.
00:32:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:07
Speaker
And if the more teachers become aware of this and possibly different logics that support that, it could change, I think, their relationship also with their own emotional states, you know, the red states and the yellow states and the green states.
00:32:25
Speaker
And as a result, yeah, that you see the full humanity, not just
00:32:30
Speaker
of the child, but also yourself.
00:32:33
Speaker
I don't know if that answers the question or Toby, what are your thoughts?
00:32:38
Speaker
There's lots of, yeah, I agree with everything that you said, Tanu.
00:32:42
Speaker
I just like to go back to your question, Chris, about the conceptualizing the child and the adult and like,
00:32:51
Speaker
like how to not have an authoritarian classroom, but acknowledge that children need these specific sets of boundaries and kinds of guidance and things like that.
00:33:04
Speaker
I don't know.
00:33:06
Speaker
I'm a university professor, so I'm not teaching young children, but I have two young children.
00:33:11
Speaker
I was also a child for quite a long time.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:15
Speaker
And I think that one of the most helpful things for me has been to, so much in the same way that with issues of race and gender, long after scientific racism was discredited and the understanding of race as a social construction was established and recognized,
00:33:40
Speaker
Long after that, we still had to deal with race.
00:33:44
Speaker
It didn't pay to pretend that social structures, law, politics, economics weren't influenced by the notion of race, even though we know that race is not a biological fact.
00:33:58
Speaker
It's a construction, right?
00:34:01
Speaker
What we're seeing between the races is simply difference, differences of skin color, differences of height and shape and things like this.
00:34:10
Speaker
Right.
00:34:10
Speaker
And these are just general to there's stereotypes, because even within that, there's greater variance in races than there is between alleged races.
00:34:19
Speaker
And I think one of the something that's been very helpful for me is understanding.
00:34:24
Speaker
the distinction between childhood and adulthood in the same way.
00:34:28
Speaker
What we really have is human beings who have lived different numbers of years, who are always in a state of development until we're no longer alive, are always encountering issues with cognition, challenges to cognition when we're young, when we're middle-aged or adult, and when we're older, right?
00:34:54
Speaker
Many of the classifications of disability are simply just impedances on what we would categorize as normal, that is adult cognitive functioning or intellectual functioning.
00:35:08
Speaker
But what I think helps me as an educator in dealing with students, young people, and dealing as a parent with children, and just as an adult in a world that is populated by a third of it by children,
00:35:23
Speaker
children is to understand that these differences are the categories of child and adult are political categories.
00:35:31
Speaker
They're not biological categories.
00:35:33
Speaker
They're wholly political.
00:35:36
Speaker
Child is a political designation of exclusion, right?
00:35:42
Speaker
A political designation of underdevelopment or potential, right?
00:35:48
Speaker
when applied to anybody else, it's seen as wrong, right?
00:35:54
Speaker
Because people should not be treated as children.
00:35:57
Speaker
And in fact, liberation and emancipation movements typically are predicated on this sort of idea that people shouldn't be treated as children.
Political Nature of Child and Adult Distinctions
00:36:07
Speaker
But unfortunately, this is how insidious coloniality is, is it's kind of duped a lot of movements into buying into the terms
00:36:17
Speaker
so that we have a lot of struggles to become adults, which assume that children ought to be treated like children, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
And that there is a natural category of subordination.
00:36:31
Speaker
It just shouldn't be applied to people who don't live in Europe, or it shouldn't be applied to women.
00:36:37
Speaker
It's appropriately applied to the young, though, right?
00:36:41
Speaker
And I think that a good starting point
00:36:46
Speaker
for thinking about relationships between people who are older and people who are younger is to understand that these are just differences that are politically irrelevant.
00:37:01
Speaker
Now,
00:37:03
Speaker
Much like as with race, we have to accept that they nevertheless structure a lot of our institutions.
00:37:09
Speaker
We have to accept that childhood and adulthood do structure a lot of our institutions.
00:37:13
Speaker
But it's very important to understand that that's a complete fabrication, right?
00:37:17
Speaker
We could organize politics very differently.
00:37:19
Speaker
We could organize economics very differently.
00:37:22
Speaker
Capitalism requires that
00:37:24
Speaker
children either be in the factory or in a school learning how to one day become somebody who works in a factory, right?
00:37:30
Speaker
And in fact, children, part of the reason children were taken out of the factories is because adults were getting fed up competing with children who were driving down wages and stuff.
00:37:41
Speaker
So a lot of socialist movements were like, wanted state schooling, strangely.
00:37:49
Speaker
They loved the idea of a state-run school, but they were sort of...
00:37:54
Speaker
aiming towards a sort of Marxist dissolving of the state, withering of the state, but state schooling was okay.
00:38:00
Speaker
And that's because they wanted to get children out of the factories, driving wages down and taking up jobs that could be for adults.
00:38:07
Speaker
So where do you put them?
00:38:08
Speaker
Well, you put them in schools and you train them to be workers, right?
00:38:13
Speaker
And this is still how our system runs today.
00:38:16
Speaker
It hasn't changed in like 150 years.
00:38:18
Speaker
It's still exactly the same.
00:38:20
Speaker
And we need to be cognizant of that and that our role as teachers or as educators is much like the role of police or military.
00:38:30
Speaker
We're gatekeepers.
00:38:32
Speaker
We're disciplinarians.
00:38:34
Speaker
We're essential to the maintenance of the colonial project.
00:38:39
Speaker
Um, and there's no real, here's the, the pest, the, not the pessimistic, but the sort of the unfortunate part is no real escaping, uh, the being implicated in the project, just as there's no, there's no way of escaping race, right?
00:38:58
Speaker
Race is all around us.
00:38:59
Speaker
And so there's no escaping it.
00:39:01
Speaker
And if you're a business owner, um,
00:39:04
Speaker
You are implicated in the capitalist system.
00:39:06
Speaker
You're implicated in a racial capitalist system.
00:39:09
Speaker
There's not much you can do about it.
00:39:10
Speaker
You do your best.
00:39:11
Speaker
And I think as Tanu pointed out, it's important to just be cognizant of your role and your position and the knowledge that what is separating you from your students isn't a natural difference.
00:39:30
Speaker
It's a political difference.
00:39:32
Speaker
And so whatever you can do in that situation, we're all just trying to do our best to get youth to recognize that that's a political.
00:39:45
Speaker
So when I start my classes at the university level, one of the first things I do is I talk about power and I talk about power in the classroom.
00:39:53
Speaker
And I say, the university has granted me power to tell you how you're going to get your degree.
00:40:00
Speaker
And I'm going to mark your assignments and I'm going to grade you and evaluate you.
00:40:04
Speaker
And I say, this is not the best way to organize an educating, an educative system.
00:40:10
Speaker
This is probably the antithesis, right?
00:40:13
Speaker
But this is what, this is the game we're all playing.
00:40:15
Speaker
You want a degree, you have to get one in order to get a good job, to take care of yourself.
00:40:20
Speaker
Um,
00:40:21
Speaker
I'm a university professor.
00:40:22
Speaker
This is my job.
00:40:23
Speaker
This is what I'm doing.
00:40:24
Speaker
But let's try to, as we're lucky, I get to teach political science.
00:40:28
Speaker
And so power is always the topic of discussion.
00:40:31
Speaker
And so we're always returning to that theme that power is everywhere and it's in the classroom and that the separation between me and them is not that they're developing and I've ceased developing because I've achieved adulthood or something like that.
00:40:47
Speaker
I'm still developing, right?
00:40:49
Speaker
Or not developing, I'm still changing.
00:40:51
Speaker
just changing.
00:40:52
Speaker
You don't need a progressive model here.
00:40:57
Speaker
I'm changing, they're changing.
00:40:59
Speaker
I'm hoping to be changing for the better.
00:41:01
Speaker
I'm hoping that they're changing for the better, but there's no real distinction between us other than the political positions that we've been placed in.
00:41:10
Speaker
That's a fantastic point because it really gets to how colonialism and with it racism, sexism,
00:41:17
Speaker
are intertwined in various practices, both scientifically and how those carry out educationally.
Colonial Roots in Educational Practices
00:41:23
Speaker
Everything from the tracing of the eugenics movement to concepts like standardized testing or carceral discipline practices, ranking and filing of kids, which are almost like a straight line and where those concepts come from.
00:41:39
Speaker
We all live within the shadow of those practices being put into place because practically every school in the world has systems that work like this due to colonialism, neocolonialism, and globalization at large and the growth of a capitalist state that essentially exists everywhere, no matter where you're going.
00:41:57
Speaker
That idea of having a mindset shift in order to start counteracting that, I think makes sense.
00:42:02
Speaker
We just had one of our keynotes at our conference was a student organization called Iowa WTF.
00:42:08
Speaker
And one of the questions that came up in the Q&A for the high school students was, what can teachers do to support you?
00:42:17
Speaker
And the thing that was unanimously agreed upon is the very first thing one of them said was they hated the fact that adults would give them a platform to speak.
00:42:30
Speaker
but then not recognize what they were saying.
00:42:32
Speaker
People would say things like, you know, you were so great at that.
00:42:35
Speaker
I can't believe you were capable of that.
00:42:37
Speaker
Or, you know, that's so amazing that kids doing this.
00:42:40
Speaker
The parallels there to race and gender and all the other types of inequities and how historically that's been used to marginalize people are pretty one-to-one.
00:42:50
Speaker
With that said, as we're dwindling down on time, we're all part of the system.
00:42:55
Speaker
We were just talking about how you can't really escape that system and it requires a mindset shift.
00:42:59
Speaker
What's next?
00:43:02
Speaker
What is the next thing that we're looking at in terms of the research that you are all doing, the things that you're writing about, the ways that people can contribute to start changing these things?
00:43:11
Speaker
What is the next step?
00:43:13
Speaker
I'll be brief.
00:43:14
Speaker
I'm very interested in...
Grassroots Movements and Educational Challenges
00:43:19
Speaker
the ways in which Black and Indigenous communities are taking back the education of their young people
00:43:32
Speaker
And I mean, it started in the 60s and 70s with the Black Liberation Schools and Akwesasne Freedom School.
00:43:40
Speaker
And these and I mean, and Western Western communities tried to do it, too, with their democratic schools and things like that.
00:43:49
Speaker
But there's a lot of like there's a burgeoning like Black homeschooling movement.
00:43:56
Speaker
right?
00:43:57
Speaker
And unschooling movements, which are trying to find ways of
00:44:06
Speaker
creating a space for the young people in their communities and in their lives to navigate without having the trappings of coercive top-down schooling, right?
00:44:21
Speaker
So education without schooling.
00:44:23
Speaker
So I'm really interested in seeing where that goes.
00:44:27
Speaker
And unfortunately, of course, as more people do this sort of thing, there's the, there's those who are like, well, this is going to kill the public school system because if people aren't invested in it, then there's going to be, uh, so there's a whole, I mean, but that's the way the capitalism sort of sets us against each other in a lot of ways.
00:44:44
Speaker
But, um, but I'm really interested in, in seeing where those sort of, uh, grassroots, um, child led forms of, um,
00:44:55
Speaker
home education and community education go.
00:44:59
Speaker
And I mean, we saw a little bit of it with COVID.
00:45:02
Speaker
COVID forced a lot of people's hands and a lot of people just didn't send their kids back into those institutions because
00:45:09
Speaker
They had children with mental health issues and emotional regulation issues with ADHD or autism who thrived when they were put in a different environment that didn't have the demands that regular schooling had of them.
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah, and I think for me –
00:45:29
Speaker
let's say the, you know, the, the transformative side of this being childism, you know, this actually, I didn't explain, explain that
Importance of Childism and Future Research Directions
00:45:39
Speaker
word.
00:45:39
Speaker
We talked about adultism, but maybe your listeners can listen to the other podcast where we talk about childism.
00:45:46
Speaker
But I think for this transformative side and childism in the sense of, you know, like akin to feminism or also decoloniality,
00:45:55
Speaker
So in order for this to happen, I think there has to be a clarity on, you know, what is the problem.
00:46:05
Speaker
And, you know, that's why it's important to look at adultism and especially this intersection of coloniality and adultism.
00:46:13
Speaker
And my...
00:46:16
Speaker
My focus in the next years is to establish this as a research area on its own terms, you know, so because things in classrooms and teachers are also qualified through universities and, you know, these systems.
00:46:38
Speaker
So the work has to happen in several places.
00:46:42
Speaker
So I am interested in
00:46:47
Speaker
developing this research area.
00:46:49
Speaker
And I think childist transformation, whether in society or scholarship, cannot happen unless we've understood this intersection.
00:46:59
Speaker
So,
00:47:01
Speaker
We're applying, you know, we, some colleagues, we're applying for, to have a sub-network under the European Educational Research Association, which would focus on childism and decoloniality.
00:47:16
Speaker
And what's interesting is there's no sub-network that has any, like either of these terms, you know, whether it's coloniality or adultism, they're just not represented in the several sub-
00:47:30
Speaker
you know, teams and subsections of what educational sciences and research and philosophy is all about.
00:47:38
Speaker
And so there is a need for that.
00:47:40
Speaker
And hopefully if we get through and we have a sub network, there will be a platform to start connecting different, you know, isolated scholars, bringing them together and also supporting early career professionals
00:47:58
Speaker
researchers who might be interested in
00:48:02
Speaker
in this direction, but simply just, you know, don't have the right places to go to at the moment.
00:48:13
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:48:16
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:48:20
Speaker
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00:48:24
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:48:31
Speaker
Thank you.