Colonization Theory

Colonization theory can be historically situated within early European conquest, domination, and colonization of various countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. This external control of foreign territories created a metropole (the colonizing country) and colony (the colonized lands) based on unequal power and exploitation of the colonies by the metropole. Educational curricula and content was a key tool in enabling and enforcing the power and control of colonial regimes. The forced external control is often referred to as the classical colonial model. This model is based on political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the metropole on the colonized lands. However, contemporary colonization theory also includes what is referred to as internal colonialism, meaning oppression and domination of certain groups of people within a country. Internal colonialism mirrors the ideology of classical colonialism in its social inequities particularly based on racism and cultural domination of majority groups over minority groups and thus expands colonial theory to be inclusive of internal domestic oppression. In order for colonization to be effective, those who were colonized had to be indoctrinated into a certain mind-set that elevated the superiority and power of the colonizer. Colonization theory continues to affect the educational decolonizing efforts of previously colonized nations.

Franz Fanon describes four phases through which classical colonialism worked and are useful in understanding the role of curriculum in enabling the assumptions of colonization theory. The first phase was one of forced entry into foreign lands and exploitation of the natural resources of the colonies. The second phase entailed the establishment of a colonial society that denigrated indigenous culture, practices, and knowledge while elevating that of the colonizing nation. In order to cement the difference between the superior colonizer and inferior colonized relationship, the third phase had to portray the colonized peoples as savage, inhuman, and in need of being civilized via colonial impositions. The first three phases resulted in a race-based system that was established during the fourth phase of colonization. This race-based system permeated the political, social, cultural, economic, and educational systems of the colonies and was designed to privilege the colonizer and to ensure the subjugation of the colonized. Hence, education became a powerful tool to propagate this superiority–inferiority complex.

European, White superiority and Black inferiority was packaged through curricula, textbooks, resources, material, and structural curriculum elements and policies. Textbooks in particular clearly demonstrated the critical role of education and curricula in maintaining the colonial ideology. Colonial ideology denied indigenous peoples useful knowledge about themselves and their world and supported a climate designed to consolidate a slave mentality.

Decolonizing efforts sought to redress the doctrine of White supremacy, appropriated knowledge, definitions, meanings, and constructed canons and theories that were formulated on the basis of particularized European experiences and given a universal dominant status. Of importance was the development of curriculum materials that worked toward the effort to decolonize the prevailing Eurocentric epistemology and to recenter the realities of indigenous knowledge within postcolonial societies. To this day, decolonization is still intricately intertwined with global, Western, and Eurocentric politics. Educational decolonization is often fraught with contradictions and hypocrisy as the colonial ideology is often repackaged in democratic curricula.

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