(Mis)educating the empire: Non-recognition,colonial ignorance,and epistemic paralysis

Abstract

In her talk ‘Disappearance, Erasure, and the Void’, Rocío Zambrana (2023) argued against the classification of colonialism as a ‘historical event of the past’. For Zambrana, colonialism is ‘a past that survives in the present’ through the ‘coloniality’ of knowledge and power (2021). Taking Zambrana's cue, I unpack in this work the ways in which coloniality survives in Philippine education and continues to structure Philippine consciousness, social relations, government policies, and political arrangements. In my discussion, I recount how colonial educational institutions in the Philippines, during its Spanish and American occupation, betrayed their respective promise of ‘spiritual salvation’ and ‘self-governance’ to the Philippines. They instead entrenched structures that facilitated political and epistemic subservience to Anglo-European authority, dependence on former imperial economies, and colonial forms of repression and extraction. Through the Philippine example, I develop a concept of (mis)education that is generative of what I call, pernicious epistemic paralysis.