Interrogating Neocolonial Education: Critical Pedagogy Contra Neoliberal Schooling

E. San Juan Jr.

Education viewed as the traditional process of “educing” human potential for critical thinking derives its actual efficacy from historical contextualization. In a colonized formation like the Philippines, unlike industrialized bourgeois polities, schooling was organized to produce regimented subalterns for U.S. monopolies while reinforcing feudal norms. Private landed property limited any attempt at utilitarian, liberal reforms. Colonial education was designed as a modernizing agency serving U.S. imperial needs from 1899-1946. From 1946 to the present, schooling has functioned as a neocolonial instrument of Cold War politics and counterinsurgency schemes. With the worsening crisis of global capitalism in the new millennium, neoliberal ideology was imposed to undermine any radical challenge to the domination of the U.S.-controlled global market and the imperative of capital accumulation. The pandemic crisis has further exposed the hypocrisy of neoliberal claims to promoting democracy via consumerism and media spectacles. Neocolonial schooling serves chiefly to preserve the inequities of a class- divided society lacking any solid technological-industrial base and real sovereignty – the result of total subordination to U.S. hegemony. It is being challenged by a critical pedagogy of “conscientization” aimed at liberating subalterns from a commodifying, alienating system of values and structures of feeling inherited from over three hundred years of colonization.