What does “ decolonize school curricula » ? How to respond to the demands of indigenous populations who want education adapted to local culture ? It is these questions that Mr. Salaün, after an investigation in New Caledonia and Hawai’i, strives to answer.
Decolonizing school today: that’s a slogan a priori unexpected, both because of the temporality usually used to talk about decolonization (the 1960s), and the object concerned by this process (an institution and not a territory). In this regard, the first merit of Marie Salaün’s work is to underline how the question of decolonization remains relevant in the contemporary world. This is particularly the case in the former settler colonies of the Pacific and the Americas, where the colonized indigenous people have not been able to recover their political sovereignty through independence, and claim collective rights within existing states as that “ indigenous peoples » — even if it means undermining the principle of equal citizenship between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Talking about decolonization in these situations requires us to go beyond a definition centered on the creation of new States, and to think about this dynamic in other institutional and administrative spaces, notably at school.
On the two Oceanic lands studied by Marie Salaün – the French territory of New Caledonia and the American state of Hawai’i – reforms have been developed over the past two decades to respond to Kanak and Hawaiian demands for decolonization of the school that emerged in the 1970s. This is the starting point of the book: what happens when public policies try to take into account the demands ? Beyond the official declarations of intention, the author enters into the “ black box » of the school and examines in detail the educational measures implemented in the name of this decolonization. His work is based on the detailed and informed criticism of a vast literature (institutional, activist, educational and scientific) dealing with educational issues and indigenous questions in colonial and postcolonial situations, at different scales: in the local and national contexts of the two fields. investigation, in other countries with similar problems (Canada, French Polynesia, etc.) and on the international scene. Marie Salaün also relies on a careful examination of educational materials (programs, curriculum, exercises, etc.) and on a survey by interviews with educational and political leaders and indigenous parents (Kanak and Tahitians).
Decolonize through culture and languages ?
Taking seriously the assertion that the school reforms initiated since the 1990s in New Caledonia and Hawai’i constitute an actual decolonization of the school, leads the sociologist to identify several fundamental tensions. This is the case with the hiatus between the condemnation of “ the colonial school » in the 1970s – which will justify the measures taken in the name of decolonization – and the exact temporality of the school system thus incriminated. In reality, the school denounced in the 1970s was not the segregated indigenous school of the colonial era, but the assimilationist citizen school, in every way identical to that of the mainland, which emerged after the Second War. worldwide. This distinction is essential since subsequent reforms will logically focus on the question of “ disconnection » vis-à-vis the metropolitan referent, rather than on the question of the transmission of a specific relationship to school which goes back to indigenous experiences of the school system before 1945 (and in particular school segregation). It is also in the light of the denunciation of the assimilationist model of the 1950s and 1960s that we can understand the focus of the debate on indigenous languages and cultures. Marie Salaün speaks here of a “ general illusion that decolonizing the school amounts to bringing in the culture of the colonized » (p. 210).
If the adaptation of the school to the linguistic specificities of the Kanaks and the Hawaiians has been the subject of an official consensus since the end of the 1980s, the author nevertheless identifies three profoundly divergent orders of justification: heritage (preserving languages as heritage of Humanity), political (repairing colonial injustices) and educational (remedying academic failure). This fundamental misunderstanding is probably the price of consensus but nonetheless contributes to “ considerably obscure contemporary issues regarding the place of Kanak languages and culture in schools » (p. 144). Very diverse experiments in terms of adaptation have thus been attempted, both in New Caledonia (systems of the Directorate of Primary Education and the Northern Province) and in Hawai’i (immersion schools and Charter Schools), whose objectives Marie Salaün precisely describes – sometimes cultural or cognitive, sometimes political or heritage. Behind this typology lies the major issue of compliance or, on the contrary, “ stall » of these programs vis-à-vis the national school curriculum – what is colloquially called the “ coconut tray syndrome “. Faced with the imperative of evaluation, reform promoters develop contrasting responses, thus revealing a broader field of possible policies than appears at first glance. While in New Caledonia the actors strive to scrupulously respond to the requirements of the supervisory authorities, their Hawaiian counterparts try on the contrary to refuse the injunction and promote alternative evaluation methods.
Social demand and functions of school
The last chapter – in my opinion the most decisive – questions what happens concretely when we teach indigenous cultures at school: what are the effects of this process on culture (the transmission of which usually takes place outside the classroom). school) and on school (one of whose functions is to transmit knowledge that cannot be acquired elsewhere) ? Marie Salaün highlights here how reflection on contents tends to ignore the question of school form. Transforming social knowledge into academic knowledge requires making it teachable, programmable, socially and epistemologically legitimate, founded in logical systems via the mediation of writing, depersonalized and decontextualized. But the “ indigenous knowledge » are almost the complete opposite: local, oral knowledge, rooted in daily experience, functional, fragmentary, unevenly mastered, in constant negotiation, etc. Two strategies are then possible. The first, followed in New Caledonia, consists of “ stick as closely as possible to this whole set of devices and formal marks by which we recognize a “school product” (from the style of writing official instructions, to the types of exercise through the exam subjects) » (p. 243). This strategy involves such a work of decontextualization that there is a great risk of losing sight of the purpose of this teaching, as evidenced by the aporias of the exercise “ I am building my family tree » analyzed at the end of the book. The second alternative known as “ methodological holism », implemented in the Charter Schools in Hawai’i, conversely claims to free itself from conventional constraints in the name of cultural conformity. The question is then that of a “ pure and simple dilution of the school form » (p. 246).
In addition to activist leaders, Marie Salaün also questioned indigenous parents — often themselves poorly equipped with educational capital — about their expectations of school. However, and this is a strong point of the demonstration, their words testify to a social demand “ shifted “: not so much in favor of a culturally “ adapted “, than a school allowing “ get out » socially and economically in the dominant society (mainly through access to paid employment). And the sociologist drives the point home: “ I do not believe that we should overestimate the attachment of indigenous people to the presence of their culture has school. It’s good school context of which we are talking, and therefore implicitly, a representation of the functions from school » (p. 210). This central argument postulating a watertight partition between the school and “ the life » — which corroborates my own ethnographic impressions — would undoubtedly deserve to be refined by other investigations. Beyond formal interview situations, long-term ethnographic surveys within indigenous families would allow us to learn more about their daily practices, informal expectations and differentiated investments in the school system. The work here draws suggestive avenues of reflection on the social experiences of “ target individuals » of these programs, which should now be explored in more depth through ethnography.
Thinking about decolonization and school outside of essentialism
Ultimately, Marie Salaün’s book constitutes a reference work on the decolonization of schools from two main entry points: public discourses (political, scientific, educational) and institutional policies (school reforms). . Deciphering and problematizing these issues requires the author to mobilize numerous and varied references and to synthesize sometimes very specialized discussions. This intellectual requirement can make reading certain very technical passages difficult. It is nevertheless difficult to avoid these debates: we must confront the fundamental questions that the new issues of decolonization raise (from the nation-state to the indigenous rights “) and the transformations of the functions of the school (from colonial partitioning then from national unification to decolonization), if we want to think seriously about the conditions of possibility of a school emancipated from the colonial legacy. Taking on the complexity of the issue is also a way of not being content with the essentialist postulates that most often limit the discussion around indigenous claims. This is perhaps, ultimately, Marie Salaün’s most convincing argument: to show that we have every interest (intellectual and political) in thinking about the relationships between decolonization and school as above all social and historical phenomena, which which supposes to “ drastically reconsider the status of cultural difference » ; in other words, to abandon the explanatory schemes of cultural relativism which, “ concerned with rehabilitating culture, considers it more as an essence than a process » (pp. 178-179).