Beyond Domination: Enrique Dussel, Decoloniality, and Education

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the colonial epistemology underlying familiar progressive approaches to education and proposes a decolonial approach building from non-Western standpoints. We start from an analysis of coloniality in Western culture and knowledge systems, grounding our account in the work of influential philosopher Enrique Dussel. We consider in particular Dussel’s accounts of the methodology of analectics (which he contrasts with Western dialectics), the ethics of exteriority, and the epistemology of liberation. We then describe how both mainstream progressive and critical accounts of curriculum and pedagogy are interrogated by the challenge proposed within Dussel’s work. Specifically, we show how his decolonial theses (a) suggest a confrontation with Eurocentrism at the level of knowing and being (not merely content or ideology); (b) challenge easy notions of reconciliation and solidarity in teaching spaces in favor of a dialogical ethics that systematically privileges the voices of the oppressed and marginalized; and (c) ask us to recognize the source of pedagogy and politics in the power and agency of the community (including communities of students), a source that teachers should remember and to which they should remain accountable. We conclude with a summative statement of the ways in which a decolonial approach to education based on the work of Dussel rearticulates, at the level of orientation, epistemology, and ethics, the meaning of an emancipatory commitment in education.