Survival of the Educated? Postcolonial Feminist Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education - Between Stabilising and Challenging ‘Class Apartheid’

Abstract: A common goal of the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) concept of global citizenship education (GCE) is to educate learners for greater responsibility and engagement in promoting (gender) justice, sustainability and solidarity.  From a feminist postcolonial perspective, it can be argued that specific colonial continuities persist in the formulated needs for action, approaches to solutions and subject positions.  With reference to my dissertation research, specific truth spaces on gender and education as well as different gendered* subject positions in UNESCO documents on GCE could be analysed.  The article begins by contextualising the study and some basic reflections on Spivak’s concept of class apartheid (2007).  The findings are then presented, with a focus on the gendered mapping of subjects.  Finally, the article considers the extent to which GCE stabilises class apartheid as defined by UNESCO, and what is needed to counter this continuation/reactivation of class apartheid.  In addition to demonstrating the extent to which the production of hierarchical and binary subject positions reinforce class apartheid, the article aims to highlight the need for a postcolonial education that recognises its underlying ambivalence and seeks to disrupt the reproduction of colonial patterns and their hierarchical subject construction.  In the sense of Spivak’s affirmative sabotage, it becomes clear that it is necessary to scandalise historical, present and future relations of domination and power, however subtly and benevolently they may be formulated, and to understand them as changeable through political practice.

Key words: Postcolonial-Feminist Theory; Class Apartheid; Critical Global Citizenship Education; Global Class.

Introduction

“we must repair the past which is far from

being repaired, we must repair the present, and

already prevent the future from becoming the past”

(Vergès, 2020).

In the context of global citizenship education, global space is described as space for all or the globalised world as our home.  This one world, which as a logic of identity follows an economy of ‘sameness’, runs the risk of repeatedly reproducing the division and hierarchisation of geopolitical spaces ‘between those who right wrongs and those who are wronged’ (Spivak, 2004: 523).  The need to grapple with the complexity that underlies the multiple postcolonial conditions of the world seems to be diminishing by the day.  Against this backdrop, global citizenship education (GCE) seems to play an important role in imparting and reflecting on knowledge that has become colonial in post-colonial capitalist realities.  Issues of global justice, sustainability and peaceful coexistence are emphasised in GCE.  As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007) pointed out, there is a deep linkage between class apartheid and the system of education in the postcolonial world.  GCE examines the pedagogical challenges that arise from a globally networked world and aims to find a solution-oriented approach to them.  As Vanessa Andreotti and Lynn Mario de Souza (2008) described, the concept of global citizenship has currently become quite prominent in Europe and the Americas for nation-state actors, civil society and, above all, educational discourses.  Despite its prominence as a catchphrase (Pais and Costa, 2020) in both education policy and practice, the concept of GCE remains a controversial one and is still open to a variety of interpretations.

Postcolonial theorists question whether the educational efforts of GCE stabilise rather than challenge the division and hierarchisation of geopolitical spaces ‘between those who right wrongs and those who are wronged’ (Spivak, 2004: 523).  Those who right wrongs and those whose wrongs are righted are separated by a certain class line.  In large parts of the post-colonial world, ‘class apartheid’ (in the sense of strong social segregation) is caused by the education system that has existed since formal decolonisation (cf. Dhawan, 2012).  Education produces subjects who are either prepared to perform intellectual work or are produced for the performance of manual labour.  According to Spivak (2008a), in order to reverse this process, the subalterns must be introduced to hegemony through the activation of democratic habits.  One of the central aims of global citizenship education is to activate the democratic habits of the ‘others’.  In doing so, however, a global citizen is conceived as one who stands for a European (universal) subject (cf. Gamal, Hoult and Taylor, 2024: 12).  A citizen who:

“must work to encourage a liberal democratic notion of justice on a global scale by ‘expanding’ or ‘extending’ or ‘adding’ their sense of responsibility and obligation to others through the local to national to global community” (Pashby, 2011: 430).

This article focuses on the intersection of postcolonial subject formation, gender and class apartheid in the context of GCE.  I build on the findings of my study ‘To Do - To Be - To Become: A Postcolonial Feminist Subject Cartography of the UNESCO Concept of Global Citizenship Education’ (Altenberger, 2024a) and ask how the production of different subject figures tends to stabilise class apartheid.  These reconstructions make it clear how specific moments of political education (e.g. subject, citizenship and agency) function as markers for inclusion and exclusion (be-longing/not belonging). This cosmopolitan moment and its inscribed universalism has been at the centre of a postcolonial critique of GCE (Andreotti, 2006).  Postcolonial analyses of GCE, such as those developed in the volume Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (Andreotti and de Souza, 2012) or Decolonizing Global Citizenship Education (Abdi, Shultz and Pillay, 2015), support important power-critical approaches to and perspectives on GCE.  Marta da Costa, Chris Hanley and Edda Sant (2024) have recently shown the need to challenge the liberal humanism, often expressed through cosmopolitanism, that is interwoven in global citizenship education.  However, there are also gaps in postcolonial research on GCE: there is a lack of thematisation of gender issues and (queer)feminist informed postcolonial perspectives on GCE.  This study attempts to expand this critical field of research on GCE by analysing UNESCO documents from a feminist-informed postcolonial perspective.

Contextualisation and localisation

The contemporary global (postcolonial) crises, the permanent intensification of global capitalism, and the urgent responsibility that this entails, demand a response.  Against this backdrop, efforts have been underway for more than ten years to emphasise the need for global education initiatives to empower learners to engage as global citizens for global justice. 

The following are cited as positive examples of the process of realising global/transnational citizenship: the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), the United Nations system, the World Social Forum/Education Forum or the founding of the European Union (cf. Wintersteiner et al., 2015: 13).  It is precisely these institutionalised achievements that Ulrich Beck describes as ‘cosmopolitan realpolitik’ (Beck, 2007: 368).  As was declared in 1948: ‘All human beings are born free and equal, born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (UDHR, 1948) - a declaration that, when it was proclaimed in 1948, was met with justifiable scepticism in the colonised countries of the time.  Sceptical because, firstly, many colonised countries did not yet have formal independence at the time and, secondly, the Declaration was proclaimed in a place and at a time when racial segregation (still) prevailed until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This massive gap in the UDHR’s narrative still exists today and is particularly evident in the assumption that contemporary human rights violations are predominantly committed by former colonised countries.

“While crimes against humanity were mainly committed by Europe, even today the majority of people in the global North do not think of human rights violations when they think of Europe, but of those countries that Europe has ‘civilised’” (Castro Varela and Dhawan, 2020: 33, translated by author).

Since 1948, UNESCO has made education one of its core themes.  Education has been present in the context of the UN and UNESCO since their inception in the form of human rights education, democracy education and peace education.  The Global Education First Initiative (UNSG, 2012), launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, marked an important turning point for UNESCO as GCE was elevated to the status of a UNESCO educational guideline.  This had a significant impact on international attention and thus on the direction and quality of GCE (cf. Altenberger, 2020: 173).  Therefore, the UNESCO concept of GCE plays a discourse-defining role as the superstructure of all critical and uncritical practices of GCE, especially for the development education discourse. 

The central point of reference of this article is my doctoral analysis of online accessible textual and pictorial material of relevant UNESCO GCE documents in the period 2012-2019. A total of 25 documents (reports, policy papers, guides, brochures, and meeting reports) were structurally analysed (multi-stage research and sorting process) and coded.  This structural analysis made it possible (1) to gain an overview of the discourses, (2) to group the UNESCO documents on GCE thematically and (3) to determine which statements appear significant for the present research subject. (cf. Altenberger, 2024a: 142).  Inductive and deductive coding therefore served, in particular to, classify and bundle text passages, and to work out regularities in order to draw conclusions about the rules of discursive meaning constitution (cf. Glasze, Husseini and Mose, 2012: 294).  The material was analysed in terms of the production of gendered* subject positions (i.e. how subject positions are constituted) and the associated perpetuation of colonial discourses and dynamics of epistemic violence.  The gender asterisk is used here to indicate that gender* is seen as a multidimensional concept and is therefore always intertwined with other structures of inequality.  Using an interpretative-reconstructive research design, I have interwoven postcolonial theory and feminist critique with deconstructivist and sociologically informed discourse analysis.  Interpretative-reconstructive methods of qualitative social research make it possible not only to decode, describe and understand content, but also practices, knowledge representation and systems of meaning and relevance.

In addition, feminist postcolonial approaches make it possible to consider gender and sexuality under the conditions of colonial continuities.  ‘The imperial/colonial dominance (which became enforceable through education, among other things) over the so-called Third World is/was based on the construction and production of specific and seemingly unambiguous (gendered*) subject constitutions’ (Altenberger, 2024a: 6).  To this end, a deconstructively orientated postcolonial reading was used to find out to what extent this production of gendered* subject positions in the context of UNESCO’s GCE-documents is linked to the continuation of colonial power dynamics.  Overall, as the analysis of the documents shows, class apartheid can be seen as a legacy of colonial power that continues to structure postcolonial societies, and the dominant narrative of achieving gender equality through GCE education reveals a modern narrative of emancipation and enlightenment that is inescapably intertwined with colonialism.  GCE documents neglect the ambivalent power entanglements of education and individualise, depoliticise and culturalise gender political issues.  But in the sense of affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2012), GCE discourse can also be seen as a field of political possibility.  Spivak applies the strategy of affirmative sabotage to the ideals of the Enlightenment.  Spivak thus emphasises two important aspects in dealing with the ideals and practices of the Enlightenment (such as cosmopolitanism, tolerance, equality, universality and freedom): the affirmative and the sabotaging aspect.  These ideals cannot be unwanted - they must be affirmed, but at the same time their violent entanglement with colonialism must be sabotaged. ‘Spivak supplements the term sabotage with the adjective‚ “affirmative”, devising a strategy in which the instruments of colonialism are turned around into tools for transgression, poison turned into medicine’ (Dhawan, 2014: 71).

In the sense of affirmative sabotage, the findings of the study use the gendered* subject cartography of GCE to illustrate the need to sabotage historical, present and future power relations (and one’s own entanglements in them), however subtly and benevolently they may be formulated, but also to understand them as changeable through political practice. (cf. Altenberger, 2024a: 289).

Global class and class apartheid

If we define the present as the global age of capitalism, as Spivak (2013) has done, it seems necessary to define the reversal and displacement of the capital relation, in the search for social justice, as a never-ending political task.  The global space is often described in the GCE discourse as a space for all, a home for all.  The creation or formation of a global society based on solidarity is formulated as a central goal.  Anil K. Jain opens his article The global class (2000) as follows: ‘The global class knows no borders.  How else could it be called “global”?’ (Jain, 2000: 51, translated by author).  With Jain, the global society can be understood as global class.  The global class is at home everywhere and nowhere and is characterised by its (expansive) ‘openness to the world’ (cf. Jain, 2000: 1). 

Beck (2007) spoke of a global risk (e.g. consequences of climate change, pandemic situation, etc.) society in the context of the increases in prosperity and individualisation processes that characterise contemporary societies.  Like Castro Varela and Dhawan (2009), Jain also emphasised that the extent to which risks can be responded to depends very much on capital resources and thus class affiliation.  For example, certain people and regions with the necessary capital resources can insulate themselves from certain risks more effectively than others.  This means that the global space is by no means equally global for everyone, but rather that global class structures can be observed (for example the mobility of goods and people - the ability to move across geographical, economic and political borders).  So here we can ask who dominates the global space, who can be a global citizen.  To maintain this possibility and privilege, Jain argues that the global class must constantly reach out to the world.  ‘Whoever is “present” in the world, whoever dominates global space, dominates the world of the global age’ (Jain, 2000: 10, translated by author).

Against this background, the endeavours of GCE, especially within the framework of UNESCO, could be seen as a form of power over global space.  In the context of GCE, the localised classes represent the beneficiaries who need support in the form of education and who do not have the privilege of dominating the global space.  Jain describes the other side as the ‘losers of globalisation’ or as the localised ‘proletariat’, the marginalised of this earth.  They stand in front of closed doors, are confined to their local structures, cut off from the global space.  Shackled to their locality, they have to deal with the processes that break over them with the ‘force of nature’ of globalisation - perceived as such - without having any means of evasion or influence (Ibid.: 10f).

From a postcolonial perspective, an intellectual bridge can be made from Jain’s description of the emergence of a global class and a localised proletariat to Spivak’s concept of class apartheid (2008b).  Spivak described class apartheid as postcolonial perspectivisation of class rule.  This class rule is defined as the ‘social mother of all injustices’ (Spivak, 2008b: 14).  It is primarily the drawn class line that is responsible for the structuring of class apartheid.  According to Spivak, this line is drawn primarily within educational processes. As the Education First Initiative (UNSG, 2012) shows in its basis for UNESCO’s further statements on GCE, it stabilises a neoliberal discourse (see Pais and Costa, 2020: 5) on education that follows a neoliberal agenda and the global economy.  As the following excerpt from the document shows: ‘No education for girls = economic loss’ (Ibid.: 12).  It promises that the skills, knowledge and values enabled by education are the human capital of the nation (cf. Ibid.: 5).  The aim of such an education model, as Brown shows, is to educate people to become more competitive, entrepreneurial and individualistic (Brown, 2015).  In their article A meta-review of typologies of global citizenship education, Pashby et al. (2020) have shown the interface between neoliberal, liberal and critical discourses.  As critical discourses include postcolonial perspectives, this article shows how a specific idea of gender and gendered* subject formation in UNESCO documents reproduces demarcations not only between positions of coloniser and colonised, but also between modern and colonial imaginaries (Ibid.: 146).

The formation of structures of desire through education is an important component of class and gender-specific subject formation and thus of the reproduction of precisely these colonial continuities.

Gender (in)equality and postcolonial subject formation

In critical and postcolonial discourses on global citizenship education, a queer-feminist perspective is often not taken into account.  The elaboration of the phenomenal structure of gender (in)equality and gender subject formations attempts to close this gap.  This not only shows the extent to which colonially grown universalist and capitalist logics are reproduced, but also how a phenomenon structure gender (in)equality and a process of othering (Spivak, 1985: 252) form a gendered*, educationally distant subject that serves as the basis for a social mission such as GCE.  This construction of seemingly homogeneous Others perpetuates a narrative of subjugation and a ‘narrative of imperialism’ (Spivak, 2008b: 42), whereby the knowledge of Others constructed as deficient is also negated, appropriated or ignored.

In relation to the research question(s), the phenomenon of gender (in)equality was recorded in open coding processes on the textual research material.  The concept of phenomenon structure refers to the ‘way in which facts are constructed [...], i.e. what is grasped in relation to a phenomenon’ (Keller, 2008: 86).  The focus here is on similarities and discursive attributions in the construction of a public topic.  The way in which gender is spoken about (naming practice) in the context of GCE, and which terms and concepts are used, has a considerable influence on the discursive setting of gender in GCE (cf. Altenberger, 2024a: 119f).  Naming practices subsequently have an influence on how gender relations are shaped. The following elements were identified for the gender (in)equality phenomenon structure: dimensions, concepts, need for action, problem solving, objectives, (gendered*) subject positions and value references. (cf. Ibid.: 159f).

By capturing this structure, it is possible to identify and name the articulations that create a specific gender truth space, organised as a space of possibility, of what can and cannot be said about gender, but also of what feminism is and is not tolerable in these spaces (cf. Hark, 2001: 30).  The following excerpts from the document are examples of how the construction of a specific gendered subject also creates a space for the truth of education (education as panacea): ‘Women with higher levels of education are less likely to get married or have children at an early age’ (UNESCO, 2013: 16) or ‘Education empowers women to overcome discrimination’ (Ibid.: 16).  As critical discourses on GCE (Pashby et.al., 2020; Andreotti and de Souza 2012; Pais and Costa 2020; Stein et al., 2020; Gamal, Hoult and Tayler 2024) and this critical postcolonial, intersectional feminist analysis show - there are pitfalls and contradictions in an uncritical GCE conception (in this case UNESCO-framed), particularly in relation to the continuity of colonially generated racist, heterosexist and classist logics.

The discursive production of subject positions is an important element of the phenomenon structure described.  These subject positions could be reconstructed in a specific way during the detailed analysis and subsequently discussed and interpreted from a postcolonial feminist perspective.  It is assumed that subjects are produced not only by the educational processes themselves, but already in the educational concepts that are fundamental to the educational processes, i.e. in the discursive practices (papers, documents, objectives, educational policy principles, curricula, etc.), which in turn frame the resulting educational processes.  Certain regularities have become recognisable in the addressing and naming and un-naming – in the discursive formation (Foucault, 1981: 48,128) – of subject positions.  In order to reconstruct the subject positions within the structure of the phenomenon, the following regularities (as distribution of the statements) (Ibid.) were identified:

- Hierarchisation: There is a hierarchisation of subject positions along the lines of education, maturity and agency.

- Totalisation: It creates an equal engagement of all disciplines with key global issues and presents education as the dominant solution.

- Binary and dichotomisation: The definition of content and the central ordering scheme of the phenomena are characterised by binary oppositions and dichotomous patterns of interpretation.

- Universalisation and essentialisation: The production of subject positions is based on a liberal-universalist claim to education and on essentialist discourses of global (gender) justice and women’s rights (cf. Altenberger, 2024a: 194, translated by author).

In Table 1, the subject figures and their characterisations are presented in tabular form and then explained in more detail.

Table 1: subject positions (Altenberger, 2024b: 8, translated by author)

To-Do subjects are those people who are addressed by the GCE documents, those who are called upon to actively engage in global citizenship education, i.e. readers of the documents who work on the implementation of GCE.  These are primarily addressed and produced as donors of education and thus called upon as subjects of action.  The mechanisms through which To-Do subject positions are integrated as subjects of responsibility establish concrete responsibility relations ‘in which actors or groups of actors are subjectivised as bearers of responsibility’ (Buschmann and Sulmowski, 2018: 282).  With reference to Buschmann and Sulmowski, the To-Do subjects are addressed here ‘as an autonomous subject capable of action [...] who has the knowledge and resources to align their actions with this responsibilising invocation’ (Ibid.: 290, translated by author).  Specific educational privileges are ascribed to them.  Accordingly, To-Do subjects are everything that To-Be subjects are not (yet).  The characterisation of To-Do subject positions as imperialist subjects is based on Spivak’s political theory of subalternity (Spivak, 2004: 2008a).  According to this theory, an imperialist subject formation is linked to righting the wrongs of others as is the case of GCE with education.  Spivak (2012) emphasises that an intervention (in the form of re-arranging, unlearning or ‘productive undoing’) in this very subject formation must necessarily take place in order to initiate epistemic change.

To-Be subject position

In contrast to the To-Do subjects, To-Be subjects appear in the GCE documents as distant from education and are produced as recipients of education.  The To-Be subject position reveals an essentialist production practice through a powerful figuration and representation of the other woman.  It is a female, vulnerable (because distant from education) subject of the so-called global South that is produced here.  To-Be subjects, in contrast to To-Do subjects, are confronted with instructions on how to be a subject.  From the perspective of education-related responsibilisation, the To-Be subject position can be characterised as an object of responsibility. The To-Be subject position becomes the deficient object of GCE (education serves as a normative frame of reference in this responsibility relation).  According to the documents, this subject must fulfil certain characteristics: to-be educated, to-be informed, to-be empowered, to-be literate, etc.  To-Be subject positions are encouraged to free themselves, with the help of To-Do subjects, from their own marginalisation through humanistically informed education – as education can empower them to overcome discrimination (UNESCO, 2013: 16).

The characterisation as a subject of legitimation results from the (gendered) deficit subordination of the To-Be subject position.  This deficit assumption appears to be fundamental for the legitimisation of GCE interventions and thus the addressing of To-Do subjects.  Queer or LGBTIQ+ related subject positions are largely ignored/dethematised.  If they are thematised at all, then they are staged exclusively as to-be tolerated subjects.  In this context, LGBTIQ+ hostility is staged as an educational problem of others.  A racialising categorisation is evident in the thematisation of (racialised) male* (To-Be) subject positions read as the desired addressees of extremism prevention or human rights workshops. (cf. Altenberger 2024a). Overall, To-Be subjects are constructed above all in relation to what they are not, to what is left out (deficit).  The imperialist (To-Do) subject endowed with educational privileges thus stands in a hierarchical relationship to the educationally deprived (To-Be) subject of imperialism, which is reproduced and secured by the production practices in the GCE documents.

To-Become subject position

The subject position characterised as To-Become in turn refers to the global citizen.  This imagines the subject of a more just future - a utopian subject.  This subject position is endowed with active attributes such as active, responsible, ethical, productive, informed, engaged, empathetic, etc. (cf. Altenberger 2024a).  In an ethics of action, the citizen of the world is defined as someone who helps an unfortunate other and behaves responsibly and actively in doing so (cf. Jefferess, 2012: 27).  The goal is an altruistic cosmopolitan subject as the end product of global political education.  This cosmopolitan subject, characterised as a supra-individual subject of responsibility, is given a collective responsibility to engage ethically with the world.  The way in which the global citizen is invoked and labelled in the UNESCO documents suggests both a position of identity and an ethical position of global responsibility. The question of responsibility is primarily linked to the declaration of an education crisis (UNSG, 2012: 6), which gives the impression that education is a matter of life and death.

Survival of the educated?  Stabilising or counteracting class apartheid through global education?

The question of Survival of the Educated!? refers to Spivak’s (2008b) comments on the instrumentalisation of human rights policies, in which she sees the continuation of a kind of social Darwinism.  She argued that human rights benefits, which she describes as a social Darwinist-informed ‘burden of the strongest’ (Ibid.: 8), can be both empowering and hurtful and contain a colonially grown gendered logic. In addition, gender inequality is formulated as a problem and therefore a need for action (education), while race and cultural differences are cited as obstacles and classist structures are not labelled as a problem at all.  Class, therefore, remains largely unconsidered in the analysed UNESCO GCE documents.  If, as Spivak emphasised, the system of class apartheid is maintained through a specific educational format that has been in place since formal decolonisation, and if education is seen as producing desire as an important part of subjectification (Castro Varela, 2015), then the subject figures described (to-Do, to-Be and to-Become) in particular have something to do with stabilising or counteracting class apartheid.  The decisive factor is who is on which side of the class line.  Because that decides which education is granted to whom.  As Spivak argues:

“Above a certain line, education takes place to explain what the material is; below a certain line, the purpose of education is simply to memorize without understanding and to take exams so that the answers replicate exactly what has been memorized.  This is completely in place and ubiquitous below a certain class line” (Spivak, 2007: 172).

What Spivak identified as the biggest and most important impact of class apartheid, is the fact that there can be no democracy.  If the people below this class line only learn by heart, they are not able to understand the public sphere - because they are not allowed to think.  The only weapon with which the extremely disadvantaged could defend themselves is therefore taken away from them at a young age (cf. Ibid.: 172).  In this context, the constant reproduction of the hierarchical, essentialising and victimising relationship between To-Do and To-Be subject positions in the GCE documents is seen as a contribution to the stabilisation of class apartheid.  Through the construction and specific labelling of To-Be subject positions and the invocation of To-Do subjects, a colonial discourse is largely reactivated and an ‘unverifiable universalism’ (Spivak, 2008a: 41) is perpetuated rather than interrupted.  This not only leads to a consolidation of dominant groups, which is represented here by the imperialist subject of a global elite (To-Do subject position), but also to the stabilisation of a global class and thus a structure of class apartheid.  Spivak problematised the fact that the instrumentalisation of poverty for global educational purposes, which in turn are part of a culture of economic growth, can reinforce class apartheid (Spivak, 2008a). 

But if class apartheid can be stabilised through education (or educational concepts like GCE), then it is also possible to challenge class apartheid through education, because according to Gramsci (2012) and Spivak (2012), education also plays an important role in intervening in hegemonic relations.  Education in Gramsci’s sense must always be regarded as ambivalent; education can have both a stabilising and a challenging effect on power, which contradicts the consistently positive understanding of education in GCE.  Pashby emphasises in a Gramscian manner that we as educators must remain vigilant and active:

“Yet, as educationalists, though some of us theorizing GCE work hard to recognize the double bind wherein education is both an apparatus of colonial power and the tool to move the masses to resist and to open up new discourses and political spaces, we cannot rest our hands or our minds” (Pashby, 2012: 21).

As Bernhard (2006: 16) explains in his comments on Gramsci, the educational subject is to be regarded as a historical-social being that represents a network of ‘subjective and objective, natural and social, material and ideal elements’.  To destabilise class apartheid, the entanglement of teachers and learners in historical-social relations should be reflected in Gramsci’s sense.  It is Spivak, above all, who here emphasises the entanglement of class apartheid and the international division of labour.  The international (formerly colonial) division of labour benefits from the above-mentioned separation of manual and intellectual.  But it is education that has the potential to reweave the fabric torn by colonisation.  Education must go beyond the mere transmission of information and aim to weave democratic habits into its subjects (cf. Spivak, 2008b: 76). 

Therefore, intervening in class apartheid would require the training of To-Be subjects to do intellectual work and, on the side of the To-Do subjects, a focus on unlearning privilege and recognizing / reflecting on their own complicity.  Because ‘attacking the educational privileges of a few’ (Ibid.: 22) also appears necessary.  This could be included in a critical GCE pedagogy that reflects the entanglements with problematic historical patterns, as Andreotti summarised in ‘HEADS UP (i.e. hegemony, ethnocentrism, ahistoricism, depoliticisation, uncomplicated solutions, and paternalism)’ (Andreotti, 2012).  To challenge class apartheid, it is therefore important to: 1) interrupt the educational privileges of a few (To-Do subjects) and train To-Be subjects to do intellectual work; and 2) to examine not only capitalist interdependencies, but also problematic patterns (HEADS UP) – in the spirit of a thinking template.  For a critical feminist postcolonial discourse on GCE, the proposals already formulated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in 1997 for an effective attack on capitalist hegemony are also required (3); a new alliance formation across multiple borders for an education for critical and collective consciousness.

Conclusion

“Postcolonial education is

not an answer to be read as definitive” 

(Delille, 2021: 51, translated by author).

As we can summarise, global education in particular plays a central role in the creation, maintenance and destabilisation of class apartheid.  Spivak formulated an important responsibility for education: we need an education that ‘must ensure a break with the creation and perpetuation of class apartheid’ (Spivak, 2008b: 73).  Such an education must go beyond ‘informal education’ and ‘functional literacy’.  For, as long as those who are at best destined for physical labour - gatar khatano - cannot train their imagination and receive no training in mental labour - matha khatano - the division between rich and poor (...) will persist (Ibid.: 74, translated by author).  Education as a uncoercive rearrangement of desires (Spivak, 2012) serves to bring about an epistemic transformation in the sense of opening access to delegitimised knowledge.  Spivak’s appeal here is particularly directed at the training of teachers and their imagination.  But as has also become clear, the pedagogical endeavour that could bring about long-term epistemic change among the oppressed is never flawless and must be constantly rearranged.

I conclude as I started – with the question raised by Francoise Vergès (2020): how can we prevent the future from becoming the past?  On the one hand, it is necessary to interrupt the reproduction of problematic patterns (as shown in HEADS UP) within uncritical conceptions of GCE, to interrupt the reproduction of the narrative that essentialises the poverty and struggles of the former colonies (and hides the fact that both are the direct result of colonial exploitation) which serves to justify the civilising mission (cf. Vergès, 2020; also see Wynter and McKittrick, 2015) or liberal educational mission.  On the other hand, it is about a constant complication of critical discourse on GCE.  This means an implementation of queer-feminist perspectives to post- and decolonial discourses on GCE.

To make postcolonial education productive for GCE, it is also essential to re-arrange the current rhetoric of a globalised world society as a world for all.  In principle, therefore, it would be significant if GCE documents (and subsequently practice) were to characterise the conditions of world society as postcolonial.  This would also mean identifying the dynamics of globalisation as a postcolonial phenomenon.  Spivak also suggests overwriting the concept of the globe with that of the planet. 

The ‘planetary concept’ that she develops under the sign of alterity does not represent a contrast to the globe, but rather a different spectrum of perception of the planet as a habitable place.  Habitable, if only on credit (Spivak, 2013: 47).  According to Spivak, globalisation stands for the introduction of an exactly equal system of exchange across the entire planet.  With this understanding of a planet that is habitable on credit, and in the face of an ever-worsening climate crisis, the idea of development in the concept of education for sustainable development (sustainability and commitment to the climate are central themes of the GCE) could be questioned.  Given the current global situation, shouldn’t development in the linear sense be questioned altogether?  Stein et al (2020), in their article entitled ‘From education for sustainable development to education for the end of the world as we know it’, turned the question around.

The claim of postcolonial theories, in Andreotti and de Souza’s sense, is to create tools for thinking: ‘We define postcolonial theories as tools-for-thinking rather than theories-of-truth’ (Andreotti and de Souza, 2012: 2).  Thinking tools can therefore open new perspectives, while at the same time being cautious and considering the impossible.  Still, as postcolonial theories do not offer concrete solutions, the question of how an ethical imperative of responsibility (Spivak, 2008b: 48) can be activated through global oriented political education like GCE remains a constant struggle for a more anti-heterosexist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist present and future.  This means creating a decolonial feminist stance that scandalises historical, present and future power relations (and one’s own entanglements in them), however subtly and benevolently they may be formulated (as in UNESCO documents), but also understands them as changeable through political practice and thus disrupts the ongoing stabilisation of class apartheid.

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Sandra Altenberger (she/her) is an educationalist and currently a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Innsbruck (CGI) at the University of Innsbruck.  She completed her PhD from the Faculty of Education at the University of Innsbruck in the doctoral programme ‘Gender and Gender Relations in Transformation’.  Her research focuses on critical global citizenship education, queer-feminist, intersectional and postcolonial theories and critical race theory.