Description:
Offering a counter-discourse to the accepted liberal metanarrative of schooling in Micronesia, this volume argues that across the Pacific region, American-developed school systems are today non-neutral cultural players with quasi-colonialist credentials.
Review Quotes:
"Kupferman's book is a trenchant and thought-provoking critique of schooling in Micronesia that strongly contests its widely accepted role as the primary axis of development. It invites continued dialogue about the purpose and effects of schooling in the region. It would be a stimulating read for educators, anthropologists of education, postcolonial theorists, and scholars of Micronesia and the Pacific at large." (Rachana Agarwal, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 89 (2), June, 2016)
Disassembling and Decolonizing School in the Pacific: A Genealogy from Micronesia is one of the most impressive, intellectually sophisticated works of scholarship on Micronesia that I have ever read. It is a truly insightful study that examines critically the idea of schooling in Micronesia, and finds it to be anything but a force for decolonization. Much of the extant scholarship on the region views formal, Western-style education as an inevitable, desirable and necessary component of the modernist project. Kupferman's discursive approach brings a new, challenging, and much needed interdisciplinary perspective to an old, tired, taken-for-granted topic. This work will also be of interest to scholars and educators dealing with colonial and other externally imposed systems of education.
David Hanlon, Professor of History and former Director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaii, Mānoa
A powerful and original achievement, David Kupferman astutely puts to work contemporary theory in the study of state-sponsored schooling in Micronesia. Covering an impressive array of materials across the fields of education, cultural studies, and Pacific Islands studies, Kupferman demonstrates the strength of theoretical intelligence to retrieve the politics neutralized by institutionalized knowledge systems of schooling. This is a brave book by a courageous scholar.
Hannah M. Tavares, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations, University of Hawaii, Mānoa