Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End (review)

Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End. By John Willinsky (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 304 pp. $22.95 cloth $19.95 paper

Echoing Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York, 1974) (107), Willinsky begins an overarching argument by noting that between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, Western scholars constructed a system of knowledge and education that absorbed a massive amount of information from the exploration of new worlds. These luminaries then categorized the data comparatively, dividing the world between "us" and "them," privileging Western civilization and subsequently providing intellectual justification for imperialism and its many evils.

In our own century, nationalist movements and decolonization have done much to challenge this vision, and in the schools of the West, good progress has been made in eliminating racist concepts and Western triumphalism from the curriculum. But powerful remnants remain, and prejudice and discrimination have not been eradicated from everyday life. The author concludes this basic argumentation by insisting that students have "a right" to be taught about the imperialist foundation in Western education (192). Textbooks and teachers cannot be silent; educators in every "domain" of the curriculum have a moral obligation to give "additional lessons" (247), which teach this history (for example, how mainstream biology formerly supported racism [166]).

In Part I, Willinsky traces the five-century-long construction of the Western worldview. He shows how it was fueled by a passion for identifying and naming all aspects of the New World (Chapter 2), how its conceptualizations informed the practice of "imperial show and tell" (Chapter 3), and how it evolved into a commitment to education that ignored the violence to non-European peoples and cultures (Chapter 4).

In Part II (more multidisciplinary than interdisciplinary), Willinsky examines selected influential texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that propounded, or still evince, strong traces of the imperialistic view. He surveys these in separate chapters devoted to history, geography, science, language, and literature, before concluding with his fullest chapter of advocacy.

Although the book is mainly directed to high school teachers, scholars who peruse it will probably find little new in the work. Part I, however, offers a useful survey of recent scholarship on cultural imperialism, and an incentive to rethink the emphases that we give to certain points in our imperialism. Part II, which offers the author's original contribution, seems dated, inadequately supported, and, at times, mislead- ing. Although Willinsky briefly acknowledges the sensitivity of today's schools to cultural imperialism (4), and has, throughout his book, only the highest of moral purposes, he dwells too much on older textbooks and too fully on textbooks themselves. Readers will wonder, Where are the teachers, and what about student-centered classrooms and "teaching moments"?

The author often argues that teachers should do more, but offers insufficient evidence to support his claim that they are not doing enough to convert their students into "little Roland Bartheses" (155). My own discussions with curriculum supervisors in the Washington, D.C., area (justified by the author's geographical reach [19]) suggest the need for a much more nuanced evaluation. The story of secondary education in the late 1990s, in many places--often with the collaboration of university faculty--is more about "Learning to Undivide the World."

Sandra Horvath-Peterson
Georgetown University

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