In this article Roland Sintos Coloma argues for the relevance of empire as an analytical category in educational research. He points out the silence in mainstream studies of education on the subject of empire, the various interpretive approaches to deploying empire as an analytic, and the importance of indigeneity in research on empire and education. Coloma examines three award‐winning books, Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End, and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, in order to delineate the heuristic spectrum of the use of empire in educational research. These texts are put in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of American, postcolonial, race/ethnic, and indigenous studies where questions of empire have received considerable attention. Ultimately, mobilizing empire as an analytical category will enable researchers, policymakers, and educators to establish new connections and dispute long‐standing views about discursive, structural, and affective dynamics at local, national, and global levels.
According to historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, “Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” If each society has a regime of truth, it can be inferred that each scholarly discipline or field of study has its own general politics of truth which regulates its intellectual conditions, boundaries, and memberships. Consequently, Foucault's assertion leads me to ask: What regime of truth operates in the field of history of education? What types of discourse does it accept as true and deem as false? How does it distinguish between and sanction true and false statements? What value and status are conferred upon those charged with saying what counts as true and those considered saying what counts as false or unacceptable? What are the effects of such a regime on the field's analytical and methodological development as well as on its practitioners?
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