Islamic Identity, Postcoloniality, and Educational Policy: Schooling and Ethno-Religious Conflict in the Southern Philippines, 2nd ed. Jeffrey Y Ayala, Milligan Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 284 pp.

Abstract

School education has long been cast as a powerful panacea for the myriad of social, economic, and political ills that might afflict a society. Countless politicians and leaders have pointed to schools as the deus ex machina that can single-handedly fix intractable realities of social conflict, material dispossession, and political exclusion. Unsurprisingly, this naive faith in the redemptive power of schools has also recently generated an intense backlash. A new generation of postcolonial social theorists has turned such prevailing wisdom on its head, recasting schools as an instrument of social domination that reflects and entrenches the interests of the powerful. In between these two poles of naive celebration and postcolonial condemnation, others have tried to forge a middle path. In particular, numerous educationalists have sought to take onboard these postcolonial critiques, to acknowledge the ways in which schools have reflected the political and economic agendas of elites, while still also trying to forge a pragmatic path forward in which education might at least help to lessen
social disparities and promote a healthy democratic dialogue between communities.