Postcolonial Education and National Identity

<b>Recognizing the strategic role that national identities play in post-colonial struggles for justice this book conceptualizes a new approach to teaching national identity that following Hannah Arendt emphasizes children's ability to renew culture.</b> The book uses the Philippine colonial experience as a case study and includes a genealogy of Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'social' including an analysis of how she used this idea to explore the role that schools play within the political community. Azada-Palacios problematizes the way that national identity is valued as an educational goal in Philippine schools and the way that Philippine citizenship education continues to aspire towards a homogeneity of culture. Through an examination of colonial-era documents she traces this characteristic of colonial history and identifies this aspiration as an unreflective perpetuation of American colonial educational policy that has not been sufficiently criticized.