Abstract
While passage of No Child Left Behind legislation has little to no legal bearing on most island-states in Micronesia, the language deployed since its passage is already a normalized feature of the narratives of the benevolence and ontological nature of schooling at work in the region. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which this normalizing discourse operates at the levels of the child, parent, and family as schooling subjects. Here I trace the construction of the child through the displacement of the home and community as sites of legitimate learning by the normalization of school as the location of “true” knowledge. Additionally, I consider the ways in which indigenous conceptions of family are erased by a western hetero-normative ideal, and the ways that parents, through recent “parents as teachers” initiatives and parent “resource centers,” are displaced from their own children, as well as from local definitions of parenting and child rearing. Finally, I explore intersecting nodes of the development of the child with that of the state, and how processes of governmentality, the policing of the parent, and colonization dressed up as national “development” circulate through discourses of beneficence and the discursive practices of educational consultancies throughout the region.
“Although grown-up now, with jobs and families of their own, the daughters and sons speak as if bent on regressing, as if they could capture and hold fast the shadowy outlines of the past, as if time could stand still, as if childhood never ended.”
Günther Grass 2010
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Notes
- 1.
The logo referred to here was first publicized by EPPSO in The Marshall Islands Journal on January 14, 2011, but was quietly replaced by a second image due to copyright infringement concerns on the part of EPPSO (see “‘Nico’ Wins” 2011).
- 2.
The use of the acronym PREL here refers to Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, the Regional Educational Laboratory contractor for the Pacific region, and does not refer to the Regional Educational Laboratory.
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Kupferman, D.W. (2013). The Mother and Child Reunion: Governing the Family. In: Disassembling and Decolonizing School in the Pacific. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4673-2_6
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