Colonialism and curricular coloniality in General Education. Notes for a discussion

Abstract

This article visits the origin and development of the Faculty of General Education of the University of Puerto Rico that integrated, in its sociogenesis, some variants of Ortega's thought and that led to the visions of the movement called "General Education" canonically promoted from fulcrums of power. North-European intellectual and imposed on the Puerto Rican reality with significant consequences. As an objective, we are interested in examining the assumptions of educational philosophy and of the curriculum that prevailed to detect in them an important and decisive episode of intellectual colonialism. With the lens of decoloniality and the critique of the triple coloniality - of being, knowledge and power - itself that permeated the threshold academic program of the university students of the UPR in Río Piedras, the author attempts an exposition of the reasons for which the Puerto Rican academy subsumed itself in a Eurocentric soup that delayed its identity sociogenesis. The chosen methodology consists of the content analysis of documents that collect the foundation of the main academic institutions and curricular strategies and of the intensive dissemination process of the "General Education Movement" in the Faculty of General Education. We identify as plausible veins for further analysis courses, seminars, activities and programs. As a closing suggestion, we consider that our commitment is to contribute so that the Western canon is understood as a valid way, among others, of approaching knowledge and education, but in no way exclusive. The pivot of this work is the critique of the ‘world system’ and the hegemonic values ??of modernity that are inherent in it, with the proposal of decoloniality as a critical lens that sets off an educational event that is articulated with overwhelming criteria of epistemic domination.