Postcolonial Education and National Identity: An Arendtian Re-imagination

By Rowena Azada-Palacios

Book Overview

Winner of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia 2025 Book Award

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. 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1350433349
• ISBN13: 9781350433342
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"