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Title
The Racialised Funnel of Inequality: Public Primary Education in Mauritius |
Full text
http://hdl.handle.net/1885/281510 |
Date
2022 |
Author(s)
Bachraz, Vijetta |
Abstract
Education is often perceived as the great decolonising equaliser in many former colonies. Memories of racial and social inequalities instituted by colonial domination have been replaced with the conviction that social mobility through the education system is democratically afforded to all, regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion (Bereketeab, 2020). Yet, little is known about how in neoliberal times, their public education systems produce neocolonial social arrangements that serve the interests of the new dominant while creating racialised inequality through high-stakes examinations with genesis in colonisation.
This dissertation examines how the neocolonial state in pluri-ethnic Mauritius configures the primary education system to create and reproduce social and racial patterns of inequality by drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in two socio-economically and racially distinct schools with contrasting academic performance levels as case studies. This thesis unites Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and Critical Race Theory to illuminate how high-stakes examinations and educational policies preserve the interests of whiteness and the dominant class. It explores how high-stakes examinations structure practices within the field of primary education to instantiate the "new eugenics" (Baker, 2002, p. 670), the processes of selection, classification and elimination that reproduce racialised educational inequality.
This study employed a historical approach and a relational analysis to examine the two case studies at different levels, focusing on the island's history of colonisation, the local, national, and global contexts, and the macro educational structures that shape practices at the micro level of the family. This study finds that the upper and broader middle class of Indo-Mauritians (Mauritians of Indian ancestry), who benefit from the Hindu-dominant state, collude to reproduce historical patterns of classed and racialised educational advantage and disadvantage. This occurs behind the facade of meritocracy and constructions of intelligence shaped by the Certificate of Primary Education (CPE) high-stakes examinations. The focus on high-stakes examinations to gauge the health of the public education system generates compensatory educational policies and practices that reproduce systemic racism, (re)constructing the Creole (Mauritians of African ancestry) working class as deviating from standards of normality that define a proper person. The findings of this thesis make important theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to postcolonial sociology in studying how social transformation and neocolonial domination unfold through public education. |
Language
en_AU |
Type of publication
Thesis (PhD) |
Identifier
10.25911/Y8XW-PR24 |
Repository
Canberra - Australian National University
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Added to C-A: 2023-04-05;10:58:26 |
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