Post-Socialist Transformations in Comparative International Education: Monuments, Movements, and Metamorphoses

Abstract

The fate of the monuments to Soviet political leaders offers an ironic portrayal of educational research examining post-socialist transformations. In this chapter, we connect the movements and metamorphoses of supposedly immortal political leaders across different former socialist contexts with the perspectives on educational research. Our aim is to trouble – and make strange – dominating knowledge, while opening spaces for knowing otherwise. This chapter offers a decolonial reading of academic interpretations that positioned change as the removal of socialist ideology in the early 1990s and attempted to de-ideologize education as an inevitable convergence to Western systems through neoliberal education reforms. Such reforms (and research) have positioned the former socialist education systems on a linear path to Western modernity, while overlooking the diverse trajectories of post-socialist transformations. By carefully re-examining the historical and colonial legacies of post-socialist education, we offer comparative and international education researchers an alternative framework from which different education imaginaries become visible.