It was 2016, and teachers at an expensive Karachi private school were clutching large bags of cotton and craft glue, ready to deck the windows with silver glitter and snowballs. A December holiday party for three-year-olds was in the works. A Christmas tree was deemed too divisive a decoration, but snowflakes were acceptably secular. The children would recognize winter precipitation from episodes of Peppa Pig, and the mania for Frozen was still at its height:  my objections to the decor were overruled and met with eyerolls.

Every child in that preschool class, my own included, learned to associate December with glittering snow, songs about drinking hot cocoa and an array of animals from Disney movies: reindeer, foxes, bunny rabbits. In that way, you could argue, there was continuity with what they learned the rest of the year: songs about farm animals such as pigs and black and white spotted cows; images of blonde farmers in denim overalls; the noises made by the occupants of buses, always plain yellow and bound for American public school. In second grade, the children collected juice boxes to distribute to underpaid building janitors, to Uplift The Dignity of Labor. The same year, they learned about the evils of the caste system in India. Starting in fifth grade, they studied history books by Peter Moss, and learned that before the British arrived, we had no trains and no universities, and our ancestors were constantly at the mercy of roadside bandits and Superstition.

Here’s a brief list of a few things they didn’t learn in preschool: that much of their milk came from buffaloes, that there are no sweet pink piglets going oink in the farms that raise their food, that the wheels of a riotously decorated bus in Lahore can also go round and round. In cities, academic exposure to wildlife was restricted to the handful of friends who had pets, and the crows and kites that circled the summer sky. A few lucky children had a school with a native tree in a courtyard, but most did not.

The children would recognize winter precipitation from episodes of Peppa Pig, and the mania for Frozen was still at its height:  my objections to the decor were overruled and met with eyerolls.

Much has been said about informal curriculum, but not enough is said about formal curriculum, aside from analyses of the jingoism in secondary school history narratives, which is well documented. As a kindergarten curriculum writer today, I know the value judgments inherent in what is and is not included. I also know that urban Pakistan is far from unique; education across the global South remains the white man’s last burden, willingly carried by ambitious and well-meaning educators eager to give their students a leg up in an increasingly precarious world.

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From the end of World War II, through the Cold War, and up until the late 1980s, we saw the increasing influence of neoliberal economics and globalization on developing countries. While they may have achieved de facto independence, dismantling the legacy of imperialism is a struggle that continues today, especially when it comes to education. In the Indian subcontinent, new constitutions were built over the framework of British laws, so that the codification of religious identity and caste became solidified in the new Indian and Pakistani states. For some states, the necessity of taking sides as the Cold War began meant that nation-building (and therefore education) became inextricably linked with their most powerful alliance, such as in Pakistan’s relationship with the United States. Others, in spite of a stated commitment to democracy and equity, found that the growing power of the World Bank and IMF often made it impossible to fund education for the most vulnerable, as was the case in most of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the Reagan years.

While they may have achieved de facto independence, dismantling the legacy of imperialism is a struggle that continues today, especially when it comes to education.

This was no accident: colonizers and superpowers restructured economies in the Global South to allow the growth of European and American industries. While colonialism may have been overthrown by the middle of the twentieth century, imperialistic and racialized forms of governance, alliances and economics maintained the hegemony of Western powers, vastly complicating the educational landscape of Asia and Africa today.

The creation of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, posed unique challenges in geographies which were relatively new to the European proclivity for categorizing people and solidifying what was once fluid and mutable. Prior to departure of the British in 1947, north Indians had already moved away from their syncretic cultural history and language. Both new states struggled over the next two decades to ascribe religion, class and caste to their proper places in the context of national identity. With young populations in which children were the majority, education immediately became the battleground where these issues would be decided. Pakistan’s government-sanctioned curricula took on the project of building nationhood, interrupted and rewritten with each coup. Elite beneficiaries of the British departure, meanwhile, crafted a parallel education system, one which swore allegiance to everything and nothing, all at once.

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My child came home from school with a coloring page from Urdu class. At the top were the words, “Kiss nay banaaya hum sab ko?” and, below, he had colored things Allah has created: birds, trees, children holding hands and circling a globe. Urdu class was the only place references to Allah were sanctioned (or more likely, overlooked). He struggled with the alphabet and never got the nuktas right. My husband told him that back in our day, we had to study Islamiyat in Urdu, too. Our son asked why; we had no idea. It all sort of fell into the vague bucket of things you were allowed to not excel in. Some children were even exempt from these subjects altogether; their parents proudly wielded blue or maroon passports and argued with principals who would eventually cow down.

Pakistan is not the only casualty of a confused implementation of a new curriculum, especially relating to postcolonial language instruction. Congo adopted French as its official language and language of instruction in schools after its independence in 1960. In spite of a recent authenticity campaign aimed at revitalizing local culture, French remains a key way to gain cultural currency, and to be accepted as a member of the elite. Students, whether in Congo, Pakistan, or India, when asked about their experiences of speaking French or English in school, recall being punished for speaking Swahili, Urdu or Tamil, but few found it problematic as children.

In the upper echelons of Karachi society, it is somehow en vogue to be bad at Urdu but also to express respect for it.

This was not necessarily what postcolonial educational policy aimed at: the democratisation of elitist Anglophone education was aimed at encouraging socioeconomic mobility, but political unrest and economic hardship prevented the state from making any real gains towards this goal. Urdu’s own contested history doesn’t help; the same language which was used to mobilize Muslim dissent against empire in northern India was also used as a tool of cultural hegemony against speakers of other languages, most notably Bengali and Balochi. For the generations born after colonialism, English, the language of Hollywood, was almost neutral ground. English became the language generations of brown children began to dream in.

My children say they speak three languages: English, Spanish (they learned to count to ten on Sesame Street) and Dollese. Dollese is the language their dolls speak. “What about Urdu,” I ask? They shrug, sheepish. In the upper echelons of Karachi society, it is somehow en vogue to be bad at Urdu but also to express respect for it. It signals that you have enough class privilege to have gone to a school where everybody spoke good English, and your family is cultured (and wealthy) enough to only ever need English…but also that you are appropriately woke, aware of the nuances of how language, class and a postcolonial legacy interact. From that position of genteel solidarity, you can safely express the opinion that it is just impractical and sentimental to switch to Urdu language instruction in schools. And while class might be Pakistan’s least interrogated cultural construct, and therefore the most urgent to understand, there is also simple psychology and cognitive theory behind the loss of the vernacular. While we may speak of some things – what to cook for dinner, what to wear to a friend’s wedding – in Urdu, Punjabi, or Sindhi, we tend to speak of others – such as postcolonial phenomenon, or the epistemic tensions of understanding them – in English alone. As we lack the vocabulary to translate our own experiences from one language to another, we become more than code-switchers; we switch entire selves, entire worlds, on and off at will, thereby crystallizing those very tensions.

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The project of international development, particularly as it relates to children in the Global South, assumes a framework that is non-colonial, collaborative and inclusive, without which any effort would simply be a waste of resources. The role of powerful international organisations, including the ones creating curriculum for Pakistani schools, is represented as altruistic. Every Pakistani child who has held a Statement of Entry to a Cambridge exam, often considered an exorbitant investment by parents, has read the sentence reminding them that CAIE is a registered charity in the United Kingdom. Young nation states are generally characterized as backward, so that the concept of development is stuffed with discourses that reflect world hierarchies. In this hierarchy, trainers from Cambridge host conferences for Pakistani teachers, reminding them to make learning Fun and Relevant for their students. Students take Fun and Relevant exams for several years in a row. The relevance can’t be contested in a system whose highest expression is a degree from a Western institution.

Urdu’s own contested history doesn’t help; the same language which was used to mobilize Muslim dissent against empire in northern India was also used as a tool of cultural hegemony against speakers of other languages

At nineteen, sitting in a history class in rural Western Massachusetts, I was shocked to learn the history of my own people for the first time. Whatever I had known about South Asia, outside the parameters determined by Cambridge experts or the state, had been through family lore and independent reading. My early education wasn’t entirely a wash though: I sailed through classes on ancient Rome, the history of Western art, and British novels. I was able to follow my friends’ pop culture references, and shared their nostalgia for the books, TV shows, and trends of their youth. I didn’t relate much to the kids from China or Romania, whose homesickness had a ferocity about it. When I did encounter a Pakistani who struggled with English, or with “fitting in,” it was an instant marker of class, and I was a good decade away from deconstructing that behemoth.

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Critical race theorist Tara Yosso writes: “Racism is often well disguised as the rhetoric of shared ‘normative’ values and ‘neutral’ social scientific principles and practices.” Every academic field today is affected by gatekeeping which prevents disenfranchised peoples from being active participants in creating the knowledge which comes to define the normative culture, but perhaps none more so than pedagogy. Paulo Freire wrote about this phenomenon decades ago, asserting that, “the educator has the duty of not being neutral.”

Where do curriculum writers, private schools, or well-meaning teachers come into this paradigm, then? It was once argued that an interrogation of the values guiding children’s education in the developing world could only be achieved by recruiting researchers from the postcolonial world. However, merely involving communities of color or indigenous peoples cannot correct a structural problem baked into our history and woven into our social fabric. The broader question is whether it is even possible to have a consensus on what constitutes a good education – and whether it is possible to divorce the dialogue around this issue from neoliberal economics and globalization.