Deculturalization vs. Heritage
The process of stripping away a group’s culture and replacing it with dominant values through schooling.
What Joel Spring means by “deculturalization”?
The “family policing system.”
According to Roberts, what she calls the child welfare system?
It spreads Western educational models globally, often reinforcing inequality.
How globalization affect U.S. schooling?
Dismantling harmful systems and building new ones based on care and equity.
What abolition means according to Roberts?
Native Americans (boarding schools), African Americans, or Mexican Americans.
What is one group historically targeted by deculturalization in U.S. schools?
They claim to protect but often surveil, punish, and separate families of color.
What is the central contradiction Roberts identifies in “care” systems?
Indigenous knowledge sharing, bilingual programs, or global solidarity movements.
What are examples of cultural exchange that resists globalization’s control?
By prioritizing relationships, healing, and community power instead of discipline and testing.
How abolitionist thinking can reshape schooling?
To assimilate minority groups and eliminate native languages.
What was the purpose of English-only education policies?
She argues real care must come from communities, not punitive institutions.
How Roberts links care to abolition?
Neoliberalism — prioritizing efficiency, testing, and privatization.
What is the global economic trend Spring links to education policy?
New systems of care, safety, and mutual support.
What Roberts says abolition must build, not just tear down?
By positioning white, Protestant values as superior and others as inferior or in need of “civilization.”
How schooling reinforce social hierarchies, according to Spring?
Mandatory reporting, school policing, welfare checks, etc.
What is one example where care becomes control in modern systems.
By exporting dominant cultures and suppressing local identities worldwide.
How globalization might reproduce deculturalization on a larger scale?
Both challenge systems that erase identity and replace them with structures that restore community and culture.
How abolition and deculturalization connect?
By affirming students’ languages, histories, and identities rather than erasing them.
How culturally sustaining pedagogy can resist deculturalization today?
Community-led networks that provide support, resources, and safety without punishment.
What is the alternative model of care Roberts proposes?
Creating community-based, culturally-rooted schools emphasizing collective care and justice.
What is one abolitionist approach that could challenge inequities caused by globalization?
Imagine your own abolitionist classroom — what’s one key feature?
Open response: student voice, restorative justice, cultural curriculum, cultural literature etc.