Against the Erasure Machine: Scholasticide, Memory and the Power of Pedagogy |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
– Milan Kundera
In an age where culture is the primary battlefield, authoritarianism thrives on ignorance, historical amnesia and the brutal aesthetics of cruelty, all normalized as common sense. This is a policy of scholasticide – a full-scale assault on the past – one that aims to erase not only history but the very capacity to critically engage with it. We witness this in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, where education is methodically destroyed, universities obliterated and unimaginable violence becomes the foundation of daily life.
In this chaos, young minds are stripped of the tools to understand their history and collective selves, to challenge power and to envision a future free from oppression. Such policies are not only crimes against individual lives; they are crimes against history itself, erasing the very memory of resistance and the struggles that have shaped the present. In the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, historical amnesia has taken on a similarly insidious form, one that deliberately fosters ignorance, particularly surrounding the nation’s deep-seated histories of racial violence, colonialism and the ongoing struggles for justice. Books are banned, critical ideas erased from the curriculum, history is whitewashed, dissenting educators fired or threatened with prosecution, and students protesting for Palestinian freedom are abducted, detained and denied due process.
Critical pedagogy: connecting ideas to action
The fight for justice requires the reclamation of education........