Oceania and the history of education

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we offer a survey of histories of education in the region commonly known as ‘Oceania’, which broadly encompasses the subregions today known as Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The first part of this article addresses ‘the history of education in Oceania’ as a topic of both interest and omission. In the second part of this article, we attend to the question of how Oceania was crucial to the formation of northern and western European systems of scientific knowledge. Overall, we propose that working with ‘Oceania’ as a frame of vision in the history of education has the potential not only to address some big gaps in the literature, but also to productively challenge some of our field’s foundational narratives about progress, land, nations, system-building, and colonialism.