Decolonizing education in Latin America: critical environmental and intercultural education as an indigenous pluriversal alternative

Abstract

Following an argument that the 2030 Agenda consolidates a neoliberal hegemonic ‘development’ system, we analyze how SDG4 deepens an instrumental and utilitarian ‘education for sustainable development’. Alternatively, the Epistemologies of the South are presented as ways of knowing that are capable of accommodating a critical environmental and intercultural education (CEIE). Under a qualitative methodology, two extensive ethnographic studies were carried out, based on convivial individual and collective interviews with indigenous peoples. In addition, documentary analysis was carried out. This strategy made it possible to analyze two different cases of intercultural education (one of ‘that which is’ and the other of ‘that which is not’) in Latin America: the model of intercultural bilingual education of the schools for the qom in Rosario, and the autonomous education model of the Zapatista schools in Chiapas. We show how the experience of Zapatista’s ‘true education’ allows us to look beyond ‘development’ and ‘schooling’, to where life is a melding of ecosystem(s) and culture(s).