What Does Decolonized International Education Look Like?

While living and teaching at the United World College in Japan (2018–2020), one of my students who was Japanese shared that she studied at an Indian Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) school in Tokyo before enrolling there. This took me by surprise. She said her school had a mix of Japanese and Indian students because they valued the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education that the CBSE Board offered. Out of the different options of international schools in Tokyo, the Indian one had a unique selling proposition (USP) that her parents sought. I could connect this back to my own experience growing up. I was born in Liberia and went to a CBSE school there in my formative years, and I remember learning alongside students from many nationalities from the Global South.

As with most national boards established in foreign countries, CBSE schools are prevalent in areas with significant Indian expatriate communities, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Singapore, Qatar, and various other countries in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. To the best of my knowledge, you don’t find CBSE schools (about 240 across 26 countries) in areas with no Indian expats. This is not the situation with International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) schools outside the United Kingdom (about 10,000 across 160 countries) or the number of International Baccalaureate (IB) schools worldwide (about 5700 in 2024), which started off serving expat populations but have grown to areas with no expats or international populations. Parents from the Global South enroll their children into these international schools largely to improve their social and economic mobility by accessing more opportunities for higher education and careers abroad.

A worthwhile reason—to improve one’s capital.

It only took a minute in the system of international education to realize that “international” refers to the United Kingdom, Western Europe, the United States, and Canada, and “education” facilitates the spread of cultural narratives and products from the Global North to over 160 countries globally, reinforcing influence and soft power. There was unfortunately very little India in international. So while the reasons to enroll into and even teach in IGCSE and IB schools are worthwhile, they could be counter-productive in the movement of decolonial futures. This is something everyone involved needs to deeply consider:

Whose version of a common destiny are we co-creating?

As I travel the world from international school to international school, some serving expatriates and others serving the idealistic mission of global peace and sustainability, or a combination thereof, I sit here thinking that I am missing an accreditation system that is Global South born and also represents priorities from the Global Majority. This comes from a place of following innovations in international education stemming from the Global South and seeing many great examples of schools opening up with wonderful missions and pedagogies and they all get stuck at the same roadblock—accreditation—and they end up almost defaulting to either the IB, IGCSE, or Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accreditations and often prescribed curricula.

There is a gaping hole.

An accrediting body evaluates whether a school follows agreed upon norms in curricula standards, learning, teaching, and administrative practices. One can argue that the very idea of accreditation is, in and of itself, a colonial product, so in that respect it makes perfect sense that such a hole exists. From another perspective, given the power of education in nurturing / conditioning humans, in the words of a colleague, Cary Reid, “anything else but a system supporting Western capitalism would never have been allowed to succeed.”

I believe we are at an inflection point in North-South power relations and have an unwavering belief in the power of education to co-create a better world. To me that looks like not just more representation of Global South voices in Global North led international schooling and accreditation but a more participatory and decolonial approach that does not reproduce the systemic inflections of its predecessors. Maybe micro-credentialing a wide range of educational philosophies and pedagogical approaches can be a thing. This could look like many things.

What does decolonized international education look like?

What would the goals of such a system be? What worldviews should it promote? Where would the funding to develop such a system come from? How can it decentralize credentialing? What design principles should underlie such a system?

If you are interested in a dialogue on this central question, register your interest here. Let’s see where the flow takes us.