The Model Minority and the Gospel of Schoolvation | Society for the Philosophical Study of Education | Columbia College, Chicago, IL, November 8-9

I’m thrilled to be presenting at the upcoming Society for the Philosophical Study of Education at Columbia College in Chicago, IL, from November 8-9. This is a bit of a new foray for me. I am a geographer who is currently housed in religious studies, and I never thought that my work would also be considered ‘philosophy of education.’ However, my colleagues in educational studies have convinced me that my work on Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asia-Pacific Christians and their public activism around schools means that I have something to say.

Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success is a very important takeoff point for my paper. It’s a book I’ve also reviewed.

My paper critiques the internalization of the model minority mythology among conservative Asian Americans because they have deployed it in their politics as a generator of grounded theologies. It’s titled ‘The Model Minority and the Gospel of Schoolvation.‘ Here’s the abstract:

This paper explores the circulation of philosophies of education among upwardly mobile Asian Americans. Despite the stated axes of political difference among liberal and conservative Asian Americans on sexual politics, tax revenue, and the role of government in welfare provision, one point of philosophical convergence among Asian Americans is that public education plays what Sam Rocha (forthcoming) calls a ‘salvific’ role in delivering young people from downward class mobility. Preaching the ‘gospel of schoolvation,’ Asian Americans such as Michelle Rhee (a Democrat) and Hak-Shing William Tam (a Republican and one of the five official proponents of California’s Proposition 8) use positivistic empirical criteria to declare that schools must do more to save their students from racial marginalization. Indeed, this paper’s central argument is that this version of the gospel of schoolvation grounds a racially constituted philosophy of education to construe Asian Americans as a model minority, a racialized group that models how empirically rigorous education can lead a racialized community out of marginalization from a white mainstream. Showing that this philosophy has in turn been exported to Asia-Pacific nation-states to fuel their participation in a global economy, I probe how race is wrapped up with soteriological accounts of schools, challenging philosophers of education to explore how educational theories construct grounded political realities.

All are welcome. Here’s the schedule. I look forward to the interaction at this conference, especially because other scholars of religion and the social sciences (especially Silas Morgan) will also be there masquerading as philosophers of education.

UPDATE: At this conference, I was made secretary for the group for one year, which means that at least persons at this conference might consider me to some extent an ex officio ‘philosopher of education.’ However, I prefer to say that the SPSE is the society that is my ‘teaching workshop,’ a group that I try to attend where people help me think through how I teach. Certainly, this has helped with the preparation of teaching statements, but more importantly, it has helped me become more intentional as a teacher, and for that I am grateful.