In this presentation, I discuss the critical analysis of and interpellations to formal education systems advanced by Latin American Indigenous intellectuals in the second half of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries: Ariruma Kowii, Elisa Loncón, Aura Cumes, Fernando Pairicán, Pablo Marimán, Fortino Domínguez, among others. These Indigenous intellectuals have produced a powerful historical-political thought in the past 50 years, in which they have underscored the thesis of a colonial continuity that marks the relationship between national societies and indigenous people in the present. From this thesis, they directly confront the national narratives and how they permeate school curricula. In particular, they question the lack of an intercultural dialogue, a lineal, stagist conceptualization of history, and narratives of métissage that have marginalized the cultural diversity of colonized peoples and racialized social groups.

In the eighteenth century, as the British began acquiring territories in India, they encountered thousands of indigenous schools that taught classical and vernacular languages. These schools used handwritten palm-leaf manuscripts to teach language, literature, medicine, law and mathematics. The indigenous vernacular schools were conducted in 10 languages with nine different scripts. The colonial state edited and printed indigenous manuscripts and created new textbooks wherever there was a lacuna. This presentation explores the debates surrounding the complex process of selecting, editing and printing textbooks for primary schools in nineteenth-century colonial India. It will also compare this process with the ideas of decolonisation that influenced and created a monolithic textbook culture in independent India.