Cognitive Imperialism

This is like the mother essay that just keeps on giivng! Here's another excerpt from

http://schoolingtheworld.org/a-thousand-rivers/

The title truly fits the essay in many ways.. it's leading me up a thousand different rivers of inferences!

Marie Battiste, a Mi'kmaw education professor at the University of Saskatchewan, has a very clear term for the tendency of one powerful group to claim the authority to define its own cognitive traits and preferences as normal and desirable and all other ways of thinking, learning, and understanding the world as deficits and disabilities: she calls it"cognitive imperialism." It's the cognitive equivalent of racism. It leads naturally, of course, to a kind of cognitive Manifest Destiny that assumes that one way of thinking, of learning, of being in the world is destined to overwhelm and replace all others.