Abstract

This article elaborates, through decolonial phenomenological analysis, the author’s concept of pedagogy of the stupid, a metacritical idea that offers a critique of the colonial practice of constructing colonized people as intellectually, politically, and ethically incapable of self-governance, cultural growth, and epistemic pursuits. Drawing upon the author’s experiences and concepts from the constellation of countries and people that constitute postcolonial India and the country of Bhutan, the author issues a critique of colonial constructions of knowledge through which the aim of producing colonized subjects depended on miseducation. The article concludes with a discussion of Bhutan’s “Green School System” of education as an effort to cultivate a form of decolonial practice and a phenomenology of the precolonial traditions of pedagogy in India.