CURRICULUM WITHOUT TERRITORY: THE FORGETTING OF RURALITY IN COLOMBIAN EDUCATION

Abstract

Rural education in Colombia is shaped by historical tensions that converge between homogenization and the recognition of difference. During modernity, the school system consolidated an urban-centered curriculum, grounded in ideals of progress and universalization which, while intended to guarantee cohesion, produced exclusion by disregarding the knowledge, productive practices, and worldviews of peasant communities. In contrast, the postmodern perspective opens a horizon toward epistemic plurality and the acknowledgment of diversity as the foundation for building context-based educational proposals.

From a qualitative approach within an interpretive paradigm, and drawing on authors such as Bauman and Mires, rurality cannot be conceived as a periphery of the city, but rather as a vital space for the production of knowledge and alternatives to dominant models. In this sense, the school must be re-signified as a place of encounter between ancestral knowledge, community practices, and contemporary scientific contributions, enabling a territorialized curriculum that responds to the cultural, social, and productive conditions of the territories.

The analysis argues that rural education should not be limited to the transmission of homogeneous content, but must become a social and political praxis that contributes to the dignity of peasant life and to the transformation of power relations around knowledge. The incorporation of historical memory, food security, and identity rootedness are recognized as central axes of an educational project capable of strengthening community cohesion and projecting sustainable development from the local level. Rural education thus emerges as an emancipatory possibility and as a key scenario in the construction of the nation, where a situated curriculum acts as a mediator between social justice, cultural identity, and territorial sustainability.