As a genre, the education documentary has gained mainstream status at film festivals and on streaming platforms over the past twenty years. Disparate in style and aesthetics, and lacking a common set of formal and narrative conventions, feature-length films such as To Be and To Have (France, 2002), Boys of Baraka (US, 2005), Please Vote for Me (China, 2007), Girl Rising (US, 2013), Our People Will Be Healed (Canada, 2017), and docu-series such as Harrow: A Very British School (UK, 2013) are instead thematically bound by their common object of study: primary school education and its relationship to the production of social and political subjectivity. Institutions around the world are struggling to determine what core skills and values will best equip their pupils to keep pace with the massive socio-economic and political changes afoot in the twenty-first century. Education documentaries have focalized these transformations in the context of specific settings, attending to the ways in which localized human agents who inhabit the roles of student, educator, or administrator define possibilities for social relation.

In settler nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, as well as in European nations undergoing multicultural transformations, one of the central stakes in curriculum and pedagogy derives from what Charles Taylor has called “the politics of recognition.” The demand for recognition is predicated upon, in his words, “the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being.” Identity, in turn, is presupposed to be partially shaped by (mis)recognition, such that individuals and groups may alternately thrive or suffer damage through the enabling or distorting images projected back upon them. Indeed, “Nonrecognition or misrecognition,” Taylor maintains, “can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” Within a liberal democracy, the political recognition of cultural particularity of all members of the society is also congruent with a certain form of universalism that regards respect for diverse cultures as ultimately also serving the basic interest of society at large. Whether referencing groups or individuals, the politics of recognition have navigated between legitimizing differences of identity through the latter’s claim to something close to ontological status, and alternately, advancing claims to performativity and elective choice.