Pulling together/tearing apart: low-cost private schools, insider poetic methods, and the black radical tradition

In the proliferation of low-cost private schools (LCPS), edupreneurs claim that the educational model provides quality education to help eradicate global poverty. Yet the operations of LCPS promulgate new forms of racialised extraction and commodification within modern conditions. In this paper, the authors offer insider experiences to further interrogate racialised colonial formations shaping market-based approaches and scalable educational strategies of edupreneurs through venture capital and big tech companies. The authors point to racial capitalism and empire-building for (re)examining how ongoing processes of racialisation permeate the different levels of LCPS. They utilise insider poetics as a method to communicate relationality, attuned to the diasporic black radical tradition of Harambee and what they call the pulling together of collective schooling, juxtaposing it against the tearing apart of education. Doing so extends interdisciplinary theorising and embraces creative method-making to open up possibilities in international education.