The Pinocchio Effect

We are in an age where automatization and systematic exclusion is beyond common sense within public schools. The failure of society in the United States to address social problems spills over into schools where youth who refuse to conform to the broken system are labelled as deviant and legitimately excluded. Students who conform are made real by the system and allowed back into society to keep manufacturing the same inequalities. This is the Pinocchio Effect. It involves the legitimization of hegemonic knowledge and the oppression of bodies, mind, and spiritualities. Students are forced through a public education that anesthetizes and inculcates an imaginicide. It is not what students know and feel but rather what knowledge benefits societal profits. This is an issue of social and cognitive justice which requires a decolonization of the mind. Educators can engage in a decolonial praxis where they are actively analysing themselves, society, knowledge, and the realities of students. The standardization of curriculum must be combatted by educators engaging in conscientiza o and consciencism to understand their and students' spiritualities and identities. The Pinocchio Effect analyzes the impact of colonialities within U.S. public education by examining the learning experiences that influence teachers' and students' spiritualties, affecting the construction and oppression of their identities. Through decolonial autoethnography, the author examines how colonialities of being function within U.S. schools to create coloniality as a hegemonic philosophy of praxis that is perceived as liberatory instead of another oppressive system. Furthermore, contested spaces in which spiritualties as connected with knowledges and languages intersect as a result of hidden, written, and performed curriculum are analyzed. Elizabeth Janson examines how educators can decolonize the classroom, which functions as a political arena as well as a critical space of praxis in order to reveal how realities and knowledges are made nonexistent--an epistemic blindness and privilege.