Applying Litland to Decolonialising and Demasculinising In Education: A Note on Metaphysics, Logic and Epistemology in Philosophy of Education (6)

In educational discussion, “decolonisation” is often used in ways that slide rapidly between slogan, aspiration, diagnosis, programme, critique, policy label, moral demand, curricular intervention, institutional restructuring, and even a general mood of suspicion toward inherited canons. One result is that debates frequently become confused at the outset. People argue over whether decolonisation is essential to education, or whether it has been misunderstood, or whether it is too radical or not radical enough, before first asking a prior and more disciplined question: what sort of thing is “decolonisation in education” supposed to be?

That prior question is exactly the kind of question Litland’s route through real definition discussed in the previous note encourages. Instead of beginning by asking whether decolonisation is essential to a just education, or whether it necessarily involves particular curricular or institutional consequences, one first asks whether the term picks out a single educational property with a unified real definition, whether it names a manifold of related but distinct definitions, whether it is a generated educational entity constituted by a family of relations and practices, or whether it is functioning more loosely as a regulative slogan whose practical uses outrun its ontological discipline. Put in a Finean idiom, we are not yet asking what belongs to the essence of decolonisation. We are asking whether “decolonisation” is even the right kind of educational item to bear an essence in a disciplined way, and if so, what sort of definitional structure would support it.

The first and perhaps most obvious result of approaching the term this way is that it becomes difficult to believe that there is one single explicit definition that exhausts its educational nature. There are contexts in which “decolonisation” is used to mean widening a curriculum beyond a narrow Eurocentric canon. There are others in which it means exposing the historical entanglement of disciplines, institutions, and knowledge forms with empire, slavery, extraction, racial hierarchy, and civilisational self-authorisation. In still other contexts it means rethinking authority in the classroom, redistributing epistemic legitimacy, altering who is represented as a knower, changing institutional governance, or unsettling inherited norms of assessment and academic prestige. Sometimes it is even used to mean a broader transformation of subjectivity, language, historical memory, and political imagination. If one tried to force all this into a single neat explicit definition, the result becomes either trivially broad or artificially narrow.

Litland’s idea of an essential manifold becomes illuminating. Instead of assuming that “decolonisation” must have one canonical definition if it is to be meaningful, one could say that the educational term functions through a manifold of legitimate definitions. In one setting it may be defined through curriculum, in another through epistemic authority, in another through institutional memory, in another through pedagogical relation, in another through the exposure of hidden colonial dependencies in disciplinary knowledge. The question would then not be which one is the uniquely correct definition, but what follows from each of them, and what, if anything, survives across them as definition-invariant. That surviving core would then be a candidate for the more essential content of the educational term.

Much educational debate currently oscillates between two unsatisfactory positions. One says that decolonisation is obviously one thing and that those who resist it are either morally compromised or conceptually obtuse. The other says that the term is so vague, elastic, and politically overloaded that it should be abandoned. A Litland-style approach opens a third possibility. The term may be neither a single sharply bounded concept nor a mere rhetorical vibe. It may instead have a structured manifold. That means two people can be using different real definitions of decolonisation without either simply speaking nonsense, while it can still remain a serious question whether their usages belong to the same manifold at all and whether there is any stable core to be recovered from their intersection.

Once this point is granted, we can ask more carefully what kinds of definitions are in play. Some uses of decolonisation in education look almost explicitly definable, or at least quasi-explicit. Consider the curricular claim that a course is decolonised if and only if it includes texts, thinkers, and traditions previously excluded by an imperial canon. As it stands, that is not a very good definition, because inclusion by itself may be superficial, tokenistic, or compatible with leaving intact the hierarchy that renders the additions decorative. But it is close to the shape of an explicit definition. It identifies relatively formal criteria, modification of reading lists, restructuring of modules, changing exemplars, diversifying case studies. In that context, “decolonisation” begins to function like an operational property of curriculum design. One can see how it is being used, what counts as evidence for its presence, and how it might be tracked institutionally.

Yet one immediately sees the limits of such explicitness. Adding texts from Fanon, Césaire, Ngũgĩ, Spivak, Du Bois, or Sylvia Wynter to a syllabus does not necessarily decolonise anything. One can have additive diversification without any alteration in the authority structure of the course, in the framing questions, in the norms of interpretation, or in the underlying civilisational self-understanding of the discipline. This shows that a merely explicit curricular definition does not exhaust the educational thing at issue. In Fine’s terms, it may capture some consequences or some manifestations, but not the full nature. In Litland’s terms, it may be one permissible definition within a manifold, but not a uniquely sufficient one.

Other uses of the term look more like implicitly defined higher-order properties. Here the claim is not that decolonisation can be captured by a fixed checklist, but that it names a pattern generated across a number of more basic practices and relations. For example, one might say that an educational space is being decolonised when the curriculum, the norms of discussion, the historical self-understanding of the institution, the treatment of language, the framing of evidence, and the representation of authoritative knowers all shift in a coordinated way such that imperial hierarchy no longer silently organises what counts as knowledge. This is not easily rendered as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it may still be a legitimate property if it is conservative over its bases. In other words, the higher-level educational property of decolonisation should not be allowed to create magical new content out of nothing. It should instead gather a structure already implicit in those lower-level transformations.

That conservative requirement is especially helpful because it prevents inflation. One of the most persistent difficulties with the term “decolonisation” in education is that it is often treated as if it could absorb every desirable educational reform. Inclusion, anti-racism, multicultural representation, student-centred pedagogy, critical thinking, democratic participation, curriculum relevance, global citizenship, linguistic plurality, and anti-capitalist critique are all at times folded into it. That inflation gives the term moral force, but it weakens its conceptual discipline. A conservative model helps us resist that. If “decolonisation” is to be a legitimate higher-order educational property, it must be anchored in identifiable lower-level relations and transformations. It cannot simply function as a receptacle into which every attractive reform is poured. 

At the same time, the framework resists reduction. One common response to decolonisation talk is to say that it really just means curriculum diversification, or really just means anti-racist policy, or really just means identity politics applied to education. Those reductions are often too coarse. A Fine–Litland approach allows one to say instead that decolonisation may be a real higher-order educational property, but one whose reality is derivative, relational, and manifold. It need not be reduced to one administrative operation in order to be conceptually serious.

This becomes even clearer if we ask whether decolonisation in education might sometimes be better understood not simply as a property, but as a generated educational entity or structure. Here Fine’s language of generation and derivative reality becomes useful. There are educational realities that do not exist independently, but are brought into being by constitutive relations. A classroom, a seminar, a curriculum sequence, an assessment regime, an institutional culture, these can all be derivative but real. One might then ask whether “a decolonised curriculum,” “a decolonising pedagogy,” or even “a decolonial classroom” are generated entities of this sort. They would not be basic natural kinds. Nor would they be unreal. They would be brought into being by a structured conjunction of changes in texts, questions, voices, authority relations, historical framing, institutional memory, and evaluative norms.This is a powerful way of refining educational thought. Instead of asking vaguely whether a school or module “is decolonised,” one asks what constitutive relations would have to be in place for such an entity to be generated at all. What would make it true that this curriculum is decolonised. Not just that it contains certain materials, but that its sequence, its framing, its standards of authority, and its conception of disciplinary inheritance have shifted in a coordinated way. Here the generated-entity model is more demanding than sloganistic use, but also more charitable than blanket dismissal. It says that there may indeed be such things as decolonising or decolonised educational structures, but they do not come into being through declaration alone. They require constitutive work.

This in turn helps clarify why many institutional claims to have decolonised curricula seem conceptually thin. Often what has occurred is not the generation of a new educational structure, but the addition of some new content to an old one. The relations constituting the curriculum, what counts as foundational, what questions organise it, what forms of authority shape its movement, what historical self-understanding it carries, remain untouched. In such cases, the term “decolonised” may not successfully refer to a generated entity at all. The reform may be politically or pedagogically worthwhile, but the ontology of the practice has not changed enough to licence the stronger description.

Litland’s attention to definitional unity also helps with another difficulty. If decolonisation is a manifold term, what gives the manifold its unity? Why are these different definitions of one thing rather than a mere cluster of adjacent concerns? This is where a more forensic analysis is needed. One plausible answer is that the unity lies in a recurring structure of relation to coloniality, not merely to colonial history as an external topic, but to the ways knowledge, subjecthood, authority, hierarchy, curriculum, and institutional memory have been shaped by colonial formations and their afterlives. On this view, the manifold hangs together because each legitimate definition of educational decolonisation concerns, in one way or another, the exposure, contestation, displacement, or reconstitution of educational forms whose present organisation still bears the mark of colonial ordering.

If something like that is right, then one can begin to test proposed uses of the term against the manifold. A reform that merely increases engagement by using more contemporary examples may be valuable, but unless it bears in the right way on those relations of coloniality, it does not belong within the definitional unity of decolonisation. Likewise, a reform that addresses race while leaving untouched the epistemic and institutional structure through which authority is still distributed may only partially belong. The framework therefore sharpens inclusion and exclusion conditions for the term without pretending to eliminate contestation.

This also refines how we should think about essence in the decolonisation case. On a Litland-style model, what is essential to decolonisation in education would be what follows from each of its genuine definitions. Here one must be careful. It may turn out that very little survives every legitimate definition, in which case the term has a loose family resemblance structure rather than a strong essence. Or it may turn out that a small but significant core survives. Perhaps not that certain authors must be taught, nor that certain classroom techniques must be used, nor that every institutional structure must be transformed, but that educational decolonisation centrally involves the contestation of colonial authority structures in the constitution, transmission, and legitimation of knowledge. That would be a much more refined claim than many currently in circulation. It would not reduce decolonisation to reading-list reform, nor inflate it into every emancipatory educational project whatever.

A further gain of this approach is modal. Once we stop treating the term as either a simple essence or a loose slogan, we can ask more carefully what kinds of necessity and possibility attach to it. Is it necessary for decolonisation that curriculum be changed? Perhaps in many educational contexts yes, but not in the same way everywhere. Is it possible to have a decolonised pedagogy within a structurally colonial institution? Perhaps partially, but perhaps only as a derivative and unstable generated form. Is it possible to decolonise content without decolonising assessment? Perhaps formally yes, but if assessment remains governed by inherited civilisational standards of authority and expression, then perhaps the higher-order entity of a decolonised curriculum is not really generated. These are exactly the kinds of modal refinements that earlier notes discussing Fine, Vetter, and Litland together make newly visible.

One can also use the framework to distinguish several educational objects that are often conflated. There may be decolonisation of curricular content, decolonisation of disciplinary self-understanding, decolonisation of institutional governance, decolonisation of pedagogy, and decolonisation of epistemic authority. These need not be identical. Nor need one be definable in terms of another. They may form overlapping but non-identical manifolds. This would explain why debates so often become confused. Participants may be operating with different definienda while using the same word. One person is talking about generated curriculum structures, another about the essential manifold of a disciplinary critique, another about institutional redistribution of voice and legitimacy. The framework does not dissolve disagreement, but it localises it.

It also shows why some sceptical objections have force without being decisive. Critics often complain that “decolonisation” in education is too metaphorical, too totalising, too imprecise, too politically overdetermined. A Litland-style response would concede that unless the term is tied to a disciplined manifold of real definitions, such complaints are justified. But that is not an argument against the term in principle. It is an argument for ontological and definitional discipline. The right question is not whether the term is too vague to use, but whether one can specify a manifold of educational definitions with enough unity, enough conservativity over their bases, and enough generated reality to make its use serious. This may also help explain why the term has been both fruitful and unstable in education. It is fruitful because it names a real family of transformations and critiques that cannot be captured adequately by narrower categories like diversification or anti-bias training. It is unstable because users often move too quickly from one definition within the manifold to claims that would require a much stronger, more exhaustive definition than they have actually given. The result is rhetorical power combined with conceptual drift.

So  the Litland framework allows us to ask of decolonisation in education not simply whether it is right or wrong, necessary or excessive, but what kind of educational term it is, what sort of definitions it admits, what must be common to those definitions, what generated structures it can genuinely bring into being, and where its use becomes ontologically undisciplined. That is a substantial advance. It does not settle the politics, nor should it. But it makes the educational concept far more analytically tractable. It also prevents two equal and opposite errors, treating decolonisation as a magical essence that automatically organises every progressive reform, and treating it as a mere empty slogan because it lacks one canonical definition. The more interesting possibility is that it is a real but manifold educational term whose serious use requires far greater definitional care than educational discourse has usually given it.

If one now turns the same lens onto the anti-patriarchy ideas of “demasculanising the curriculum”, the first thing that becomes clear is that we are again dealing with a term that has been doing a great deal of work without its ontological status being carefully examined. It is often treated as if its meaning were self-evident, or at least politically transparent, and the debates around it quickly become moralised. Yet, as with decolonisation, the first task is not to decide whether demasculinisation is good or bad, but to ask what kind of educational thing it is supposed to be. Is it a property of curricula, a family of practices, a higher-order pattern over pedagogical and institutional relations, a generated educational entity, or a loose regulative ideal whose application outruns its definitional clarity?

Once that question is posed, the term begins to separate into a manifold of candidate definitions. In some contexts, demasculinising the curriculum is taken to mean increasing the representation of women and non-male authors, artists, scientists, and thinkers within a syllabus. In others, it refers to altering the framing of subjects so that traditionally masculinised forms of reasoning, competition, abstraction, or authority are no longer treated as the implicit norm. In others still, it concerns the affective and relational dimensions of learning, the ways in which classroom interaction, modes of assessment, and norms of participation may privilege certain forms of confidence, assertion, and self-presentation historically associated with masculinity. In more theoretically ambitious settings, it can involve questioning the deep structuring of disciplines themselves, asking whether certain forms of knowledge, such as those that emphasise control, domination, objectification, or instrumental rationality, have been historically coded in ways that align with masculinised social formations.

As before, it is difficult to believe that all of this can be captured by a single explicit definition. The term appears to operate through a plurality of real definitions, each tied to a different layer of educational practice. So rather than asking which of these is the one true definition of demasculinisation, we can treat them as members of a structured family and ask what follows from each, and what, if anything, remains invariant across them. A purely additive definition, one that treats demasculinisation as the inclusion of more female authors or perspectives, becomes recognisable as only one member of the manifold. It may be a legitimate definition in certain contexts, particularly at the level of curricular content, but it does not exhaust the phenomenon. Just as with decolonisation, one can have representational change without any alteration in the underlying structure of authority, value, or epistemic normativity. A syllabus can include Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Donna Haraway, or Judith Butler, while still being organised around forms of argument, evaluation, and intellectual authority that remain implicitly masculinised. The additive definition therefore risks being extensionally adequate in some superficial sense while explanatorily thin.

Other definitions look more like implicitly defined higher-order properties. Here demasculinisation is not reducible to a checklist but emerges from a coordinated transformation of several dimensions of educational life. A curriculum might be said to be demasculinised when the norms governing what counts as a good argument, a valuable contribution, a legitimate question, or a successful performance are no longer tacitly aligned with a narrow set of masculinised dispositions. These might include aggressive debate, rapid-fire assertion, competitive display, emotional detachment, or a privileging of abstraction over relational understanding. On this view, demasculinisation is a structural shift in the ecology of learning, not merely a change in content.

Here again the notion of conservativity becomes important. If demasculinisation is to be a legitimate educational property, it must be grounded in identifiable features of practice. It cannot simply name everything that feels more inclusive, collaborative, or humane. Otherwise it becomes inflated and loses its explanatory grip. A disciplined account would require showing how particular features of curriculum design, pedagogical interaction, assessment, and institutional culture together generate a higher-order pattern that can be recognised as demasculinised. Without that grounding, the term risks becoming a diffuse evaluative label rather than a conceptually tractable educational category.

At the same time, reduction is equally problematic. To say that demasculinisation is nothing more than increasing representation, or nothing more than softening classroom interaction, would miss the deeper structural claims often associated with the term. A Finean approach allows us to resist both extremes. Demasculinisation may be a real but derivative educational property, one that depends on a network of more basic relations without being reducible to any single one of them. 

The idea of generated educational entities becomes particularly helpful here. One might ask whether there are such things as demasculinised curricula or demasculinising pedagogies in the same sense that one might speak of a seminar or a disciplinary field as a generated entity. If so, then such entities would come into being only when a sufficient set of constitutive relations is in place. It would not be enough to change a reading list or adjust a marking scheme in isolation. What would be required is a coordinated transformation in how knowledge is framed, how authority is distributed, how participation is structured, how success is recognised, and how intellectual virtues are cultivated.

This provides a way of diagnosing why many attempts at demasculinisation appear shallow or unstable. If the deeper relations remain intact, then the generated entity does not come into being. One has altered the surface without changing the underlying structure. Conversely, where multiple dimensions shift together, one may indeed begin to see the emergence of a new educational form, even if it is fragile or incomplete.

The question of definitional unity then arises. What holds together the manifold of definitions associated with demasculinisation? One plausible answer is that they all concern, in different ways, the contestation or reconfiguration of educational forms historically structured by masculinised norms of authority, value, and interaction. This does not require that masculinity be treated as a monolithic or purely negative category. Rather, it suggests that certain patterns, often associated with particular historical formations of masculinity, have come to organise educational practices in ways that can be identified, analysed, and, if desired, transformed.

At this point, the comparison with decolonisation becomes particularly fruitful. Both terms appear to operate through manifolds of definition. Both concern the transformation of educational structures that have been historically shaped by powerful organising forces, coloniality in one case, masculinised norms in the other. Both risk inflation if they are allowed to absorb every desirable reform, and reduction if they are collapsed into a single operational measure. Both can be understood as generating derivative but real educational entities when their constitutive relations are sufficiently in place.

This raises the question of whether the two terms might share an essence at some level of abstraction. One must be careful here. It would be a mistake to simply identify them or to treat one as a subset of the other. The histories, conceptual lineages, and political stakes of decolonisation and demasculinisation are distinct. However, the Fine–Litland framework allows for a more subtle possibility. It may be that, at a sufficiently abstract level, the two manifolds intersect in a shared structural feature.

One candidate for such a shared feature is the transformation of inherited regimes of epistemic authority. In both cases, what is at issue is not only who is included in the curriculum, but how knowledge is authorised, who is recognised as a legitimate knower, what forms of reasoning and expression are privileged, and how historical legacies shape present educational structures. Colonial formations and masculinised formations have often intersected in the history of education, reinforcing one another in the construction of canons, disciplines, and institutional norms. It is therefore not surprising that efforts to decolonise and efforts to demasculinise may converge on similar sites of transformation, even if they approach them from different directions.

From a Litland-style perspective, this convergence can be understood as a partial overlap of essential manifolds. Each term has its own family of definitions, but there may be propositions that follow from all definitions in both families. For example, it may be essential to both decolonisation and demasculinisation, in their educational senses, that they involve the reconfiguration of epistemic hierarchies that have been historically naturalised. That does not mean that every instance of one is an instance of the other, but it does suggest a shared structural core.

This way of thinking yields new possibilities for educational theory. Instead of treating different reform agendas as competing or loosely aligned, one can ask more precisely where their definitional manifolds intersect, where they diverge, and what follows from each. This allows for a more articulated mapping of educational change. A particular reform might belong to the manifold of decolonisation but not to that of demasculinisation, or vice versa, or to both, or to neither. Such distinctions are rarely made with clarity in current discourse, but they become available once the underlying metaphysical structure is taken seriously.

It also allows for a more disciplined form of critique. One can ask whether a proposed reform genuinely belongs to the manifold it claims, whether it generates the relevant educational entity, whether it is conservative over its bases, whether it preserves definitional unity, and whether it contributes to the shared structural transformations that might constitute a deeper common core. This is a far more precise set of questions than those typically asked, and it avoids both uncritical endorsement and blanket dismissal.

Perhaps the most significant fruit of this approach is that it reorients educational debate away from slogans and towards structure. Terms like decolonisation and demasculinisation are not abandoned, but nor are they taken at face value. They are treated as candidates for serious conceptual work. Their legitimacy depends not on their rhetorical force, but on whether they can be embedded within a disciplined account of educational ontology, definition, and modality. This does not remove their political significance. It clarifies it. It shows where the real work lies, in identifying the structures that need to change, in specifying the relations that constitute those structures, and in determining what kinds of educational entities can genuinely be brought into being through those changes.In that sense, the speculative application of Litland’s framework does not settle the questions raised by these terms. It makes them more exacting. It demands that educational theory become more careful about what it takes itself to be talking about. And in doing so, it opens the possibility that debates which currently appear intractable might be rearticulated in ways that allow for both sharper disagreement and more genuine understanding.

Once the framework is adopted a more unsettling possibility comes into view, one that is easy to miss if one remains at the level of slogans or loosely coordinated reform agendas. If decolonisation and demasculinisation are each understood not as vague aspirations but as structured manifolds of real definitions capable, under certain conditions, of generating distinct educational entities, then it becomes an open question whether the entities they generate are always jointly realisable. In other words, the framework invites us to consider the possibility that they may, in some cases, be incompossible.

The term “incompossible” comes from modal metaphysics and is most closely associated with Leibniz, though it is developed in more precise ways in contemporary work by Fine and Williamson. Two things are incompossible not because each is impossible on its own, but because they cannot both be instantiated together within a single coherent reality. Each is possible, but not compossible with the other. The idea is familiar in simple cases. A world in which I am both standing and not standing at the same time in the same respect is not a coherent possibility, even though each state is possible on its own. The more interesting cases arise when the tension is not logical contradiction but deeper structural incompatibility between systems of organisation.

Translated into the present educational context, the question becomes whether there are cases in which a fully realised decolonised educational structure and a fully realised demasculinised educational structure, each understood through its own disciplined manifold of definitions, cannot both be generated within the same institutional or curricular space without distortion. This is not the trivial claim that particular policies might clash in practice. It is the stronger, more philosophical claim that the defining relations that generate one educational entity may, in certain configurations, undermine or exclude the relations required to generate the other.

The possibility only becomes visible once we take definitional discipline seriously. At the level of loose discourse, it is natural to assume that all progressive reforms align. Decolonisation, demasculinisation, inclusivity, anti-racism, and so on are often treated as mutually reinforcing. But once each is given a more precise ontological and definitional structure, the question of their interaction becomes sharper. We must ask not whether they share a general moral direction, but whether the conditions required for the generation of one are compatible with those required for the generation of the other.

Consider, for example, the role of epistemic authority. A strong form of educational decolonisation may involve reconfiguring the curriculum so that knowledge traditions previously marginalised by colonial formations are not only included but granted equal or even privileged authority in structuring inquiry. This may involve recognising forms of knowledge that are oral, communal, relational, or embedded in particular lifeworlds, rather than abstracted into universalised, formally articulated systems. It may also involve resisting certain forms of standardisation, evaluation, or generalisation that are seen as tied to colonial epistemic practices.

At the same time, a strong form of demasculinisation might involve reworking the norms of intellectual engagement so that forms of assertiveness, adversarial debate, rapid contestation, and hierarchical authority are displaced by more dialogical, collaborative, and affectively attuned modes of interaction. It may also involve challenging the valorisation of detachment, abstraction, and control as the primary intellectual virtues, replacing them with attentiveness, care, relational understanding, and situated responsiveness.

At a superficial level, these projects appear aligned. Both challenge dominant forms of authority. Both open space for alternative voices and practices. But once we examine the definitional structures more closely, tensions can emerge. Some decolonial approaches, for instance, place strong emphasis on the recovery and preservation of specific cultural traditions, including forms of authority and knowledge transmission that are internally hierarchical, gendered, or organised in ways that do not easily align with demasculinising aims. A curriculum that seeks to faithfully represent certain indigenous or historical knowledge systems may find itself committed to forms of authority that are not easily reconfigured without altering the very thing it seeks to preserve.

From the other side, some demasculinising approaches may involve reconfiguring classroom interaction and epistemic norms in ways that prioritise certain forms of participation and expression that are themselves products of particular cultural trajectories, often Western, liberal, and late modern. These may not map cleanly onto the forms of knowledge and authority that a decolonising project seeks to foreground. What counts as respectful dialogue, appropriate challenge, or legitimate expression of understanding may differ significantly across the two manifolds. In such cases, the issue is not simply that one reform has been imperfectly implemented. It is that the constitutive relations required for the generation of one educational entity may not be fully compatible with those required for the generation of the other. The decolonised curriculum, understood through its manifold of definitions, may require preserving certain forms of authority, narrative, or epistemic structure that a demasculinised pedagogy, understood through its own manifold, would seek to transform. Conversely, a fully demasculinised educational space may reshape interaction and evaluation in ways that alter or even undermine the integrity of certain decolonial knowledge forms.

This is where the notion of incompossibility does real work. It allows us to say that each project may be internally coherent and defensible, and each may be realisable in some educational contexts, but that their joint realisation, in a fully robust sense, may not always be possible. The tension is not necessarily visible at the level of individual practices, where compromises and hybrid forms are common, but at the level of fully generated educational entities. A hybrid curriculum may be partially decolonised and partially demasculinised, but it may not instantiate the full defining relations of either.

This perspective also helps explain a recurring pattern in educational reform. Initiatives that aim to combine multiple transformative agendas often begin with a sense of harmony and mutual reinforcement. Over time, however, tensions emerge, not merely because of resistance or poor implementation, but because the underlying conceptual structures pull in different directions. The framework suggests that such tensions are not accidental. They may reflect deeper modal facts about what can and cannot be jointly realised. 

Importantly, recognising incompossibility does not entail abandoning either project. Nor does it imply that one must choose between them in a crude way. What it does is force a more careful articulation of priorities, scopes, and contexts. It becomes possible to ask in which domains, at which levels, and under what conditions the two manifolds can overlap without conflict, and where they diverge in ways that require trade-offs or reconfiguration. It also opens the possibility of more creative responses. One might seek to identify weaker or more flexible definitions within each manifold that allow for greater compatibility, though this risks diluting their transformative force. Alternatively, one might accept that different educational spaces or moments instantiate different generated entities, some more strongly decolonised, others more strongly demasculinised, without expecting a single unified structure to do all the work. Or one might attempt to develop new definitions that genuinely integrate elements of both, though this would require careful attention to whether the resulting entity has a coherent definitional unity or is merely an unstable compromise.

From a Fine–Litland perspective, these are not merely practical questions but questions about the structure of educational reality. They concern which educational entities can be generated, which properties can be instantiated together, and what follows from the definitions we adopt. The language of incompossibility gives us a way of articulating conflicts that are otherwise difficult to name. It shifts the discussion from accusations of inconsistency or bad faith to an examination of the modal structure of the concepts themselves. (Just think about the recent gender war stand-offs in terms of incompossibility clashes, for example, or anti-racist and class based reformers.)

For philosophers of education it suggests that educational theory is not only about values, evidence, and policy, but about the kinds of entities and structures that can coherently exist. It also provides a more charitable framework for disagreement. When two positions appear to clash, the issue may not be that one is simply wrong, but that they belong to different manifolds whose full realisation cannot be jointly achieved. Recognising this can make debate more precise and more productive.

In this way, the speculative idea that decolonisation and demasculinisation might be incompossible in certain configurations is not a pessimistic conclusion but a recognition that the world we live in involves real dilemmas. Its structure is tragic. Given this, an invitation to think more carefully about the structure of educational change requires us to face this structural fact. It asks us to move beyond the assumption that all desirable reforms can be seamlessly combined, and to engage instead with the harder question of how different educational goods relate to one another within the space of possibility.