This model, developed within my Africana Critical Race Framework (ACRF™️), reveals what is often left unspoken within educational and training institutions. 

What presents itself as neutral, objective, and modern is, in fact, structured through an enduring logic of coloniality. At the surface, education appears as a site of knowledge production and professional development.

​Yet beneath this lies a historical and ongoing architecture shaped by empire, racial hierarchy, and epistemic control. 

The pyramid illustrates how whiteness operates as an unmarked standard at the apex, while modernity functions as its legitimising narrative. Beneath this, the coloniality of power continues to organise knowledge, training, and institutional life.

At its foundation lies the often obscured reality: the universities and educational systems were built through and for colonial domination. 

To engage this model is not simply to reinterpret education, but to confront the conditions under which knowledge itself has been produced, authorised, and sustained. 

This model was developed within my doctoral research and presented as part of my viva examination. 

The Hidden Architecture of Education (ACRF™️)
​Dr Derek McKenzie, 2026) 

Conceptual Overview

The model illustrates the hierarchical structuring of knowledge within contemporary educational institutions, revealing the persistence of coloniality beneath the surface or modernity. 

At the apex sits whiteness, not merely as an identity category but as an unmarked epistemic and ontological authority that defines what counts as knowledge and who is recognised as fully human.

​Beneath this lies the construct of modernity, often presented as universal and progressive, yet historically constituted through colonial expansion, domination, and the hierarchal ordering of human existence.

Drawing on Anibal Quijano, the model positions the coloniality of power as the enduring structure that continues to shape education and training at both epistemic and ontological levels.

This is further grounded in the recognition that educational institutions historically organised, justified, and sustained colonialism and slavery (Faye et al, 2021), while universities themselves were built as instruments of colonial power (Wilder, 2013, 2019). 

One way of bringing this into view is to consider a simple, yet unsettling question: 

What might happen if Black students were to ask their lecturers whether Africa has a history? 

The likely response would be immediate rejection of such a claim. Yet when Africana intellectual traditions, histories, and philosophical contribution remain absent or marginal within curricula, a different message is conveyed—one not stated explicitly, but structurally enacted through omission.

In this sense, the absence operates along two registers: 

Africa is positioned either as tabula rasa, where history is understood to have existed but is rendered erased, or more insidiously as tabula blanca, (Georg Wihelm Fredrich Hegel, in  The Philosophy of History) where no history is recognised to have existed at all.

The latter does not simply misrepresent the past, but affects a deeper form of ontological exclusion, positioning Black existence outside of historical time itself.

​It is within these silences that coloniality continues to operate, shaping not only what is taught, but what is assumed to exist. 

The base of the pyramid, labelled the Dark underside (Mignolo, 1995; Maldonado-Torres, 2008), of coloniality, signifies the ongoing, often obscured foundation upon which contemporary knowledge systems and modes of being rest.

The model thus challenges the presumed neutrality of education and calls for a decolonial interrogation of its epistemic and ontological conditions through which knowledge and being are constituted.