Colonialism is the violent practice of seizing control and exerting domination over land, its people and financial, material, and cultural resources. It involves the extraction of resources and human labor and creates racial hierarchies to legitimize colonial rule. Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that operates through the genocide of the indigenous populations while settling the territory. Some form of colonialism has impacted almost every country in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas.  

Coloniality is the control of knowledge, values, and culture. Through coloniality, Eurocentric knowledge, values, and practices are viewed as universal and superior. Indigenous and local knowledges and cultural practices are devalued and erased. Coloniality frames non-Europeans in dehumanizing narratives–underdeveloped, uncivilized, backwards, and in need of saving. Colonization of the mind is the inferiority that colonizers create in the colonized through cultural forms, knowledge structures, and social institutions such as education, religion and government. Coloniality outlasts colonialism in keeping colonial beliefs alive and dominant.

Colonial powers used the institution of school for its “civilizing mission.” With a universalist and patriarchal Eurocentric vision of education, it was a tool that suppressed the knowledges, cultural practices, and histories of those colonized. It violently tried to assimilate them into the colonizer's worldviews. At the same time, anti-colonial and feminist movements saw the power of education and schools for liberation. 

Gender transformative education calls for the examination of lasting colonial legacies in educational policies, curriculum and pedagogies. It calls for education that is decolonial.