In the Preface to Out of Place Edward Said implied that he had been surprised when, looking back at what he had written, he realized how prominently his school years featured in the book. For reasons I touched on in the Introduction, his reaction may itself be surprising to some readers: many people think of their time at school as formative, and in Said's case it led to a life-long commitment to education. Yet the perplexity he felt over education's place in his memoir seems consistent with the uneasy status of education in his most influential critical works, where it receives little explicit attention – however deeply implicated and present it may be in other ways – and where the attention it does receive is frequently, and sometimes ferociously, antipathetic.

Much of the antipathy is grounded, of course, in Said's understanding of colonial education's place in colonialism. In his view, to borrow a summary from two of the many people working in his wake,

What is more, Said understood the complicity between education and imperialism to extend into the present, long after the major European empires started to crumble. In ‘Orientalism Now’ (the last chapter of the original text of 1978), he wrote: