Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Provincializing Europe’ is the starting point in this contribution which aims to engender a postcolonial view on education. With the help of an educational-theoretical extension of Chakrabarty’s work, the text aims to support the thesis that European modernity, especially the ideas of nation, individualism and bourgeoisie have inscribed themselves into the order of education (Bildung) or even fundamentally constitutes it so that even a post- or decolonial use of the concept of education remains problematic and remains ambivalent.