Education
Related: About this forumThe shadow side of educating women in the developing world
One of the presentations at a conference I attended last weekend was a remarkable activist film called Schooling the World - The White Man's Last Burden. It was shot in Ladakh, and documents the effects of the curriculum and educational style that the developed world is pushing as the universal solution to empowering women in the developing world.
The film is very good, but it didn't contain that many surprises. Everyone who knows the history of aboriginal education in the United States, Canada and Australia knows that this sort of "education" is imperialism and colonialism at its worst. However, the commentary from the director afterwards rocked my world.
In one of my other lives I have been a population activist, working to bring awareness to overpopulation issues, especially in the developing world. One of the shibboleths of this field is that education is the fastest, least costly, least damaging way to empower women and lower birth rates. When this question was raised with the producer Carol Black during the Q&A after the movie, she said approximately this:
"The statistics we get from the media on this issue are heavily cherry-picked. Fertility rates do come down, but in every case the introduction of westernized schooling has resulted in a massive surge in human trafficking rates.
"In addition, as these women are trained to become consumers of western goods and workers in the transnational industrial system, their rural communities are decimated. This leaves large areas with no defense against the land grabs of powerful nations who are looking to expand agriculture or mining activities.
"Educating women in this way is a recipe for the destruction of individuals, cultures and nations."
To say I was stunned is a serious understatement. This was followed by a comment from Manish Jain, a Coordinator of Shikshankar in India. He said that one of the unspoken goals of the education of women in the developing world is to demolish the world's last bastions of localization that are standing in the way of the globalization agenda of the transnational corporations.
This is Shikshankar's assessment of "The Culture of Schooling":
1) Labels, ranks and sorts human beings. It creates a rigid social hierarchy consisting of a small elite class of ‘highly educated’ and a large lower class of ‘failures’ and ‘illiterates’, based on levels of school achievement.
2) Imposes uniformity and standardization. It propagates the viewpoint that diversity is a problem, which must be removed if society is to progress.
3) Spreads fear, insecurity, violence and silence through its externally-imposed, military-like discipline.
4) Forces human beings to violently compete against each other over scarce resources in rigid win-lose situations.
5) Confines the motivation for learning to examinations, certificates and jobs. It suppresses all non-school motivations to learn and kills all desire to engage in critical self-evaluation. It centralizes control over the human learning process into the State-Market nexus, taking power away from individuals and communities.
6) Commodifies all human beings, Nature, knowledge and social relationships. They are to be extracted, exploited, bought and sold.
7) Fragments and compartmentalizes knowledge, human beings and the natural world. It de-links knowledge from wisdom, practical experiences and specific contexts.
8) Artificially separates human rationality from human emotions and the human spirit. It imposes a single view of rationality and logic on all people, while simultaneously devaluing many other knowledge systems.
9) Privileges literacy (in a few elite languages) over all other forms of human expression and creation. It drives people to distrust their local languages. It prioritizes newspapers, textbooks, television as the only reliable sources of information. These forms of State-Market controlled media cannot be questioned by the general public.
10) Reduces the spaces and opportunities for ‘valid’ human learning by demanding that they all be funneled through a centrally-controlled institution. It creates artificial divisions between learning and home, work, play, spirituality.
11) Destroys the dignity of labor; devalues the learning that takes place through manual work.
12) Breaks intergenerational bonds of family and community and increases people’s dependency on the Nation-State and Government, on Science and Technology, and on the Market for livelihood and identity.
The number of invisible assumptions that I had exposed in a few short minutes last Thursday night has rocked my world.
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midnight
(26,624 posts)sometimes don't have the distance to see what is going on until it's too late. We had no child left behind. Threats, and testing, and now we have race to the top... Over crowding, more tests, and no jobs...
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)As you point out, our minds and our culture have also been colonized through education. We have been reduced to a form of psychological slavery to the industrial/consumer system in exactly the same way. It's no wonder that homeschooling and (even better) unschooling are becoming more and more attractive.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)indoctrination process. However, all schooling is an indoctrination process. There is no getting around it. People say, well, we don't teach ideology, we teach kids to think critically or whatever; but that way of thinking about education is itself reflective of a certain kind of culture and way of life too.
The problem I see with homeschooling is that it is segregating, and this segregation is increasingly going to a smaller and smaller scale. I don't mean necessarily racially, though that too. I mean more ideologically. I have seen some tests administered by local fundie Christian homeschoolers and I shuddered. They were mostly about religion, so much so that I wondered how they could be fulfilling state requirements. The children of former friends did online schooling, which is kind of similar. The results were terrible simply in terms of basic skills. That they "graduated" amazed me. Though Waldorf et al is more upscale and supposedly liberal and non-directive and all those good yuppie values, I have issues with those options as well.
With the increasing segregation by class, race, and religion I doubt there is going to be enough common culture left to hold the nation together, and sometimes I wonder if that's by design.
I would much prefer to have good local schools for everyone that could address differences in kids' learning styles and learning speeds, with open democratic input teaching a common, inclusive culture. And that of course represents the way I was raised and the values I hold. Other people have different values.
But some haven't thought through the possible consequences, I think. Balkanization seems to me to be an attractive proposition for some parts of the power structure, because it would give them more power. I think that would be mostly detrimental for most of the population, though some people seem to imagine they'd be left alone to grow vegetables and spin their own yarn or something. Doubtful.
On edit: I'll add that I think there's a difference between discussion of education policy in our own community/country and imposing education policy on places/countries we really don't know diddly about. Which is being done in our name by actors we really don't know diddly about, with all kinds of motives we don't know diddly about, and sold to us as some kind of wonderful beneficial thing. I think the same thing can be said of missionaries and things like the Grameen Bank. All of them disrupt and dissolve traditional cultures. As does the presence of multinational corps and every aspect of modernity. The purpose is to bring all people into the realm of global capital, to remove them from the land, to break clan networks, to isolate people and make them dependent on the state and the market economy.
I wish we could just leave everyone alone. But that has never happened in all of history. It seems that human life on earth has some kind of trajectory that is independent of the wishes of most people -- which I suspect is, at root, just to cultivate their own little garden, metaphorically speaking, and have a reasonably pleasant life with family and friends.
saras
(6,670 posts)They list a lot of the reasons I support progressive home schooling - in some parts of the country home schooling seems to be exclusively fundamentalist, but here it blends in with Montessori, Waldorf, and other alternative schools (while I'm sure there are right-wing and Christian home-schoolers as well).
Jerry Mander wrote about these issues quite a while ago - "In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations" in 1991 and "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" in 1978.
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)BlueIris
(29,135 posts)Thanks for posting about it.
eridani
(51,907 posts)There is quite a bit of resistance to corporatism there.
http://www.enterthefray.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=3215&b=1&st=&p=41763entry41763
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)If the education technique and curriculum is consistent with the culture and emerges from it, as seems to have happened in Kerala (and in the developed world for that matter) fewer problems occur. If the methods of education are imposed from an outside, dominant (or worse yet, imperialist/colonialist) culture the problems are more severe, and resemble the ones I described.
The more removed the educational culture is from the culture of the recipients, the worse the problems. Thus we saw minor problems with industrial education in Britain in the late 1700s and 1800s, but severe problems with indigenous education in North America and Australia. This is the effect that is being seen in countries like Ladakh today.
While TFR reliably declines with education, the cultural and personal costs of the education depend on the intentions of those promoting the education. In the case of Ladakh and I would suspect in African countries as well, the education system is intended as a colonial tool, and the TFR results are used to greenwash the process and misdirect our attention from its other consequences to the recipient nations.
Kerala is an outlier even in India, and it's worth pointing out that a lot of money flows back into the state from remittances by educated expatriates who have left the state to find work. Kerala is a bright spot in the story. However, one man that spoke to the conference was Mainish Jain, a Harvard-educated education activist in Rajasthan. His opinion of the consequences of education in other parts of India was decidedly sour.
From the Wiki article on the economy of Kerala:
eridani
(51,907 posts)--to insist on educational equality for girls. Kerala is an intensely crowded chunk of land--no surprise that it exports a lot of educated people. A big bonus is that when expat workers save enough for a comfortable life back home, they come back and lend their skills to the home front.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)communist presence.
"In 1957, elections for the new Kerala Legislative Assembly were held, and a reformist, Communist-led government came to power, under E. M. S. Namboodiripad. It was the first time a Communist government was democratically elected to power anywhere in the world. It initiated pioneering land reforms, leading to lowest levels of rural poverty in India....
Kerala hosts two major political alliances: the United Democratic Front (India) (UDF—led by the Indian National Congress) and the Left Democratic Front (Kerala) (LDF—led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Since independence, Kerala was managed as a democratic socialist welfare economy...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala
However, neo-liberalism entered the picture in the 90s.
