Occupy Your Brain
On Power, Knowledge, and the Re-Occupation of Common Sense
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority. While all cultures are different, in many non-modernized societies children enjoy wide latitude to learn by free play, interaction with other children of multiple ages, immersion in nature, and direct participation in adult work and activities. They may have meaningful responsibilities in the economic life of the family and may be expected to treat elders with respect, but there is often little direct adult control over their individual moment-to-moment movements and choices, and they learn by experience, experimentation, trial and error, by independent observation of nature and human behavior, and through voluntary community sharing of information, story, song, and ritual. Local elders and community traditions are autonomous and respected as sources of wisdom and practical knowledge, and children are integrated into local livelihoods, knowledge systems, and ethical and spiritual awareness through elegant indigenous pedagogies that have been honed over generations to minimize conflict while effectively transmitting what each child needs to know to be a successfully functioning member of the community.
photo by Carol Black
Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed. The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure. Family and community are sidelined, their knowledge now seen as inferior to the school curriculum. The teacher has control over the child, the school district has control over the teacher, the state has control over the district, and increasingly, systems of national standards and funding create national control over states. In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
The problem with this scenario should be obvious: who gets to decide what the world’s children will learn? Who decides how and when and where they will learn it? Who controls what’s on the test, or when it will be given, or how its results will be used? And just as important, who decides what children will not learn? The hierarchies of educational authority are theoretically justified by the superior “expertise” of those at the top of the institutional pyramid, which qualifies them to dictate these things to the rest of us. But who gets to choose the experts? And crucially, who profits from it?
American teacher in the Philippines, c. 1901
In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. We allow remote “experts” to dictate what we must learn, when we must learn it, and how we must learn it. We grant them the right to test us, to measure the contents of our brains and the value of our skills, and then to brand us in childhood with a set of numeric rankings that have enormous power over our future opportunities to participate in the economic and political life of our society. We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control. Nothing could be more fundamental to the sphere of intellect and spirit than the education of our children, and yet freedom of education was not included in the First Amendment along with freedom of speech, press, and religion, because at the time of the American Revolution the idea of centralized state-controlled schooling was not yet clearly on the horizon. But by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born. We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power. A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
The crucial confusion here is between the idea of publicly supported education and the idea of centrally controlled state-administered education. To really get your hands around this distinction simply replace the word “school” with the word “radio” in the following sentences and see what you get:
I am in favor of publicly supported radio.
I am in favor of centrally-controlled state-administered radio.
Not the same thing, are they?
* * *
The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups. Our votes no longer matter. Our wishes no longer count. Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
Viewed through this lens, it becomes quite interesting not only to look at what your children are required to learn in school, but at what they are not required to learn. While your kids are very busy toiling over algebra and chemistry, international trade agreements are being forged and currencies are being manipulated by entities that most Americans don’t even know the names of, much less the inner workings of. Kids are compelled to solve quadratic equations and write essays on Shakespeare, and they graduate without understanding how to calculate the interest on credit card debt or decode a mortgage agreement. They learn an old fable called “How a Bill Becomes Law,” while corporate lobbyists draft legislation that will pollute their air and water, deny them health care and unemployment benefits, and put barely tested drugs on the market and genetically modified organisms in their food system. And in the developing world, teenagers are struggling with — and more often than not, being defeated by — English Romantic poets and high school physics while the World Bank and IMF are negotiating incentives for foreign investment that will lead to their ancestral lands being sold out out from under them to foreign timber and mining companies and Wall Street speculators in agricultural land.
Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them. They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world. The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors. Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
Next time you hear a teenager saying she’d like to know more about Occupy Wall Street but she can’t because she has to study for a chemistry test, or a parent saying he’d like to let his child run around outside a bit more instead of putting him on Adderall but he can’t because the school schedule doesn’t allow it, or a teacher saying she’d like to do more hands-on experiential learning or open-ended discussions or creative projects with her class but she can’t because she has to do standardized test prep, please ask yourself: why can’t they do these things? Who says they can’t? Who’s in charge here? Isn’t this is a free country?
Isn’t it?
* * *
When Thomas Paine wrote the pamphlet that helped ignite a revolution, he didn’t title it, “Expert Assessment by a Certified Professional,” he titled it “Common Sense.” In other words, the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa. Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. Not only can’t we as children be trusted to learn, our parents – and even our teachers – can’t be trusted to manage our education. They must have supervision, evaluation, they must submit to the authority of higher “experts.” But if ordinary parents are not competent to judge whether young children are developing normally or whether teenagers are adequately preparing for adult responsibilities, how are they competent to judge proposals for national health care reform or U.S. policy in the Middle East? If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience? Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
The usual argument for centralized hierarchical control of schooling is that ordinary people simply aren’t competent to make sound judgments about these matters. It has to be managed from above by trained professionals; we have to have some kind of quality control that will override the intellectual weakness of the hapless American public. And yet it bears remembering that all these hapless Americans attended American schools. We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
* * *
When Wikipedia was first founded, it was kind of a joke. The quality of the entries was spotty; there were absences and inaccuracies galore. The old corporate encyclopedia publishers, which employ qualified experts in hierarchical structures to write and edit and fact-check their entries, probably had a good chuckle over it. They’re not chuckling now. The idea that a high-quality information source could be created by an open network of volunteer editors seemed ludicrous at first. But something interesting happened. Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not romanticizing Wikipedia; of course it still has errors and biases and limitations. But so does everything else. After only ten years in existence, it’s pretty darn remarkable. Even Harvard professors, those icons of the intellectual hierarchy, are now assigning Wikipedia entries on their official syllabi.
But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration. Again and again as the digital revolution has progressed, non-hierarchical models of collaboration have been demonstrated to outperform the old factory-style vertically-controlled models. Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
The children of the digital revolution, the young people of Occupy Wall Street, are modeling this type of voluntary, horizontal collaboration for us now in the political realm. But if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities. If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations? What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures? If the internet is the collective intelligence of human beings connecting across the dimension of digital space, then indigenous wisdom is the collective intelligence of human beings connecting across the dimension of time. Every ecosystem in the world at one time had a people who knew it with the knowledge that only comes with thousands of years of living in place. A tribal person in New Guinea can still identify 70 species of birds by their songs; a shaman in the Amazon can identify hundreds of species of plants and which preparations will enhance their chemical potency in the human body; a traditional Polynesian navigator can detect an island miles beyond the horizon by a pattern in the waves and the behavior of birds. This kind of knowledge seems almost supernatural to a modern person stumbling noisily through the forest; but it’s not supernatural. It is human intelligence honed over millennia, through unimaginably vast numbers of individual observations, experiments, reflections, intuitions, refinements of art and experience and communication. It is the indigenous equivalent of a spacecraft sent to Mars; it is human intelligence shaped and perfected and then shot like an arrow, like a ray of light, deep into the heart of nature.
* * *
In the hills and forests of eastern India’s tribal regions, the Adivasis (“original dwellers”) have begun to defy the Indian government and to occupy the ancestral lands stolen from them to benefit foreign mining and timber companies. The plight of the Dongria Kondh, a tribe whose lands are threatened by the toxic Vedanta bauxite mine, has been compared to that of the N’avi in the fantasy film Avatar. But for the Kondh this is no fantasy. They realize that they cannot trust their government, they cannot trust the companies, and they cannot necessarily trust the foreign political activists and NGO’s that have come to “help” them. As historian William Greider has said of the populist movement among U.S. farmers in the late 19th century,
They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side. Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either. So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
So as the Adivasis occupy their land, they are also moving to create their own forms of education for action. Just like the legendary Highlander Folk School and the barbershop literacy initiatives during the Civil Rights movement, Adivasi people are coming together on a voluntary, cooperative basis to share experiences, analyses, strategies, and tactics:
We organize workshops and gatherings and have created a learning environment for all our people – I feel so happy and satisfied, I cannot tell you – we have been creating a political education around land, forest and water issues and debating courses of action. We are expanding in terms of participation and we need to keep generating more awareness on more issues that affect us… it is a political awareness, an adult education about society – a different kind of schooling perhaps.
~Adivasi-Dalit Ektha Abhijan movement organization representative/leader (Kapoor, 55)
To be effective, the Adivasis will need to understand their constitutional rights, the economic forces of globalization, the legacies of colonialism, the agendas of foreign investors, and the economic policies of the Indian government which enrich the upper castes at the expense of Dalits and tribal people. But crucially, they need to speak to each other about all of this in their own languages, to share information and ideas in the context of their own histories and cultural identities, to create new strategies that are shaped by their own values. As a matter of fact, for the Kondh, they need to sing to each other of all these things:
People’s organization is the only help, the only way It is the fountain of knowledge for the poor. If we come together and get organized, That will be the end of the exploiters and oppressors… We will fight through non-violent means. How many deaths will we die from running away in fear? Our hearts are weeping, our hearts are bleeding But the people’s organization is the only way…
~ Song at Kondh tribal gathering (Kapoor, 62)
The Kondh aren’t going to let the powers that are destroying their world be the ones to teach them about it. They are choosing for themselves, talking to one another, learning from and teaching one another, building their movement. As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us? To what end? The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks. But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. They must occupy their brains.
Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
~ Carol Black
“We live for our Niyamgiri,” video courtesy of Survival International.
Sources:
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary.. Eric Raymond, O’Reilly Media, 2001. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596001087.do/ Read the updated text online here: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/”
Education, Decolonization, and Development: Perspectives from Asia, Africa and the Americas, Dip Kapoor, ed. Sense Publishers 2009.
Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Joel Spring. Beacon Press, 1973.
Indigenising Curriculum: questions posed by Baiga vidya. Padma Sarangapani. Comparative Education Volume 39 No. 2 2003, pp. 199–209. http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_padma.pdf
Lifecycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.. Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, 2006.http://berkana.org/berkana_articles/lifecycle-of-emergence-using-emergence-to-take-social-innovation-to-scale//
Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education, Gregory Cajete, Ph.D. Kivaki Press, Durango, CO 1994
Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power, video discussion with Naomi Klein, William Greider, Michael Moore, Rinku Sen, and Patrick Bruner. The Nation, November 10, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/video/164494/watch-michael-moore-naomi-klein-and-others-whats-next-ows
Power and Place; Indian Education in America, Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat. Fulcrum Publishing, Golden Colorado 2001.
Revolution OS: Hackers, Programmers, and Rebels UNITE!. View trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP3zvc2dG5Y View entire film online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjaC8Pq9-V0
Short Route to Chaos: Conscience, Community, and the Re-Constitution of American Schooling, Stephen Arons. University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
Survival International, Tribes and Campaigns: The Dongria Kondh. http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/dongria
The Future of the First Amendment. Knight Foundation, 2004: http://www.knightfoundation.org/publications/future-first-amendment-2004
Walking With the Comrades: Gandhians with a Gun? Arundhati Roy plunges into the sea of Gondi people to find some answers.Outlook India, March 29, 2010. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738
Why Are There No Successful Innovation Initiatives? Steve Denning. Forbes magazine. December 2, 2011. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/12/02/why-are-there-no-successful-innovation-initiatives/
Wikipedia. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Three Cups of Fiction
Posted in blog
On Greg Mortenson, and how our collective fantasy about saving the world with schools goes from romance to comedy to tragedy.
The recent revelation that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea is based on fictionalized accounts of his experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that his charity’s funds were misspent and its books were cooked, and that there was little or no followup or support for many of his schools once they were built – if they were built at all – has drawn a lot of media attention. But the larger fiction which goes unquestioned is Mortenson’s romanticized portrayal of education as a panacea for all the world’s ills, a silver bullet that in one clean shot can end poverty, terrorism, and the oppression of girls and women around the world.
- photo by Jim Hurst
Don’t get me wrong – I would never deny that there are individuals who benefit when money is spent on education, and I would never want to come between those individuals and that money. If a girl from rural Pakistan wants to go to school and has a knack for academics, she deserves support and I hope she gets it. But the idea that building schools and getting every kid on the planet inside them is a solution to the problem of global poverty, for example, is a real whopper.
Why? Well, for starters – and everybody knows this – a huge percentage of the children in those schools will fail.
Greg Mortenson, like everybody else, loves to tell the touching story of the girl from the village who studies hard, passes her school exams, and goes on to become the proverbial doctor-who-will-come-back-to-the-village-and-reduce-infant-mortality. He raises a lot of money with that story, and a lot of donors go to sleep at night feeling better about the world because they are helping it to happen. But what Greg doesn’t tell us, and what the donors don’t want to think about, is what happens to all the other children. The dirty underside of our system is that schools as we know them today are structurally designed to fail a reliable percentage of kids. Interestingly, they reliably fail a much higher percentage of kids in in low-income areas than they do in affluent areas, and this is true from Detroit to Gilgit-Baltistan. When we put children from traditional rural areas into school, what we’re doing is transitioning them from a non-cash agricultural economy where nobody gets rich but nobody starves into a hierarchical system of success and failure in which some lives may get “better,” but others will get much, much worse. Guess which club has more members? Welcome, boys and girls, to the global economy.
The reality is that there are few better ways to condemn a child to a life of poverty than to confine her in a bad school, and a very high percentage of schools in low-income areas are and will remain bad schools. Many NGO’s as well as international programs like “Education for All” are focused on the body count, on getting more and more children into classrooms. What happens to those kids in those classrooms is harder to quantify or to track. One thing that seems clear is that an awful lot of them learn very little. A Brookings Institution study of education in Pakistan by Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff reports that “the education system produces many unemployable youths with few skills for economic survival…..In a recent survey of Pakistani youth, half the students say that they believe they lack the skills necessary to compete in today’s labor market.” A World Bank Policy Research working paper indicates that, contrary to popular belief, money spent on education often increases inequality in a country. This is partly because those who already have substantial assets are better positioned to take advantage of educational resources than those who have their hands full trying to get food on the table. But it’s also because from its inception school was designed as a sorting mechanism, a rigged competition where only one form of intelligence is valued, only one way of learning is permitted, and one child’s success means another child’s failure. We forget that the structure of schools as we know them today was developed during a time when people believed in racist eugenics and Social Darwinism; modern schools were structurally designed to perpetuate a hierarchical class system, and – despite the best efforts of many dedicated teachers – that’s exactly what they still do, through the non-democratic, hierarchical ranking of children which is hard-wired into our entire system of grading, testing, and one-size-fits-all standards. Until we change that – at home as well as abroad – education will continue to perpetuate and justify poverty, not to ameliorate it.
Of course, even if everybody succeeded at school, you would just run into the fact that the current structure of the global economy does not provide enough good jobs for the growing number of graduates. As Winthrop and Graff say about Pakistan, “Many young people express fears about their ability to find employment, and they believe there are too few jobs available and that their prospects are getting worse, not better. One complains that ‘if you have an MA or an MBA you do not get a job. People are roaming around with degrees in their hands.’” Economists at the World Bank have a fanciful theory – a fairy tale much bigger than any of Greg Mortenson’s – that by schooling the world and expanding our “human resources” we will endlessly expand the growth economy to a point where we will all live in affluence. This is pure fantasy, of the “it’s-okay-to-buy-this-house-that-you-can’t-afford-because-the-housing-market-always-goes-up” variety. The planet doesn’t have the physical resources to sustain a middle-class lifestyle for a white-collar world, and in any case, who will mine the coal, collect the garbage, and work at Walmart when all seven billion of us have college degrees? China now has millions of unemployed college graduates, and it turns out they are as free to work in sweatshops as everybody else. As the New York Times reports, “While some recent graduates find success, many are worn down by a gauntlet of challenges and disappointments. Living conditions can be Dickensian, and grueling six-day work weeks leave little time for anything else but sleeping, eating and doing the laundry.” Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system says, “College essentially provided them with nothing…. For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”
Which brings us to terrorism. If we want to look for links between education and terrorism, we should look hard at this cycle of raised expectations, inevitable failure, disappointment, unemployment, and poverty, which fuels crime and violence at home and conflict abroad. According to observers familiar with the region, Greg Mortenson is just fear-mongering when he suggests that Islamic madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan are a primary source of terror recruits (according to Winthrop and Graff, madrasas constitute a small percentage of schools in those regions, and only a tiny percentage of these are militant; the vast majority are simply religious schools, like Catholic schools or Hebrew schools in the U.S.) But if you confine large numbers of low-income boys in mediocre conventional schools for years, brand them as failures, make them feel stupid and inferior, and then turn them loose without marketable skills into a country with high unemployment and a lot of cheap semi-automatic weapons, what exactly do you think is going to happen? “In Kashmir, there are reports that unemployed youths who joined militants ‘found an occupation and ideology, and a new family in which they found bonding and brotherhood. They had motivation, dedication and direction’ as a result of joining a militant group.” Substitute the word “gangs” for “militants” and the situation is the same in the U.S. We need to have a serious conversation about the shame and humiliation that young people experience in school –– and the crummy opportunities available to them afterward –– as an unacknowledged trigger for violence.
Which brings us to girls. It doesn’t take a professional psychologist to tell you that anything that causes humiliation and anger in men is going to cause increased rates of violence against women. I don’t question that access to education has benefitted some girls and women in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the way education is currently framed means it does good for some children at the cost of doing great harm to many others, and this is not good for families, for communities, or for societies. The answer is not to hold girls back, of course; it’s to challenge the ranking-and-failure paradigm as the only way to help children learn. Because let’s not forget that millions of girls also fail in school every year. What do we suppose that the future holds for these young women?
I was talking recently to a friend who had grown up in a rural village in the Philippines. It was one of those places that still exist all over the world, where people don’t have much money but nobody goes hungry. Life was not luxurious; there were hardships and problems, illness and death; but it was not a pit of endless degrading misery either. Families and friends lived close together; people gathered to sing, joke, and tell stories in the evenings; the mountains and valleys were beautiful; life was slow-paced, and there was plenty of time for relaxation and enjoyment. My friend was sent to a school where she did well, eventually took advantage of an Army program that enabled her to train as a nurse, moved to the U.S., and spent the rest of her life thousands of miles from her home and family. She made a good living and sent money home to her family, but she was well aware that this was not the way it worked for everybody. I asked her what happens to the girls from her province who do not succeed in school.
Without missing a beat, she said, “They get trafficked.”
The World Bank isn’t giving us any data on this. Girls’ education raises GDP, the development agencies all crow! Yes, but transitioning rural people from self-sufficient farming into sweatshops also raises GDP. Girls’ education lowers the infant mortality rate! Yes, but what if introducing school failure into rural areas also raises the sex trafficking rate? It’s commonly assumed that lack of education in developing areas is a risk factor for trafficking, but apparently the evidence suggests the opposite; according to the Strategic Information Response Network, vulnerability to human trafficking correlates with
To closely question just one of these factors, try looking at the teen suicide rate around the world. Both school failure and suicide are epidemic among “educated” indigenous teenagers from the Amazon to Australia to the Arctic Circle. And in societies like India, China, and South Korea whose recent economic growth has been fueled by intense academic pressure placed on children, suicide rates are “spiraling out of control.”
In both India and China, suicide among girls, fueled by “academic pressure and fear of failure,” has now outstripped the rate among boys, and in an alarming trend, according the the Lancet, unpublished WHO studies show the same pattern emerging in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. “I am not doing well in exams,” wrote a girl from Chandigarh to her parents before she took her life. “This is something striking, unfortunately for women,” says Jose Bertolote of the World Health Organization. Anuradha Bose, who led a Lancet study of suicide among young people in southern India, observes, “Poor countries that are developing rapidly may suffer higher suicide rates.” But according to the BBC , the Mumbai area records a teen suicide almost every day, and there is a “general agreement between psychologists and teachers that the main reason for the high number of teenagers taking their own lives is the increasing pressure on children to perform well in exams.” In case you were wondering, the Lancet authors report that the top three methods of suicide in the population they studied were hanging, poisoning with insecticide, and – a method used only by girls – self-immolation. As Damayanti Datta asks in India Today, “What have we done to our children?”
The bottom line is that the modern school is no silver bullet, but an extremely problematic institution which has proven highly resistant to fundamental reform, and there is very little objective research on its impact on traditional societies. When we intervene to radically alter the way another culture raises and educates its children, we trigger a complex cascade of changes that will completely reshape that culture in a single generation. To assume that those changes will all be good is to adopt a blind cultural superiority that we can ill afford. A clearer view of the real impacts of school projects would require well-funded and well-executed research which looks objectively at both positive and negative effects, not reports which mine the data to bolster an a priori assumption that the impact of schooling is always good. And until we have a clearer view, we should all – NGO’s, development agencies, rock stars, corporate billionaires and bestselling authors included – think long and hard about the principle, “First, do no harm.”
So what are the solutions?
Most importantly, solutions begin with the truth. We can’t start working toward real answers until we stop lying to ourselves about what schools do to children – in the real world, not in our dreams. We need to acknowledge that no system that discards millions of normal, healthy kids as failures – many of them extremely smart, by the way – will ever provide a lasting or universal solution to anything. We need to innovate with learning here at home and abroad, to put our resources into developing the many promising models that already exist for sharing knowledge, skills and ideas without humiliating children or branding them as failures. We need to recognize the real value of the intellectual traditions of other cultures – including non-literate cultures – and look for ways to share useful information in both directions which does not completely disrupt or undermine the social structures, traditional livelihoods, and knowledge systems of those cultures.
And most of all, we need to stop falling for the popular fiction of schooling as a cure for everything and recognize that a romanticized idea of education is being used as a PR device and a smokescreen to obscure the real economic issues at play for powerful nations and corporations – who extract natural resources and cheap labor from weaker nations, and then turn around and tax their own citizens to provide “aid” and “education” to help “end poverty.” It’s an elaborate shell game, a twisted road to nowhere. It should be clear by now that the “rising tide” does not “float all boats” – that’s another fairy tale – and it’s time to start talking seriously about the underlying global economic structures which are creating poverty, so that people everywhere can educate their own children in the way they think best –– without charity.
Greg Mortenson’s second book, Stones Into Schools, revolves around his efforts to build a school for Kyrgyz nomads in Afghanistan. He built the school, and it stands empty, never having been used. Many development people, including Mortenson, would tut about this, and try to find ways to convince the Kyrgyz people of the importance of education for their children’s futures. But to me, this empty school is a small sign of hope. I mean, Greg. Hello. They’re nomads. Should they give up their horses and their high mountain valleys and their yurts and sit in a classroom for years so at the end they can look for work hauling bricks or driving trucks in Kandahar or Kabul? As it turns out, the New York Times reports that Kyrgyz parents want their children to learn to read and write; it’s just that they also want them to herd sheep. Mortenson’s representative in the region was frustrated by this: “The Kyrgyz only care about sheep and yaks…They say if we have sheep and yaks, we have success in life.” Hmm. Perhaps the Kyrgyz don’t understand the value of education. Or perhaps they still have a sense of what’s real and what’s not in this world. Sheep are definitely real; “big dreams” may not be. The Afghan government, to its credit, seemed to recognize this, and sent teachers to teach the children at home in their yurts. Apparently it’s working out quite well. I just hope the Kyrgyz remain unschooled enough to continue to be able to tell fact from fiction.
~ Carol Black
Kyrgyz boy getting an education.
Sources:
Alarm at Mumbai’s teenage suicide trend. By Zubair Ahmed. BBC News, Mumbai. February 1, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8473515.stm
Beyond Madrasas: Assessing the Links Between Education and Militancy in Pakistan. By Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff. Brookings Institution, June 2010. http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2010/06_pakistan_education_winthrop.aspx
China’s Army of Graduates Struggles for Jobs, by Andrew Jacobs. New York Times, December 11, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/world/asia/12beijing.html
Estimating The Returns To Education : Accounting For Heterogeneity In Ability.by Harry Anthony Patrinos; Cris Ridao-Cano; Chris Sakellariou. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4040, October 2006 http://elibrary.worldbank.org/content/workingpaper/10.1596/1813-9450-4040
Indian teens have world’s highest suicide rate. By Shaoni Bhattacharya, New Scientist,
April 2, 2004. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4846-indian-teens-have-worlds-highest-suicide-rate.html
Progress Can Kill: How Imposed Development Destroys the Health of Tribal Peoples. Survival International, 2007. http://www.survivalinternational.org/progresscankill
Serious School Failure Is Depressing For Girls, But Not Boys. University of Washington, ScienceDaily, July 23, 2008. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080722131653.htm
Suicide the major cause of death among young people. By Wang Shanshan. China Daily, 2007. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-03/27/content_836869.htm
Suicides in young people in rural southern India, Rita Aaron MD, Prof Abraham Joseph MD, Prof Sulochana Abraham MD, Prof Jayaprakash Muliyil PhD, Prof Kuryan George MD, Jasmine Prasad MD, Shantidani Minz MD, Vinod Joseph Abraham MD, Dr Anuradha Bose MD. The Lancet - 3 April 2004 ( Vol. 363, Issue 9415, Pages 1117-1118 ) http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)15896-0/fulltext
Targeting Endemic Vulnerability Factors to Human Trafficking. Strategic Information Response Network, United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP) 2007.
Teen Suicides, By Damayanti Datta, India Today, April 18, 2008
Two Schools in Afghanistan, One Complicated Situation, by Edward Wong, New York Times. April 23, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24mortenson.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=gregmortenson=
Violence and school failure drive young people to commit suicide, by Theresa Kim Hwa-young. Asia News, August 21, 2008. http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Violence-and-school-failure-drive-young-people-to-commit-suicide-13028.html
The Future of Big-Box Schooling
Posted in blog
“I think the way western education has grown over the last few centuries, especially with the rise of industrialization, was basically not to create human beings fully equipped to deal with life and all its problems, independent citizens able to exercise their decisions and live their responsibilities in community, but elements to feed into an industrial production system.”
– Vandana Shiva, “Schooling the World”
“Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials – children – are to be shaped and fashioned into products… The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”
– Ellwood P. Cubberly, Dean, Stanford University School of Education, 1898
For those who haven’t yet seen it, this animation of a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson makes a good complement to the film Schooling the World. Robinson is approaching the question of education from a different angle, and with a different set of assumptions about globalization and culture, but the ideas here can begin to illuminate some of the questions and possibilities raised by the film.
The structure of schools as we know them today developed during the rise of the industrial period, and as the quote above from Ellwood P. Cubberly indicates, the resemblances between big-box schools and factories are quite intentional. People in the 19th and early 20th centuries did not have our sense of political correctness, and they built into the public school system their very conscious intention of testing, labeling and sorting the population into a modern class system – with a small intellectual elite, a somewhat larger managerial class, and a large laboring class, whose main “education” would be in obedience, punctuality, willingness to respond when a bell rings, and conditioning to the dutiful performance of repetitive and uninspiring tasks. As John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board articulated in 1906, “In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.”
The SAT was developed by a man who ardently believed in eugenics, and the pseudo-scientific quality of these tests functioned from the outset to lend an aura of legitimacy to the privilege of the economic elites – in other words, they created a vehicle for redefining aristocracy as meritocracy. With a small percentage of exceptions, upper-class children were reliably found to have more academic “aptitude” than lower-class children – a situation which continues today – and the entire testing /grading / sorting function of schools was overtly intended by many to identify superior genetic stock and foster interbreeding among them, while discouraging reproduction among the mentally inferior. Poverty was seen as inevitable, and grading and intelligence testing as a valid mechanism for determining which of our children would be abandoned to it.
While of course we no longer think this way, and teachers working in contemporary schools no longer hold these goals for the children in their charge, the structural features of the system which are designed to perform these functions remain intact, and continue to do considerable harm to children.
The fundamental flaw which is structurally embedded in our education system is the fallacy of social engineering – the false belief that it is possible to institute a top-down, mechanical structure, impose it on a complex living system, and expect predictable results. The entire superstructure of goals, objectives, state standards, curricula, and tests is fundamentally built on the assumption that learning is a mechanical process, in which the proper ingredients can be fed into the pipeline and the proper product will emerge at the other end. (Of course, the fact that this persistently does not happen, John Taylor Gatto argues, is no accident, but reflects the fact that it is not actually in the interests of the existing power structure to have a large population capable of exercising independent critical intelligence.)
In his talk, Sir Ken Robinson is proposing that we shed this “factory” model of education like a snake sheds its skin, and begin to explore the more flexible, creative modes of learning that will better serve the needs of children in the 21st century. But what will these new forms look like? Interestingly, the modes of learning characteristic of many indigenous cultures have the kind of flexibility, open-endedness, and intuitive nature that may be better suited to the organic growth of human intelligence and creativity than the modern regimes of state-standardized curricula and testing.
The key to the development of human intelligence and learning is that it is an organic process, in which a myriad of elements – some seen but many unseen – engage in a dynamic interplay to produce results which are stubbornly unpredictable in both timing and ultimate outcome. If you change your fundamental metaphor for the education of children from a mechanical one to an organic one – in other words, from the manufacture of a product to the flowering and fruiting of a plant – then you begin to see that your role is not to rigidly control each step in the process – with age-graded standards and lists of objectives and scope-and-sequence outlines and percentile scores – to but to create the conditions – the soil, the water, the light – under which human brilliance may unfold and flourish.
Every culture is different, and as anthropologist Meredith Small points out, every culture makes trade-offs: it would be romantic to assume that there is some perfect balance to be found. But because a traditional culture embodies learning which takes place over many generations, in which thousands of years of observation and trial-and-error allow for a multi-generational wisdom about human nature to evolve, it is possible that nuanced and workable ways of relating to children may exist in traditional cultures from which modern societies can learn and benefit.
Aspects of learning in many (not all) traditional cultures include:
These strategies can work for learning to identify medicinal plants in a rainforest, for learning to anticipate and respond to the moods and movements of wild caribou, for learning to build a sustainable house out of mud brick, and they can work for learning how to design software applications or conduct a biological field study or write an elegant and compelling essay.
So if modernized societies are beginning to discuss moving from 20th century “big-box” schooling to a more 21st century “open-source” model of learning, one possibility is that we may see a convergence of learning styles between ancient and modern cultures. As Sugata Mitra has discovered, unlettered street children can teach themselves how to use computers when given free access to the technology. So does it make sense to remove indigenous children from their traditional cultures and put them into outdated factory-style schools? Or should traditional people consider skipping that step, and deciding for themselves how they may want to use, ignore, adapt, blend, or hybridize new technologies and information in an open-source self-regulating manner?
When a new form of knowledge is truly vital and desired by a population, and access to the necessary resources is available, there is no question of needing to make education compulsory — you couldn’t stop the spread of knowledge if you tried. Look at how computer technology and expertise spread through the developed world. Personal computers were not invented by people in schools, and the vast majority of the population did not learn how to use them in schools. It was an open-source process – an organically expanding, networking, self-correcting, self-regulating and incredibly effective process – just like the early spread of literacy in many parts of Europe before the institution of widespread schooling.
Whether this is always good, of course, is another question. New technologies always change our lives, and not always for the better. Television has burned a wide swath through many cultures, including our own, leaving obesity, isolation, and advertising-driven insecurity and depression in its wake. I’m uneasy about the aggressive marketing of cell phones and technology to remote areas like Ladakh: once people from a sustainable culture suddenly require cash to feed a technology habit, many negative consequences ensue. But ultimately, it’s still better to be in control of what you adopt and what you choose not to adopt –– to be able to take what you need and leave the rest, absorb new things at a rate of your own choosing, than to be forced into an obsolete model of schooling just as the developed world begins to seriously discuss moving beyond it.
Thanksgiving
A thought on Thanksgiving:
What would North America be like today if Europeans had tried to learn from Native Americans rather than to conquer and then “teach?”
If the fantasy story taught to American children on Thanksgiving – of the friendly exchange of help and ideas between Native American and European people – had really happened?
If Europeans had come here as what they really were – immigrants – prepared to learn the languages and customs of the local people, to live peacefully among them, and to exchange information, knowledge, and ideas as equals?
What would our forests and rivers and great plains be like today? What would our arts and sciences and music and literature be like?
What would education be like if that exchange had taken place? If Native American wisdom about children and learning – about the ways of teaching through storytelling rather than direct instruction, through example and experience rather than lecture and text, through immersion in community and nature rather than segregation in a school building, and through personal challenge and transformation rather than confinement and obedience – existed today side by side with European-style schools and universities as options among the commonly accepted ways for young people to learn and grow to adulthood?
Learning from Indigenous Knowledge Systems
Because of our unconscious assumption of superiority to less technologically advanced societies, it never occurs to most people working in education that traditional cultures embody a wealth of practical information about children and learning. School as we know it is such a historically young institution – less than a century old – and modern educators are continually baffled by the fact that students don’t learn the things they are intended to learn, programs don’t work the way they are intended to work, new initiatives don’t have the impact they are meant to have.
Indigenous societies base their modes of learning and teaching on thousands of years of experience, observation, trial-and-error, and collective wisdom. The relationships between children and adults often appear effortless, with little or no obvious teaching going on. And yet children reach adulthood with an encyclopedic knowledge of their local ecosystems, spiritual traditions, and sustainable ways of living.
As Padma Sarangapani remarks in her paper, “Indigenising Curriculum: Questions Posed by Baiga Vidya:”
Baiga villages can be regarded as epistemic communities (Holzner, 1968) engaged with the application and the transmission of medicinal knowledge. There is a distribution of this knowledge among various members of the community. In Baghmara village, for instance, virtually all the adults have a fairly extensive knowledge of the trees and plants in the forest, and varying degrees of knowledge about the medicinal properties of various plants. Children, both boys and girls, from the age of about five or six years can identify several of the more common medicinal plants around the village. On a few occasions they mentioned what it was used to treat; typically stomach ailments. By the age of about eight or nine years, the scope of the child’s environment and knowledge both widen quite dramatically. On some of our visits together to the forest, they named over 60 plants with medicinal properties, and many more that bore fruits that could be eaten or were useful. They stopped their list out of consideration for me because I could no longer keep track. The Baigas themselves appear to take their knowledge of the plant life of the forests for granted, although they do recognise that there are a few men in every village whose knowledge is far more extensive and specialised.
As we search for better ways to educate our own children, we should bear in mind that indigenous societies may have practical wisdom that can be of very real use to people in the modernized world. This is not to say that we should try to transplant another culture’s learning system roots and all into our own lives – as the Dalai Lama says, you don’t need to give up your own culture and dress like a Tibetan in order to benefit from the insights of Buddhism. But what we can do is take the observations and successes of another society and begin a dialogue within our own, thinking about what elements may be used, adapted, or recombined in organic and creative ways to generate possible solutions to current problems. The following description of the Baiga mode of learning shows remarkable resemblances to practices currently being used with great success within alternative learning communities in the modern world:
Many of the features of ‘learning vidya’ are anticipated in childhood socialisation. Perhaps the most important feature is the learner’s autonomy and initiative-taking. This aspect of initiative-taking by the learner is a common feature throughout childhood where the child is almost never coerced into doing anything, but is given ample opportunity to take initiative and participate in ongoing activity. Equally important is the fact that the pace of learning is set by the learner, depending on his own judgement regarding his readiness. In most situations, children could opt out of an ongoing activity at any point when they wished, without fear of any stigma or teasing. The same level of proficiency or interest was not expected of everyone. It was also acceptable that different people would learn to different degrees, and accordingly practice differently. Most learning took place in the course of, or alongside, productive work. Thus the boundaries between work and play, leisure and labour are quite fluid. In the learning environments, whether in the family or among the peer group, there were niches for several levels of proficiency and learning by participating and direct engagement with the task.
If we can let go of thinking that there is one right way to educate children, and fully perceive the value of diversity both of cultural modes of learning and of individual talents, temperaments, and learning styles, it opens up a universe of possibilities for solving the seemingly intractable problems that face our children in the 21st century.
Thanks to Shikshantar: The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development for the link to the article by Padma Sarangapani.
Welcome
“School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of God’s own handiwork …
It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual…
a manufactory for grinding out uniform results. I was not a creation of the schoolmaster:
the Government Board of Education was not consulted when I took birth in the world.”
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1927 Nobel Prize Winner for Poetry
Welcome to the STW blog page. Check in with us here for updates about screenings, random thoughts about education and culture, links to interesting ideas and people, and whatever else life brings. Post a comment, share your thoughts, ask a question, suggest a resource. The purpose of the film is to begin a conversation; please join in.