I was traveling in Africa / Asia / South America, and the people I talked to there all wanted modern schools for their children. Are you saying they’re wrong?
No. People everywhere are entitled to choose the educational setting they feel is best for their children. There’s an important context in which we need to view this phenomenon, however. The enormous multinational corporations that drive the global economy spend billions advertising the modern consumer lifestyle, and they do a very good job of making people want what we have (it’s been called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world.) Even the word “developing” implies a kind of evolutionary process whereby other cultures will inevitably “advance” to our superior level…
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Isn’t it equally paternalistic to say that people shouldn’t have schools if they want them?
Of course. It’s not your job or mine to decide how people in other parts of the world should raise their children. That’s really the central point of “Schooling the World:” that we need to drop the assumption of superiority that inclines us to think that we can or should decide how other people should raise and educate their children…
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If you don’t think schools are the way to end poverty, then what do you think we should do?
Schooling the World is addressing the impacts of education programs on relatively intact traditional cultures — that is, cultures where people still live on their traditional land, where they are able to produce healthful and adequate food, shelter, and clothing for themselves in traditional ways, and where they enjoy the support of intact family, community and religious structures. A person who makes less than two dollars a day in this setting is not “poor” in the sense that a person living in an urban slum on less than two dollars a day is poor…
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But isn’t education for girls important?
Part of the appeal of the mainstream narrative about building schools and educating girls is its simplicity; through this one simple act, we are often told, we can end poverty, reduce conflict and war, and improve the status and living conditions of girls and women around the world. The reality, however, is that when you intervene to change the way a culture raises its children, you create a complex cascade of thousands of changes which will radically alter that culture in a single generation. Inevitably some of those changes will be good and others not so good. What you find will depend on what you look for, what you measure, and how you attribute causality…
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Aren’t you just romanticizing traditional cultures?
The short answer is: no. Helena Norberg-Hodge specifically says in the film that “all these cultures are not perfect.” Wade Davis points out that each culture has its own advantages and disadvantages, emphasizing that “if you’re in an accident and your arm is cut off, you don’t want to go to an African herbalist, you want to go to an emergency room.” The longer answer is also no, but it depends on just what you mean by the question…
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When was this video produced?
Hi Elsa – The film was shot from 2006 – 2010 and released in October of 2010.