- The filmShare| var addthis_config ={“data_track_clickback”:true}; If you wanted to change an ancient culture in a generation, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children. The U.S. Government knew this in the 19th century when it forced Native American children into government boarding schools. Today, volunteers build schools in traditional societies around the world, convinced that school is the only way to a ‘better’ life for indigenous children. But is this true? What really happens when we replace a traditional culture’s canon of knowledge with our own? Does life really get better for its people? SCHOOLING THE WORLD takes a challenging, sometimes funny, ultimately deeply troubling look at the role played by modern education in the destruction of the world’s last sustainable indigenous cultures. Beautifully shot on location in the Buddhist culture of Ladakh in the northern Indian Himalayas, the film weaves the voices of Ladakhi people through a conversation between four carefully chosen original thinkers; anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; Helena Norberg-Hodge and Vandana Shiva, both recipients of the Right Livelihood Award for their work with traditional peoples in India; and Manish Jain, a former architect of education programs with UNESCO, …
- StoreAll profits from sales of “Schooling the World” will be donated to nonprofit organizations concerned with cultural survival and rethinking education. But we don’t want money to get in the way of your seeing the film, so we’re adopting an “honor system” pricing structure. If you can pay our standard rate, we greatly appreciate it; if you’d like to pay our supporter rate, that’s fantastic; if you’re a student, nonprofit cultural or educational group, teacher buying classroom materials out of your own pocket, or just a private individual trying to survive in tough economic times, please feel free to select our sliding scale rate for DVD purchase. If you don’t have a credit card and you’d like to buy a DVD, email us at info@schoolingtheworld.org. SCHOOLING THE WORLD DVD NTSC R-O 65 min. “Powerful, effective, direct, clear… and at the same time poetic, subtle, delicate, tender.” – Gustavo Esteva, education activist and co-founder, Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico “An important and fascinating movie.” – Sir Ken Robinson, author, The Element Rate options Standard rate $15.00 Supporter rate $25.00 Sliding scale rate $5.00
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- faq1. 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. But there’s an important context in which we need to view this phenomenon….. 2. Isn’t it equally paternalistic to say that people shouldn’t have schools if they want them? Of course. It’s not our job to decide how the peoples of the world should raise their children…. 3. 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…
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The Future of Big-Box Schooling
“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.