A viewing of the documentary “Schooling the World” offers a critical perspective on the development of international educational policy from its present framework as practiced in the globalizing world community. The film’s cinematography offers time for the viewer to reflect on the discourse while shots pan across the beautiful Himalayas, invoking a cinematic sentiment that education is to be taken in a place of reflection upon the natural world.  From a journalistic perspective, the film portrays aspects of various educational policy such as the transition of traditional peoples in the developing world from a lifestyle of multi-generational sustenance farming to that of uniform adherence to an institutionalized education and a disparate economic system. The economic, social and environmental issues that the global community faces can be traced back to an ideology of economic imperialism, a resounding faith in systemic industrial, chemical, and genetic engineering systems. Many of these systems are being staunchly challenged by activists in the global community, including Vandana Shiva, a highly facultative Indian born woman who is now active in movements concerning agriculture, climate change and systemic educational policy.

Shiva critiques the educational policy in her home region:

“I came from the central Himalayan region of Garwal. The woman of Garwal worked very hard to make sure the kids would have schooling, but of course the schooling was the institutionalized schooling of the kind that doesn’t teach you anything about your local ecology, your local culture, your local economy or your ability to be productive, it basically teaches you to be a semi-literate for another system to which you have no entry because you don’t belong to the right class, you don’t belong to the right privilege, etc. I now go back to the same villages and the woman say that the worst mistake they made was to think that that kind of education would help. We have saying in Hindi: It’s the washerman’s dog that belongs neither to the place where the washing is done nor to the home. They are in between people and they are falling through the cracks of an in-between world.” –Vandana Shiva, “Schooling the World”

There are many examples of the inequitable distribution of capital and labor resources in the current structure of the world economic order. Less Developed Countries seem to remain underdeveloped while bearing the various costs of their natural resources being plundered by international corporations under the banner of 21^st century economic imperialism. An example of structural adjustment policy enacted in the agricultural sector is to be found in the Punjab Region of India beginning in the 1970s and under the directorship of Norman Borlaug and USAID. This industrialized model of agriculture has criticized for its negative social and ecological impacts. Chemical intensive agriculture, generally recognized as a monoculture with a heavy focus on using expensive machinery to add chemical inputs in the form of macronutrients like N, P, K, Ca, Mg and S, and it has been proven that with consistent intensive application of these inputs, the soil becomes less nutrient-rich, and the vast majority of life supporting microorganisms including bacteria and fungi which retain water in the soil are killed off.

Unfortunately the impact of the Green Revolution, which in mainstream media is hailed to have saved the lives of billions in the short run, has in the long run created vast debt for thousands of Indian farmers who cannot make payments on their Western tractors, chemicals and bio-engineered seed because of the desertification of their fields, driving a significant portion of them to developing inferiority complexes or suicide. In addition, the ecological impacts of chemical intensive agriculture include genetic mutations and unbalanced pH for organisms in contact with the regional ground water. Many of the projections (SAPs, GEPs, etc.)  from the developed world to the developing world have caused multi-faceted crisis following their implementation, especially in the long run.

             Realizing that both education and agriculture belong to the foundation of human life, Shiva identifies a solution and calls the international community to readdress these issues with a progressive frame of mind:

“We can now only go forward by picking up the threads of our broken histories and nature’s broken evolution, its only through that that we can build the bridge to the future, because a century of breeding for industrial agriculture has been a breeding for uniformity and uniformity is a guarantee for very high risk and very high vulnerability…”

–Vandana Shiva

Works Cited

“Schooling the World,” publisher unknown, additional citing req.

Verger, Novelli et Al. Global Education Policy and International Development, Bloomsbury, 2012.

www.youtube.com /search Vandana Shiva