Our education system makes the assumption that the Western world has already reached perfection and cannot possibly improve any more, and that the rest of the world ought to be following our glowing example of how to live well.

In actuality, only 1 out of every 10 of the children who undergo Western-style schooling in impoverished countries grow up to become successful doctors, engineers, lawyers, or businessmen[1]. We LOVE to tell stories about the children in this ten percent and brag about how much good we are doing in the world through education. But what happens to the other 90%? We try to sweep them under the rug and pretend they don’t exist. But they do. And they are not just statistics. They are people, same as you and I.

So what happens to the 90% who fail – either while in school, or in finding employment after graduation?

Most end up in SLUMS.

What exactly are slums anyway? Slums grow when people move to the city looking for “good jobs”, but such jobs are limited, and only a small portion of them actually end up with one. Many people from the countryside have zero income, so they come to the city to make money. A man might end up working in a factory and earn four times the amount he had before, but the work he must do usually turns out to be much more dangerous, tedious, and less fulfilling than his previous way of life.

Where did education get him? The people in the slums are often the same ones who went through school. Helena Norberg-Hodge, an expert on globalization, puts it like this: “People are led to believe that the future is this modern urban consumer culture. And they are going into debt; they are selling their houses, to give their child an education. The great hope is that they are going to get a good job as an engineer, as a doctor in the modern economy.” But that doesn’t happen. So now what? They don’t have any money left. They spent it all on an education that didn’t lead to a prestigious job as promised. All that hard work, and they are reduced to living in a tiny shack on government-owned land and digging through the trash piles for food.

It is evident that we have a problem. But what precisely is the problem? Is it that our culture is actually inferior to traditional societies’? Is it in what we are teaching people? Is it in the way we are teaching them? The film Schooling the World seeks to open a dialogue about this by showing the world the ways our education system is failing to make the world a better place, and people moving to slums is only one of the many negative effects Western education is having. However, in doing criticizing our system, it is easy to romanticize traditional culture as better than our own. I would argue that what’s wrong is not so much that our culture sucks, but that we’ve decided our culture is right, and are trying to force it on the rest of the world. Of course, as this film clearly shows, our culture is not right, and the world is suffering from being shoved into it. However, we would have just as much of a problem if any people group on earth were to go out to the rest of the world and force its farming techniques, education style and other customs upon it. Perhaps our problem is not our education itself, because it does have a time and place, but the fact that we want everyone in the world to go through it. Not everyone can be an engineer or doctor. Our system fails to take into account how different people are, and does not allow them to be creative, challenge the system, and change the world.