Selling the world, dreaming a lie is the prevalent Western strategy, based on our speculation-driven economy, to draw as many new clients into the global consumer market as possible. For this, people have to be manipulated, formed, created, molded, simply put educated to fit into the cash-economy.
The documentary film Schooling the World critiques the emerging trend to use Western modern education as a panacea to tackle poverty worldwide. It challenges the goal of poverty reduction and rather suggests poverty creation with the current approach. The film elucidates the underlying assumption of UNESCO, UNDP, UNICEF, and the World Bank to bring development to non-industrialized countries by drawing children around the globe away from their homes, educating them, and then integrating them into the job market.
Education for All (EFA). This is the new catch-phrase in the international development sector. In 1990, at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, 155 countries and 150 organizations agreed to provide universal access for primary education. The shift of the education discourse from an economic driven approach to education as a fundamental human right was celebrated as a breakthrough, even though forty years earlier the Declaration of Human Rights had already proclaimed that “everyone has the right to education.”[1] Nevertheless, in 2000 Universal Primary Education became a goal of the MDG’s (Millennium Development Goals). This got the worldwide effort progressing and the wheels spinning. Governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), as well as the private sector allocated money, which resulted in 82 million more children being enrolled in primary education during the first decade of its implementation.[2]
I believe that the policy, Education for All as it is carried out at the moment will diminish and eventually destroy the diversity of cultures and leave us with one homogenous culture, namely the Western high-consumption culture. The school settings oftentimes mimic the Western example and appear quite uniform globally. Wade Davis, an anthropologist, describes culture as “one model of reality.”[3] However, the modern education of the West has been expanded to remote rural villages on continents like Asia or Africa. Children, whose parents are still working the land, are now sitting in classrooms to receive universal primary education. The curriculum which is used has not much to do with the lives around them.
Interestingly, by hearing Education for All, most Westerners assume the so-called developing world should be on the receiving end. In my view, shifting the focus to truly Education for All is the only workable approach. We, educated Westerners, know that our Earth’s resources could not sustain the world population on our living standard. Therefore, since we know it is not possible, I think it is time to turn the table and we should realize that we are the ones who have to be educated in order to reduce poverty. If the goal is poverty reduction, it is on us to rethink our lives. If it is about economic growth we should be honest about selling the world and dreaming a lie.
Vandana Shiva explains in the documentary film Schooling the World that our education deliberately and systematically attempts to create what I would call robots. In her words she says, “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. They were products with partial knowledge. We move from wisdom to knowledge and now we are moving from knowledge to information and that information is so partial that we are creating incomplete human beings.”[4]
As the name says: Education for All. So why are we taking ourselves out of the equation, but project it to the rest of the world?
[1.Shields, R. (2013). Globalization and international education. p.26. Print.]
[2.Shields, R. (2013). Globalization and international education. p.26-27. Print.]
[3.Carol Black. (Director) Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden. 2010. Web.]
[4.Carol Black. (Director) Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden. 2010. Web.]