Expectations Met

I came into this class hoping to learn more about how education is and isn’t conducive to development around the world—whether or not it really did lead to a better life for people, or if we as the western world just decided it did. From this class, I came to understand that the Western idea that education improves lives is based on the neoliberal worldview. If every person is prepared to compete in the global market, it will expand, everyone will earn money and lives will improve. Many would disagree with this idea, as evidenced by the movie Schooling the World (among several readings done for the course) where the experts argue that education actually leads to poverty rather than alleviating it because students become, “a semi-literate for another system, to which you have no entry, because you do not belong to the right class, you do not belong to the right privilege.”[1]Being educated does not change how society functions. Education has not led to automatic employment as promised, but many people have spent all their money in order to be educated in the way the Western world says is right. This is what I suspected of the world, and it was interesting to hear other people express it.

Perspectives Heard

I appreciated getting to hear so many different perspectives on this issue. For a couple weeks, it seemed like the only opinion out there was that education is not actually conducive to development. Having Najla come and talk about her personal story about how education made such a difference for her and was now changing her country was like a complete 180 from what we had been hearing and discussing before. She talked about how education not only improved her life and helped her get a good job with the World Bank, but how she was working with other educated Afghanis to improve their country. If development aid is going to be given, it needs to be allocated by those who understand the country’s culture and needs, and who knows better than those who are from there?

Freire Read

I also enjoyed reading Freire’s thoughts on education because I have been frustrated by the same issues for years. I went through the banking model; to an extent, I am still going through the banking model, though less exclusively in university than before. I went through all of elementary school and parts of high school putting in minimal effort and getting almost all A’s, because all I had to do was memorize stuff and spit it out on the test, and occasionally color a map or give a short presentation. I was never expected to actually work to understand what we were learning or figure anything out for myself (with a few exceptions like the one time we had a science fair in seventh grade). We were never taught to form our own opinions, only to accept everything we were taught as absolute truth.

Challenges Faced

This class was challenging for me because I was supposed to deeply understand the readings and develop critiques on them. Even when I did feel I understood and had thoughts on what we were discussing, I had trouble articulating my thoughts, and often just ended up sounding like an idiot. A few times, someone else would follow up with my fumbling words and say exactly what I thought what I had been saying, and everyone would agree with that person, whereas they had just looked at me like I was turning into a llama when I tried to say it. I was only trying to ensure my participation points by talking in class, but I think I may have just ended up reducing them instead. I learned that I participate better as a listener, and appreciated that Jessica recognized that as valid.

Course Vanquished

I really will feel as though I have vanquished a foe if I pass this class. It was interesting material, but perhaps not my strongest subject. I loved that we took off our shoes and sat on the floor together. It made for a much more comfortable learning environment. Thanks for taking on this challenge, Jessica!!

Does education really lead to employment? Is entrepreneurship the hope for a better tomorrow? Are people unemployed because they are not qualified for jobs?

The answer to all of these questions is “No.”

In his blog entry, “Business, As Usual, Distorts Education”, Professor Steven Klees argues that education does not, in fact, produce employment (http://educationincrisis.net/blog/item/1002-business-as-usual-distorts-education-part-i, http://educationincrisis.net/blog/item/1003-business-as-usual-distorts-education-part-ii). People all around the world in every type of situation- from the elite and middle class to those living in the slums or even refugee camps – believe that they must receive a Western-style education in order to be successful in life. What many of them are finding is that they invest in an education, and end up either unemployed or getting a job at the same level they would have worked had they not gone to school. People are working hard to compete academically so they might have a competitive edge in the workforce. Meanwhile, companies- from large corporations to small businesses are working hard to minimize their expenses, meaning they are avoiding taxes, hiring as few people as possible, paying their employees as little as possible, and giving them as few benefits as they legally (and at times, not so legally) can.

Neoliberalism is not leading to economic growth either on a personal or national level. It is only leading to the economic advancement of large corporations that are not interested in anything but their personal gain. Many people would say this is a failure of the capitalist system. On the contrary, “Poverty is not a failure of our economic system; inequality and poverty are the result of the successful functioning of our economic system” (Klees, “Business as Usual Part 2”, para 6). Capitalism is not set up to share gains with the general population.

Capitalism undermines the authority of a government, instead putting all the responsibility on the market to take care of a country. In the current system, businesses are expected to not only support a country economically, but also hold up education and other public goods through investment and through the hiring of educated citizens. Klees argues that what is needed instead of our current system is, “a large, vibrant public sector that puts limits on the market, that promotes and creates decent employment, that provides for the production of public goods, that develops an adequate and fair system of taxation, that redistributes wealth, not just income, and that is run as a very participatory democracy” (Klees, “Business as Usual Part 2”, para 11). Basically, he is calling for what the United States and UN claim they stand for: equal power and money in the hands of citizens, not just a small group of elites.

Creating such an environment would require a complete transformation of the way the entire world works. This may seem like an impossible task, but the entire world has already changed before when it transformed into the capitalist society we know today. Who’s to say it is not possible to transform it again? In the transformation to what we now know, businesses took the power from governments around the world. The task before us according to Klees is to take that power back and give it to governments in which citizens have a great deal of say.

Such a task is not an easy one. Businesses have succeeded in their goal: to make money and grow in power. How we are meant to take that power away from them is a topic for another time. The first steps are for us to realize that the market system is not improving our lives, and education is not contributing to the market. Then, we need to consider how we can change this system, and who will be actors in this transformation. Leaving behind neoliberalism as the driving force of society is the only way we will see employment and equality in our world.

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.