“The Treachery of Images” by René Magritte

We have spent the entire INTL 399 course discussing education policy, the need for governments to educate better, and the benefits thereof. Let me argue that all of this, all of these “better education policies” and “rights to education” that people “have”, is completely separate from “reality”.

The Right to Education project extolls the work of multiple international and non-governmental organizations that work towards furthering education policies because education is “a right in itself”[1]. “Hurrah!” they say as their belief gains international prominence and becomes normal in the minds of any “educated, pluralist fellow”.

Those scare quotes challenge the assumption that because the majority of people believe something, it must be true.

I personally buy into the scheme of globalized education, and as I am writing now from a position of privilege in a university setting, I have an obvious bias towards education and academia over working in a sweatshop. Yet I became educated because that is what my culture and worldview told me to do. My worldview tells me that education is the key to personal and economic success, and as such education is just as basic of a right as the right to breath. Denying someone’s intellectual freedom and development is akin to denying someone’s physical freedom and subjectivity.

But Western culture informs my view of the world and argues for the fundamentality of formalized education to personal development.

Attempting to abstract human rights out from under the oppression of our own cultures, what can we really say about them? In order for there to be rights, it must be assumed that someone is giving people these rights, for one can only have rights if there is something granting these rights and someone who does not have them. If you believe in God, there you go: big, bearded man going around creating life and endowing everyone with “the right to a primary school education and a Christmas holiday”. Fine. Yet for those who do not ascribe to a divine, who is granting us these rights?

Rights as such, while I support them fully, are just as relative as whether or not you think a bird feeder is either at rest or hurtling through space. The bird feeder is doing both of these contradictory things, and the answer one gives depends on their frame of reference[2].

The conception of the universality of rights comes from a specific worldview that purports their existence.

Thus projects like the Right to Education are troublesome because they claim to have a sort of divine knowledge into the workings of the world when they are really just the beliefs of one worldview asserting their ideas upon everyone else.

Human rights are relative to their cultural context, and the concept of education is not above and beyond culturally-informed paradigms of what a person is and what rights they do and do not have.

“Before, you spoke our language, my son.”
(Source: “That Was Before America’s Capitalist Society Betrayed Him — and Us…” from ¡No Pasarán!)

Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly notes in his blog post entitled “Bridging the Language Divide in Vietnam”, that the language of instruction for education heavily influences the success of a student. He claims that educating minority children in their native language during elementary school assists their overall educational development more than merely educating minority students in a foreign language to begin with (Nhan-O’Reilly, 2013)¹.

Nhan-O’Reilly’s case study is Vietnam, but I have seen the same setbacks he mentions facing students in my hometown of Redmond, Oregon.

Even in America, as pluralistic as it claims to be, English education is largely forced upon a number of minorities throughout the country, severely stinting their educational development. Speaking predominantly Spanish or an indigenous language at home, the overwhelming majority of students who were behind on their reading level in my community were either Hispanic or Native American. School taught them English, not their family. As a result, they were told to have, in Paulo Friere’s terms, “an absolute ignorance” (2005, p. 72), and as such they were deemed “problem children”, just like the Vietnamese students who would, “drop out of school altogether, while others fail their examinations and spend years repeating grades” (Nhan-O’Reilly, 2013).

In the United States and other countries with minority groups, we need more programs like the ones Nhan-O’Reilly mentions in Vietnam. As a new sector for teachers in education would open up, community members who would normally face trouble finding a job, such as poorly educated minorities, could acquire a quick teacher’s license and then help out the children from their communities (Nhan-O’Reilly, 2013). This would create both an economic incentive for increased attention paid to minority’s education, but it could also harken to the effects noted by Nhan-O’Reilly where students were, “[motivated] to read, including in Vietnamese” (2013). When the children learn first in their mother tongue, they are more successful in education and at learning other languages later on.

We know from the colonial history of numerous countries that education is both a means of inclusion and exclusion (Nhan-O’Reilly, 2013). We cannot afford to continue to exclude minorities in education within the United States. If the least successful students on paper got a chance at education on their own terms, then these students could possibly be the next Einstein as neoliberalism so resolutely wants them to be.

However, it is not as if the entire education system needs to be reorganized to benefit the few at the expense of the majority. I merely argue that at the rudimentary level of public education, students should be given an equal opportunity to succeed regardless of background and language. I acknowledge that satisfying the needs of all minority groups in every geographic region is nearly impossible in a practical sense, but our lack of ability to do everything to help minorities does not mean we should do nothing to help.

Language and education are essential for human development across the board. Otherwise we would merely be left with the Lonely Island’s knowledge of education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw 

Nhan-O’Reilly’s piece can be found here:
http://www.educationforallblog.org/regions/east-asia-and-pacific/bridging-the-language-divide-in-vietnam

Paulo Friere’s book:
Paulo, F. (2005). The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. United States of America.

(Source: “Race starts early for ethnic minority students” from Earth Times)

(Source: Leaving “No Child Left Behind” Behind from The Class Struggle)

In the film Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden, we are repeatedly told that minority and traditional cultures and languages are being crushed by the cogs of formalized, mass, Western education. The film provides testimonies of young men and women who have moved to New Delhi and have become caught up in Western culture; “They tend to forget their own culture … sometimes they don’t even know how to speak their own language” (Schooling the World, 2010)¹.

English has taken the linguistic world hostage and represses all others in its wake. Western education is thus seducing and destroying the myriad of cultures in the world by contorting them all into one homogeneous product for industrialization.

In a majority of instances, Schooling the World is correct, yet there are other sides of formal, Western education that are not so destructive to languages. Minority languages can sometimes be preserved by formal education. Furthermore, having children learn the lingua franca of the day, i.e. English, can lead to increased dialogue between cultures rather than being a purely malevolent force. Granted, history is wrought with examples of minority groups, cultures, and languages being attacked by a foreign government and culture. Yet this is not a necessary outcome of education today as Schooling the World purports it to be.

It all depends on how you teach and who supports you.