Schooling the World: The White Man's Last Burden trailer from lost people films on Vimeo.
Over the weekend, I watched a film called Schooling the World, part of National Geographic's "Half the Sky" series featuring female movie-makers. The movie, which was far too simplistic and relied on too many quotes from famous people scrolling down the screen, nevertheless asked an interesting question about our current push to extend formal, institutionalized schooling to every remote corner of the world, especially to young women: Why do we view this as an unalloyed good?
On its face, of course, it makes perfect sense. Education sounds like a good thing, and education for all is intended to be a democratizing force, one that opens up economic participation to everyone and takes control over knowledge out of the hands of the elite. But the point of the movie is that we simply can't, and aren't, giving everyone a place in the new global workforce, so we're systematically removing people from their homes and cultures to receive formal education, using curriculum largely defined by Western powers, without guaranteeing them a good life. The documentary focused on Ladakh, a town in the northernmost region of India, where, according to the film, only about 10 percent of the schoolchildren successfully finish and go on to higher education or good jobs. Most of the graduates from Ladakh's formal schools, largely leftover from colonial days, simply don't belong to the right class or otherwise have access to opportunities to work. The movie's point is that this leaves them stuck in between worlds and depletes their hometowns of entire generations.
Even if every graduate in Ladakh got a job, though, is this a good thing? The anthropologists interviewed in the movie, including Wade Davis, National Geographic's anthropologist in residence, point out that our view of the rise of countries like India and China is a bit skewed. The middle class in those countries is undoubtedly growing, and we have a lot of data on, say, the rise in GDP. But, to paraphrase Davis, some of that is due to workers moving from cashless, agrarian economies to become factory workers in crowded urban centers. That tells us a lot about the rise in the average income, but not a lot about residents' well-being. We frame the push for schooling as a way to eradicate poverty, but in reality, what we're also doing is training workers to serve the needs of multinational corporations and a global elite. We have, after all, done this before. The phrase "white man's burden" was coined at a time when we were using education to forcefully assimilate non-Western groups around the world, eradicating cultures and "civilizing" those deemed "native." That, too, was something we ostensibly did to help these "others."
Unfortunately, the movie doesn't dive into these questions very well. It falls squarely on the side of institutionalized education being a horrific thing. These schools are presented as mechanical and destructive -- we know that because the filmmaker, Carol Black, provides a steady montage of schoolchildren doing a lot of marching and weird calisthenics. The farming communities from which they hail are presented as holistic and natural. Infant mortality, hunger, and lack of opportunity -- all very real effects of poverty among remote populations -- are brushed over. But the idea that we should more critically examine a push to educate the entire world, in a fairly universal system, is a good one. After all, we know from our own experience that formal education can introduce inequality as often as it eradicates it.
