(29 September 2009. The Internet hasn’t worked in over twenty-four hours, so I don’t know when it will be that this will get posted.)
In my last post, I mentioned that folks shouldn’t fall into the progressivist fallacy that there is a necessary causal relationship between formal education and development. That is, it’s pretty clear that formal education does not necessarily cause economic development, contrary to popular believe. It doesn’t necessarily even contribute to it. It can contribute to it, but not necessarily so.
[Barbara Rogoff in her study of cognitive development, Apprenticeship in Thinking: Development in Social Context, writes the following about this issue:
It is easy for middle-class American and European researchers to focus on skills that are important in our own daily lives and in our community no only because as humans we all tend to be ethnocentric, but also because in many other nations, skills such as literacy (and the arbitrary skills associated with a particular form of literacy and schooling) are adopted as national priorities in the attempt to change the countries’ economic position. Researchers’ judgments of the importance of literate (or other technological) skills for intellectual development can be misled by the worldwide export of these tools to other nations…and by attempts to convert their inhabitants to a Euroamerican view of the natural world and literate ways of thinking and acting. We must be careful not to confuse the specific uses of the skills with the economic power of their users. The point is clearer when we consider the respect that is now given to socialization practices and cognitive processes of the Japanese, apparently because to their success in beating Americans at their own game (i.e., economic power and excellence in mathematical and technological skills). (pp. 106-107; emphasis added)]
But here’s the kicker: This is the very reason that this country needs the sort of education provided by the Society of Jesus. That seems a contradiction, I know, but bear with me: I hope it is less so at the end of this post.
We are enthralled by the myth of progress. The myth of progress simply states that the human project necessarily (there’s that word again!) can and will continue to march toward utopia, step-by-(more/better/improved)-step. A certain sort of functionalist and technical rationality serves this myth in our present era, and it informs what we now think is the purpose of schooling. In Surprised by Hope (which I read some months ago and which informs some of what follows), N.T. Wright notes the following about this myth (I’m sorry I don’t have the exact page reference in my notes):
The world is ours to discover, exploit, and enjoy. Instead of dependence on God’s grace, we will become what we have the potential to be by education and hard work. Instead of creation and new creation, science and technology will turn the raw material of this work into the stuff of utopia.
Here’s the problem with the myth, however: It can’t deal with the existence of evil in the world. It is powerless to deal with evil and the problems it wreaks in any meaningful way.
Education does not inevitably have to serve the myth. What if we structured education in ways other than those proposed by the progressivist myth, in ways that serve other purposes than the creation of cogs and levers for the gears of the capitalist vehicle making its way through time to some neo-liberal Utopia?
What if education were, instead, considered in terms of liberation? In this regard Mwalimu Nyerere got it right (again!):
The purpose of education is therefore liberation through the development of man as a member of society. The purpose is not the development of objects – whether they be pyramids, or irrigation ditches, railways or palaces. The development of things – what is usually called economic development – can be used in the development of man. It is so involved in Africa. But the purpose of education is not to turn out technicians who can be used as instruments in the expansion of the economy. It is to turn out men who have the technical knowledge and ability to expand the economy for the benefit of man in society.
The care for/of the individual student as a human person, as an end in herself or himself, is the starting point. We refer to this as cura personalis in Jesuit-speak. We would be doing the opposite if we began to see our students as commodities, if we believed that the mission of OLQP were to convert students “into objects – into repositories of knowledge, like rather special computers.”
One important goal education is to help students engage what it means to be human; we Christians would its purpose is to help them engage what it means to bear the very image and likeness of God. In this regard, education is liberation/celebration because it engages what genuinely and authentically makes us who we are, who we are meant to be. At its best, education frees not only the intellect but also each student’s talents, creativity, energy, etc.
We are concerned with the care of each individual, but the goal of Jesuit education is to form “men and women for others.” This theme simply recognizes that education is a social activity, with a social purpose. Again, Nyerere:
The first essential of the liberated person is an awareness of two things: his or her own humanity, and the power of the human person to use circumstances rather than to be used by them. He or she must overcome any ingrained feelings of inferiority, or superiority, and therefore be able to cooperate with other people, on the basis of equality, for their common purposes. (language changed re: gender; emphasis added)
In my two months at language school I have had numerous conversations with Tanzanians about these “ingrained feelings of inferiority,” a vestige of colonialism (as are the “ingrained feelings of superiority” wazungo feel, if we’re going to be honest, no?). The answer is not to educate for selfishness, though; education has to be at the service of the community, “common purposes,” as Nyerere calls them.
To be continued
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