Education as Liberation

Education as Liberation? 

The powerfully liberating effects of education have been well-documented by progressive educationalists over the years. Education, "As the practice of freedom," has encouraged participatory, progressive thinking, modeled around a foundation of collective critical analysis. However, we must be prepared, as progressive educationalists, to accept altering views of liberation, as our concepts, just as with our pedagogy, itself, are not necessarily grounded in the realities of our students' lives. 

In a recent working paper by Kremer, Friedman, Miguel, and Thornton (2011), the authors discovered that in Kenya, increased educational opportunities, and their related improvements in human capital (Schultz, 1961), does not necessarily translate into  "developmentally positive" outcomes, such as increased democratic participation and female empowerment, as expected, theorized, and modeled for decades. The trials held in Kenya were shown to increase political awareness of the young women, and decrease their propensity for early marriage and acceptance of domestic violence. As the authors concede, "…in our Kenyan context, this rejection of the status quo did not translate into greater political efficacy, community participation or voting intentions. Instead, the program increased the perceived legitimacy of political violence (1)." 

This unexpected outcome shatters the idealized image of education as necessarily leading to the "freedom" that we would expect; instead, the definition of "freedom" itself is subject to the same participatory reflection and pressures in ethnically divided societies with weak governing institutions. 

Thus, how to reconcile the popular drive towards critically reflective educational systems, which act to empower both educators and students in critically resource-deficient regions of the world, and the unintended consequences of critical reflection. Is it the role of a third party/outsider/expert group to make judgments on the outcomes of critical education in specific contexts that are not our own? Education empowers at the individual level; this is the great promise, but also the critical factor that undermines national, uniform standardization. 

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kremer/files/GSP-tracking-politics_2011-04-04-CLEAN.pdf 

The Path Through the Fields

An important article in this week's Economist on poverty alleviation and social development in Bangladesh, "The Path Through the Fields," (http://tinyurl.com/azttbnl) which has debunked some of the common myths of developmental economics, such as the primary fallacy that growth brings poverty alleviation (since disproved by such economists as Pranab Bardhan, who has shown that in India and China, most poverty alleviation occurred, in fact, not as a result of increased economic opening, but in fact, as a result of agricultural policy changes and other social factors). We must examine the analysis through an enlightened lens, that of social development over economic development, that of understanding the myth of economic growth as the end all for development, that of understanding the role of a functioning government as a mechanism for redistribution, not for wealth creation for the entrenched few.
What Bangladesh has, indeed, shown, is that poverty alleviation can occur with strong grassroots institutions, with the crucial role of a bold and innovative civil society, and with a focus on women's empowerment and women's advancement playing a fundamentally key role.

A fundamental question that I have raised previously that goes unanswered, however, is just how important the makeup of these civil society organizations is, and how this makeup effects their role in a country's transformation. 

South Asia is home to the largest, best organized, and most progressive indigenous NGO's on the planet, which have pioneered the route of social development for millions. Organizations such as Pratham in India and BRAC and Grameen in Bangladesh have developed incredible breadth and depth, and have acted as true agents of change for their nations. My question is: why have the majority of African nations  NOT developed their own transformative"super-NGO's," and what is the connection between host country ownership/development of NGO's and their actual, on-the-ground effectiveness?