Education as Reflection

From the Andra Pradesh Mahila Samatha organization:

"Education is understood as a process which enables women to question, conceptualize, seek answers, act, reflect upon their actions and raise new questions. It is not to be confused with meer literacy."

Chambers on Development

"As people we are now, as never before, in all this together. All of us human beings, wildly different though our circumstances are-young men caged and tormented in Guantanamo Bay, corporate fat cats complacent in capital cities, child soldiers in African conflicts, middle class children of the OECD, skinny people scouring for scraps and obese people stuffed sick, those who see evil and those who see good, those who hate and those who love, fundamentalist and ecumenicals, believers and skeptics-a kaleidoscope of people, culture, languages, faiths and beliefs...We see all these differences, but they are overwhelmed by what we have in common-our global habitat, our miraculous genes, our brains, the mystery of consciousness, our ability to reflect on ourselves and our potential for selfishness and greed to be overturned by generosity and altruism."

-Robert Chambers

Courage

"At the very lowest time, in a moment of hopeless despair, when any effort at all seemed impossible, the word 'courage' suddenly appeared in my mind...With some magic of its own, it unhooked the last deep place of aversion and fear about what was happening that was keeping me separate from the experience. It brought forth the courage of simply being...Courage is not about changing anything o grasping for some better state. Its the valor of truly being present."
-Joseph Goldstein

The Professional Mentality

From a string of recent, excellent articles from The Atlantic, a line from "Gods Surgeons in Africa," discussing the training and equipping of surgeons in Sub Saharan Africa, and the immediate connection to the areas of all civil servants, and the strong cross-disciplinary connections to incentives, both on the surface level, and their deeper, psychological connotations:

""The professional mentality that you and I talk about is a luxury that exists only if you have enough money to allow people to dedicate themselves to certain things and certain principles."

Pritchett, Scott, and Bureaucratic Reality

From Lant Pritchett's "The Illusion of Equality: The Educational Consequences of Blindingly Weak States," a parallel to the reality of bureaucratic function here in West Africa:
What Scott terms "bureaucratic high modernism," according to Pritchett, "...blinds the state to the many observable social characteristics on which localized social processes had historically depended...to produce equal treatment of all citizens by the state's bureaucratic apparatus." I would add that in the reality of bureaucratic function, or nonfunction, the equal treatment so referred to is, in fact, a collective inability create and administer administrative outputs for these mentioned citizens. The differing organizational structures that have been implemented in the developing world, I would argue, are in fact the very "zombie" apparati that Pritchett, himself, earlier references. Organizational structures actively dissolving incentives for outputs through completely regimented, top-down decision making, restricted to those at the very top of the hierarchal bureaucratic pyramids. The end result: structures with no inherent meaning other than to mimic the functions in the Western world; function without actual output. 

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? 

Slowness

Slowness, listlessness, so easy to get trapped into the quicksand of time, stepping outside, sitting, waiting, listening, open.....

"The end of suffering is achievable...through the unconditional freedom of the enlightened mind."
-Mark Epstein

The Pedagogy of Human Development

"Critical Internalization"

If people are being asked to change, if change is suggested as the superior option to one's current standing, and regardless of the positive developmental virtue/value of this change, a mindset needs to shift, a certain critical reflection and self-actualization must be implemented to determine the value of this change in personal, individualized life circumstances. No circumstance is alike.  This is the central, frustrating, indomitable tenant of all developmental economics. Thus, for all of the planning, for all of the technology, the ideas, the meeting, the finance, the "last yard" of developmental planning is always the hardest, and the most prone to oversight due to its complexity and individualized nature. Critical internalization is this last, fundamental step.
Critical internalization, though daunting, is not complex; it is amazingly simple, yet impossible to model, and impossible to clone. It is not costly; the sums demanded are only for the necessary human capital which foments viable human response. Critical internalization is not contingent upon fungible goods, depreciating and falling into disrepair, disuse, as currently litters so much of the developing world. Great intentions, poor connections. It is dependent upon only machinations of the human mind; virtue, value, judgement, reflection, and finally/ultimately, acceptance, rejection, modification.
How can we standardize developmental linkages to the individual, how can we measure the internalization of change, how can we observe individualized judgements?

Poverty and Power

The basic tenant of poverty is a lack of power.  A lack of power, of control, over the external circumstances of one's life. This lack of power is systemic, not individual, in nature. To gain power
is to lose poverty; to lose power is to become deeper entrenched into the physical and mental depravities that plague so many in the world. First, we need to define "depravity;" in this context, I refer
to a simple lack of comfort. Comfort as human development, if you will. This simple definition can be extended to all walks of life, and forms the cornerstone for greed and lust for power and control. We, as human beings, simply want comfort, and wish to avoid pain and unpleasantness. This is the human condition. This is also the situation that plagues so many of the systems designed to help alleviate the powerless conditions in the developing world. Once people get comfort, they are loath to give it up; our thirst for comfort becomes paramount, and clouds our judgements, our duties, and our capabilities to truly perform altruistic work. Only those few, who have done the near-impossible, and have overcome the addiction to comfort, have had the power to lead-by-example and truly influence change for the powerless. The list of these people is extremely short; the normal suspects, Mahatma Gandi, Mother Theresa, His Holiness The Dalai Lama; those who have transformed their own addiction to comfort, and have succeeded in breaking down the walls that the comfort divide builds between the powerful and the powerless. So much of our thirst for comfort, which controls out motivations and actions, also depletes the resources intended for the powerless. Again, this can be seen in the macro-level, through environmental resource depletion and trade barriers, down to the micro, individual level, as NGO workers power around town in air conditioned, new SUV's, basking in comfort that the powerless can not even imagine.
Power and comfort are intoxicating; this is the drug of inequality.


“Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.”"
-Paolo Freire