The Pedagogy of the Oppressed....

Re-reading Freire's historical account of learning, of critical thinking, of awareness, and the power of education to create reflection and true development....the words are so dense, yet there are  a few that truly stand out.....

“It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained…the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” –Hegel

“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. “ 

“It is a rare peasant who, once ‘promoted’ to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant’s situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged.”

“A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.”

“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.”

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, and with each other…In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”

“The banking approach to education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the important of learning that, on the contrary, floger gave green grass to the rabbit.”

“Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged ad obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated. Their response to the challenge invokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.”

Uganda Reflections

Day 3 Education…Reflections

The disillusionment of working within the confines of a corrupted macro-level climate is palpable when speaking with local and, more-so, international NGO’s. What, then, I always ask, is the answer for the students, the most vulnerable citizens who lack political voice (primary and secondary level students), when changing the governmental-level inclusive/extractive political institutions is a long term project? What is the role of outside organizations? To give voice, to raise the level of collective action of the marginalized, and to lower the opportunity cost for these citizens in doing so. Keefer’s “voice surrogates” is a fitting term; how, then, do we act as surrogates within the confines of disillusionment? Is there a role for micro-level debate?

Disagreement with published figures, according to figures I interviewed yesterday, have meant that the literacy rate in this nation for students has actually decreased 10% in the last year (inflated initial figures, to appease international donors, are the culprit). Who is to blame for this preverbal dog and pony show? One thing that we can surmise, for sure, is that basic education is, indeed, a heavily politicized issue in the developing world;  and this politicization is an active engagement; and those who actively partake in the politicization of education have no interest in education, itself; it is merely a power struggle, and the issue at hand is inconsequential to those involved.

“…there are many who share our basic premise-that it is possible to make very significant progress against the biggest problems in the world through the accumulation of a set of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested, and judiciously implemented.” Banerjee/Duflo, Poor Economics

“In Africa, for the first time, I got a glimpse of the sort of pattern my life would take...that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk...I learned what many others have discovered before me, that Africa for all its perils represented wilderness and possibility...School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. I never wanted to be a tourist. I wished to be far away, as remote as possible, among people I could talk to.”
-Paul Theroux

Yet another adventure beckons. An entire year passed in the blink of an eye. I sit and reflect on the moments, which have faded into a fondness, a nostalgia, a hankering for more; yet, we cannot accumulate experiences, only have them; only understand their transience, appreciate their beauty, and then, let them go. 

I will be moving to Senegal in September for what promises to be yet another interesting chapter in this mosaic quilt of a life that I have been weaving over these years. Back to teaching, back to the engagement with students, the critical reflection, the exhausting, demanding beauty of facilitating knowledge, not for oneself, but for others, a striving for selflessness. 

But first, 6 weeks in Uganda, traveling, writing, photographing, living, breathing, experiencing. People ask, "why are you going?" and the answer I give never quite matches what is moving in my heart..."Life." 

Educational Diagnostics

     What is needed to progress the aims of primary and secondary school education in the developing world is an anthropological approach, complete with the same expert intervention, analysis and diagnostics that have been recommended for programs in the health field, as well as with macro-level economic policy.
     The tools currently exist to improve schooling outcomes; what is needed now is diagnostics to see where exactly the stumbling points lie (as these are extremely context specific), which needs to be undertaken through a participative, anthropological, diagnostic approach. Innovation has been occurring in this area, through the proliferation of educational randomized control trials; however, these trials are not firmly embedded and do not become entrenched or scales once completed. Shining the light is very important; actually implementing change, scaling change, and sustaining change is another matter all together.
     Change is possible. As Banerjee and Duflo state in their masterpiece, "Poor Economics," "...concrete, measurable programs can be implemented to improve the lives of the poor, even in areas with poor institutions."

The Moral Limit of Markets

“This issue goes to the heart of fairness in our country. There has been much discussion recently about economic inequality, but almost no conversation about the way the spread of markets nurtures a broader, systemic inequality."-Michael Sandel, The Moral Limit of Markets, 2012

 

     The issue of fairness, of social justice, of equitable redistribution, the core rationales for modern,  liberal societies has been percolating in my mind; as I ride through West London on my way to tutor, the numbers of Ferraris and Lamborghinis is startling both in their excess and their symbolism in this great bastion of free market liberalization. And thus, the issue that Sandel brings to public light, of fairness. Is is fair that some should be driving $250,000 cars, when there are plenty of $20,000 cars which are perfectly capable of performing the same function, and people starving to death in other nations, and multitudes of homeless and destitute in this same city? What is the appropriate balance of free markets, governmental restrictions on personal liberties, private property rights, and moral excess? 

     Economic inequality is a fundamental feature of liberal economies. However, the gap continues to widen; and as this gap continues to widen, and societies are increasingly polarized, we must ask as a society, as a modern experiment in social relations, what kind of world is it that we wish to live in? What is fair? What is responsible? What is just? What is fairness in both the eyes of the rich and the poor (as well as the middle)? What is the point of excess, and what is the redistribution that must be enacted, at this point, to further our aims of basic social justice and equity? 

      How can this market economy, with its excesses, be legitimized in the eyes of the masses? As Dani Rodrik asks, how can a functioning market economy be "...compatible with social stability and cohesion?" 

 Nick Kristof, commenting on Sandel's work, concludes succinctly, “Market fundamentalism,” to use the term popularized by George Soros, is gaining ground. It’s related to the glorification of wealth over the last couple of decades, to the celebration of opulence, and to the emergence of a new aristocracy. Market fundamentalists assume a measure of social Darwinism and accept that laissez-faire is always optimal. "

The Limitations of Participation

The Limitations of Participation: What Else Needs Consideration? 




In being a proponent of a particular ideology, it is vital to understand the negative ramifications of overtly positive thrusts in development. Thus, a fantastic critique of participatory design that I have encountered before, but not so succinctly.....the dangers of local "duplicitous agendas." which was also highlighted in Banerjee et all's "Can information campaigns spark local participation and improve outcomes"(2006), in which localized participatory integration was neither effective nor truly egalitarian in nature; in dealing with human beings, at the local level, we must also understand the negatives of human/power relations that are intrinsic to us all, regardless of socioeconomic development,  and not look at the poor as simple, innocent recipients of our developmental agendas. Vogt and Clemons explain:


"On the other hand, what Chambers' (1994) failed to anticipate was Kapoor's (2002) concerns that "local controls" may not be without their own duplicitous agendas. Arguably, village politics often mimic the gross inequalities at the global level. Therefore, as researchers and practitioners, if we accept that globalization combined with decentralization of nonformal education introduces a complex phenomena, we must further agree that site specific research must be dependent upon localized social and political contexts of reform as much as on specific national or global directives (Crook & Manor, 1998)."
- Vogt and Clemons, 2004

Global Education Program?

"Harvard Offers New Global Health Program"

-Today's New York Times (5.14.12): a fascinating article on the scale and scope of rural health care delivery in Rwanda; "...the country provides health care and insurance to more than 90% of its population, inspiring medical leaders from across the globe to visit the African country to study its transformation." 
The new program at Harvard, which analyzes public health through this local context, "...is one of the first that focuses exclusively on the challenge of delivering health care. It encourages students to think about politics, economics, and other social factors effect health....

Thus, putting great minds together, both in Rwanda and in the academic world, to highlight local innovations, local solutions, and the causation to these local realities.  My question, of course, is why is this not being done in education, and how can we implement this same mode of thought into educational development?

Resource scarce environments demand a delicate level of social understanding and analysis/diagnosis into service delivery blockages in basic education, just as health services; however, in education, quality and efficiency is taken as a given; enrollment rates, instead of educational outcomes, the yardstick. What would the analysis reveal if health centers were judged on their intake of patients, alone, and no attention was paid to mortality rates or levels of care they were receiving once in the clinic? This is exactly what is occurring with most of the world's educational systems.  And this is the mindset that needs to be changed, through innovative, diagnostic, local projects such as this new Global Health Program.

Chambers on Participation

Absolutism in the Song Dynasty, leading to a critical lack of decentralized creative destruction and absolutist control, perpetuating macro-scale decline...the summation of the last chapter of Why Nations Fail. While absolutely fascinating for a student of development theory, and certainly encompassing the rigor and depth of extraordinary insight, there is something fundamental lacking in this tome, as well as in so many others: the people. Where are the stories of the lives of the people, the poor, the disenfranchised, those affected by these macro-scale struggles? We only hear the stories of the rulers, of the kings, of the absolutist leaders and of the pioneers; what about the lives of those held in sway, those struggling to survive, failing to survive?
I come back often to the words of Robert Chambers, to ground the theory in reality; it can be difficult to incorporate the incredible depths of knowledge, the specializations, with the situations that simple people survive in every day, untouched by this maddening institution that is developmental academia. And most lives in the developing world will continue to never be touched by our PHD's, our scholarly articles, our governance projects and our World Bank partnership deals; the creme is skimmed off of the top, and all those below will never even know of its sweet existence.
What of the lives of the "others?"

I comes back to the words of Chambers (1995: "Whose Reality Counts?")

One may speculate on what topics the poor and powerless would commission papers if they could convene conferences and summits: perhaps on greed, hypocrisy and exploitation. But the poor are powerless and cannot and do not convene summits; and those papers are rarely written. It is not surprising: we do not like to examine ourselves. To salve our consciences we rationalize. Neo-liberalism paints greed as inadvertent altruism. The objects of development are, anyway, the poor, not us. It is they who are the problem, not us. We are the solution. So we hold the spotlight to them (from a safe distance). The poor have no spotlight to hold to us.

But poverty and deprivation are functions of polarization, of power and powerlessness. Any practical analysis has to examine the whole system: - “us”, the powerful as well as “them” the powerless. Since we have more power to act, it is hard to evade the imperative to turn the spotlight round and look at ourselves. ..

Our views of the realities of the poor, and of what should be done, are constructed mainly from a distance, and can be seen to be constructed mainly for our convenience. We embody those views in the words and concepts which we use.

Why Nations Fail on Sachs

Having spent a good deal of time in the last few years following the work of Jeffrey Sachs, and his theoretical arguments that poor geography is the chief determining factor for poverty (and, inversely, if we tackle the geographic limitations, such as disease and land productivity burdens, we can eradicate poverty), it has been interesting to see his research dismantled by the duo, Acemoglu and Robinson, in Why Nations Fail:

" Tropical diseases obviously cause much suffering and high rates of infant mortality in Africa, but they are not the reason that Africa is poor. Disease is largely a consequence of poverty and of governments being unable to undertake the public health measures necessary to eradicate them."
Certainly a valid point, yet, the authors do not fully address the issue of poverty traps, a central theory in Sachs' work. And although I do agree with Acemoglu and Robinson on this point (something about Singapore being malaria-free while remaining in the tropics raised an initial red flag in my mind), they do not address the practical steps that need to be taken to address the current state of affairs in many of these nations. If nations are stuck in cycles of poverty and disease and incapacity in handling public health measures, how do we create the inclusive economic and political structures needed to then address the institutional change necessary for country-wide shifts? 

Why Nations Fail

I am currently reading the excellent new book, "Why Nations Fail," by Acemoglu and Robinson. First introduced to this trio earlier in the year with their colonial/settler theories on development (extractive colonies vs. inclusive colonies as being the key predeterminant for future economic success), this book has been impressing at every step with its clarity and purpose....

A comment, on their views on failing educational systems:
"The low education level of poor countries is caused by economic institutions that fail to create incentives for parents to educate their children, and by political institutions that fail to induce the government to build, finance, and support schools and the wishes of parents and children." 

While I agree that inclusive economic institutions are vital to a nation's (and individuals) prosperity, schooling incentives can often be decoupled from the reality of the immediate economic climate, or better yet, inverse to the broader economic climate; desperation or struggle  in one's current situation will lead to an increased hope in the power of education as a "savior" for the next generation, a though and wish echoed constantly in the developing world.
The "incentives" for schooling, thus, often fall under the familial desire for the next generation to prosper, and an often misguided hope in the individual economic rewards that can be reaped by sending children to school (see: Poor Economics). Thus, I would argue, the above proposition regarding economic institutions (though I agree with the political institutions necessity) is much too broad and general to render valid, in the area of education, as proposed.