question 4
Post-Development Theory What is Education For.html
Post-Development Theory: What Is Education For?
Juan Carlos Barrón Pastor
A quick look into post-development theory
Post-development authors challenge the idea of ‘development’ and associate it as an ideological complement of the apparatus of oppression in which academics are implicated through knowledge production (Sachs 1992). Influenced by ideas such as those put forward by Ivan Illich (1971, 1974), Arturo Escobar (1988, 2000, 2007) and Gustavo Esteva (1985, 1987), these ideas have now moved beyond condemning development and towards the construction of a post-development theory (Ziai 2007). Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) argues that the box of modernity is now too tight and it is necessary to move elsewhere, while the Mexican professor Don Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (2004) affirms that what created the problem cannot be its solution. In the meantime, the role of subaltern epistemological perspectives is being explored and developed to dismantle dynamics of oppression (e.g. Esteva 2006, De Sousa Santos 2007, Menezes De Souza 2009).
In line with these ideas, Ivan Illich (1974) explained that obliging all children to climb the same ladder of schooling is not favouring equality but the opposite. Indeed, in many countries today, education policies generate overeducated and underemployed people, promote competition, stress and debts for students and intensify inequalities. The core of this problem, explains Illich (1974), is that obligatory instruction could be reducing the desire to acquire knowledge from alternative sources due to a hidden curriculum. Illich explains that ‘the hidden curriculum consists of learning that education is valuable when it is acquired at school through a graduated process of consumption’ (Illich 1974, p. 127, my translation). ‘ For a consumerist society, education becomes training to consume’ (Illich 1974, p. 137, my translation). And the target of this training is the universalization of expectations (Illich 1971).
We do not need to carry out a very exhaustive study to see that all those tendencies, which for Illich and his ‘radical humanism’ were very clear, are currently under way. Schooling is widely considered an industry and it is a new form of alienation, indispensable for consumerism that applies techniques of ‘pedagogic torture’: alienation not to extract information (hegemonic elites now have the internet and social networks to achieve that aim) but to impose a certain validated knowledge as merchandise that allows our participation in certain markets and to specific labour levels for a short time (e.g. the ideas on quality enhancement and the focus on employability in a recent document distributed by the European Higher Education Area and the Bologna Process, EHEA 2012). By these means, schooling moulds the progressive consumer, who is the main resource of capitalist economy. Hence, education innovators will promote educational institutions as ‘bottlenecks’ for the programmes that they bottle, and as Illich clearly explained, for the purposes of consumer formation, these are mechanized goals of institutionalized education delivered through classrooms, online courses or through mass media transmitters.
Schooling is corrupting education
For Illich, the essential corruption of education occurs through schooling. To better understand this process, it is necessary to reflect on the notion of institutionalization.
To institutionalize something can have several meanings related to ‘institution’ understood as system. Among those, it could mean to be confined to an institution, to become an institution, to establish something in order to perform a particular role, to build a conventional relation or custom in society, or organize a practice. Institutionalization finds its roots in Latin to place, in the sense of regarding or viewing something as being – for example, in the relationship education = school.
It could be easier to understand the notion of institutionalization if we look at another example such as love and marriage. Marriage is a form of institutionalization of love, but it would be a mistake to confuse love with marriage. Similarly, a well-educated person can be a person with a high level of studies or not. A well-educated person can become a wise person through learning. But an overeducated person in terms of schooling may have an impressive instrumental knowledge, ability to do something or perform in certain way, but not necessarily become a wise person. Like love and marriage, school and education can be related but are not necessarily so, and it is a huge mistake to misperceive having school training as being educated.
At the core, education is about learning, learning to live, learning to live a better life. Schooling is about someone been certified that he/she has gained certain abilities in order to exercise certain practices in society; nowadays, this means levels of certification for production and consumerist practices in a capitalist society. A given certification is an extension of a membership and hence entails exclusion of the rest. The higher the membership, the more privileged, and then, the fewer people will be able to reach the social peak. It does not matter how many years of school a person may have, certification entitles his/her role/level/place in society.
Education can help us to go beyond these practices and this society. Education can occur in schools or not; in families, or not; in social networks or not; on the internet or not. The temptation to administer and regulate education and learning poisons the essence of education and corrupts it at its heart towards instrumental reasoning.
Concepts 2
Escaping Education
‘The challenge of living the good life without education is intuitively grasped and understood by those whose common sense has not been drowned or buried under the barrage of information prized by the proud owners of information technologies, by those who still have unschooled cultures. From them we have learned to learn without bells and bell curves, without credentials, textbooks, chalkboards and the overwhelming perverse institutional logic that “dumbs down” all those who come under its sway. With them we have learned to free our imaginations from the clutches of classroom information; to recover our common sense before it was extinguished by under use or denigration. For they know in their hands, their eyes, and in all their other senses what it is to learn without packaged instruction. The people at the grassroots have not forgotten the skills required to live and flourish outside the academic “cave” – with its shadows, its dark doubts that are mistaken to be liberatory or emancipatory certainties.’
Excerpt from Escaping Education: Living as Learning in Grassroots Cultures (2008), by Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva.
To clarify the importance of the dispute over administrative issues and of the control and regulation of the delivery of certification, many education reforms, and resistance to them, can be analysed worldwide. I will pick up the case of Mexico, in Latin America, but a similar approach can be used to reflect on many other cases worldwide – including the UK and the USA. In Mexico, through 2013, there were numerous demonstrations from teachers and students angered by the education initiatives promoted by the government to accomplish ‘international goals’ for education. It seems like a global trend: worldwide social movements with common education-related demands have questioned the commoditized model of what to teach and how to evaluate learning. Also, they have highlighted a major attempt to phase out arts and humanities courses, and governments have usually argued that teachers are not good enough, that education is too expensive and that universal evaluation could be helpful to somehow improve education.
In the case of Mexico, for example, the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto – massively rejected by student organizations such as #Yosoy 1321 during his electoral campaign – with the support of the majority of the political representatives (Education Reform Mexico 2013) proposed and approved a reorganization of the schooling system in this country that was widely supported by mainstream media as an education reform. The proposal consists of ten points, but the core of the bid is the creation of a National System to Evaluate Education (Sistema Nacional de Evaluación Educativa, INEE). The democratic wing of the teachers’ union – Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, CNTE – rejected the proposition arguing that it is an administrative one and not a plan to improve education (CNTE 2013). From the official documents presented by both parties it seems that the main problem in this dispute is evaluating and deciding who can remain as a teacher and who cannot. It seems that some teachers do not want to take the risk of an evaluation system saying they are the main cause of education problems, and lose their jobs; the government does not want to continue to employ teachers who have been proved inadequate through what it sees as objective evaluations.
The debate is not about education itself but about administration, and hence it is about forms of institutionalizing education. The proposal cannot be considered a proposal on education as it does not mention how it will solve educational problems such as deficiencies in infrastructure, curriculum and contents, pedagogical techniques, teaching resources (books, technology) or training for teachers. It is mainly an administrative reform that attempts to transfer to teachers the responsibility of the country’s failure on international evaluations and that tries to set the schooling agenda on the grounds of those global assessments, framed by the fading capacity of governments to negotiate with corporate powers the transfer of resources to the public sphere and hence their increasing risk of bankruptcy and failure due to their economic deficit.
The practical problem in terms of education and from a post-development perspective would reside in the fact that ‘Educators, for instance, now tell society what must be learned, and are in a position to write off as valueless what has been learned outside of school’ (Illich 1977, p. 15). From my viewpoint, this grim picture needs a grayscale, as many teachers are in fact aware of the necessity of responding to students, society and teachers themselves as human beings and their crucial role in essential education to transform society for the better. Teachers, therefore, still have a privileged position of power to transform society into something else, something better, not in instrumental but human terms.
This circumstance presents teachers with a dilemma; on the one hand, validating the schooling system with our membership and our labour: we are under the increasing pressure of accreditation reports and data-driven classroom interactions, and the international schooling system develops more and deeper controls to ensure that schooling becomes more (tending to only) for the development of instrumental abilities. This process is promoted in order to gain accreditations for memberships with the permanent menace of exclusion from the ephemeral role of production and consumerism that entails belonging to a capitalist society. On the other hand, outside of that system of belonging, there is informality and criminality. However, the option is not an easy one; as Dunn-Kenney stated recently, ‘if we as teacher educators abandon oppressive technicality, without abandoning our posts, we are stepping into a new place, traveling without insurance. We have no idea where this moment-to-moment, embodied living will take us’ (Dunn-Kenney 2013, p. 53).
Post-development paths for better explanations and transformations for the better
This practical problem, complicated as it is, cannot be well-reflected if it is not seen from a perspective that is questioning if capitalist societies are really bringing us to a better life. And if the answer is no, then forms of education and action to dismantle capitalist dynamics are needed. The challenge from a radical perspective is that we cannot institutionalize those efforts or we could be failing by corrupting the very core of social interactions for learning to live better.
Post-development authors answer the previous questions following ancient traditions mainly represented nowadays by indigenous peoples worldwide: the planet is a living being, not a supply of resources; she is ill and could be killed by current human treatment. Contemporary development tendencies intensify the disparities between rich and poor people and push the vast majority of peoples and cultures to migration or extinction. Western schooling values reinforce these awful tendencies instead of attenuating injustice and despoiling. Instead of consumption, competition, alienation and individualism, education should promote human networks to construct knowledge aiming for solidarity, respect and a more healthy conviviality for all living beings alongside self-sufficient communities. This is perhaps post-development theory’s main challenge – recognizing that the current model is bringing living beings and the vast majority of people into a disastrous present and future. We need to stop pretending we are doing well and go back to the roots to build meaningful tasks for learning to pursue a good life for everybody.