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Chapter1EducationandInternationalDevlopment.html.zipChapter 1 Education and International Devlopment.html
International development is an area with contested beginnings, perspectives, pathways, alliances and positions of critique. Writers and practitioners concerned with education have engaged with international development invoking a range of ideas, policies and practices. Yet the kind of role education has taken or been given in this process has often been dictated by other more powerful disciplines or alliances. Its potential to offer a space for critical reflexivity with regard to development has been somewhat undervalued. This chapter aims to provide a short background history of education and international development as a context for the theoretical reviews and analyses of issues that follow.
In January 1961, the United Nations (UN) announced that the 1960s would be the decade for development. The concept of development it used was expressed in the call to member states and their peoples to work together ‘to accelerate growth of the economy of the individual nations and their social advancement’ (United Nations 1961, p. 17). Although this portrayal of development invoked state and non-state processes and referred to economic and social relations, the emphasis was very much on economic development. A key target for the decade was increasing the annual rate of growth of aggregate national income to 5 per cent, although in the 1960s various UN agencies, such as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), worked to broaden this remit.
Development economics had emerged in the 1950s as a specific sub-sector of economics concerned with the uneven experiences of industrialization in low income countries and the nature of trade and exchange between resource-rich countries, usually colonies or former colonies, and various metropolitan centers. It generally positioned education as an aid to economic growth. However, formal education systems in low and high income countries were not simply concerned with economic relations, and education had been a strand in the expansion of colonial or imperial rule for many centuries. In the anti-colonial confrontations from the eighteenth century onwards, education was a key location for political, cultural and social contestation, highlighting complex struggles over knowledge, language, national or cultural identity and principles of political economy. Thus the range of issues which form part of the terrain of education and international development have origins long before the 1960s, when the emergence of development economics gave a particular flavor to this work.
Colonial History, Education and International Development
Authors who were critical of divisions associated with colonial political economy used the education they received to articulate a different vision of society. They present an alternate beginning point for the history of education and international development. Some key figures are:
Olaudah Equiano (c. 1750–1797) was born in southern Nigeria. In his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789, he describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of eleven, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia. Bought by a Royal Navy captain, he spent twenty years travelling the world and was ultimately able to make enough money to buy his freedom. He learned to read and write, becoming a prominent member of the campaign to abolish slavery. In the dedication of his autobiography, he depicts the horrors of the slave trade and his confidence in the liberal human values of Britain, its arts and science, which will resonate with his aim as an ‘unlettered African’ to become ‘an instrument toward the relief of his suffering countrymen’ (Equiano 1814).
Kartini (1879–1904) was the daughter of a Javanese landowner and regent (a local political official) under Dutch colonial rule. Kartini and her sisters were sent to school and she read widely in Dutch. She engaged in correspondence with a number of Dutch women and in her letters formulated a critical commentary on the colonial political economy and aspects of the rights of women. Kartini died in childbirth. Her letters were published in 1911 initially in Dutch as Door Duisternis tot Licht (Out of Dark Comes Light). She has been an influential symbolic figure in postcolonial Indonesia associated with the establishment of schools for girls, ideas about domesticity and feminism. In a letter of 1900 to a former teacher, Mrs Zeehandlelaar, she wrote: ‘We wish to equal the Europeans in education and enlightenment, and the rights which we demand for ourselves, we must also to give to others’ (Kartini 1920, p. 20).
Sol Plaatje (1876–1932) was born on a mission station in South Africa, where his Tswana-speaking parents were employed. He attended a mission school. He worked as a teacher, a telegraph clerk and a journalist; he also wrote a novel, many political commentaries and translated Shakespeare into Tswana. In 1913, he was a founder member and first Secretary General of the South African National Congress that engaged with the British colonial authorities for political rights for black South Africans. He began writing Native Life in South Africa, an account of the hardships and discrimination associated with colonial rule, while on a journey by sea to London in 1913 to petition the British government to repeal legislation on land and labor. He was also part of a delegation in 1919 to the peace conferences at the end of the First World War that tried to gain recognition for the political rights of black South Africans, many of whom had fought in the war. While none of these petitions were successful in Plaatje’s lifetime, he is today recognized for his political, social and literary contribution to South African scholarship. A passage in Native Life gives a flavor of his clear observations:
Whenever by force of character or sheer doggedness one Native has tried to break through the South African shackles of colour prejudice, the Colour Bar, inserted in the South African Constitution in 1909, instantly hurled him back to the lowest rung of the ladder and held him there. Let me mention only one such case. About ten years ago Mr. J. M. Nyokong, of the farm Maseru, in the Thabanchu district, invested about 1,000 Pounds in agricultural machinery and got a white man to instruct his nephews in its use. I have seen his nephews go forth with a steam sheller, after garnering his crops every year, to reap and thresh the grain of the native peasants on the farms in his district. But giving evidence before the Lands Commission two years ago, this industrious black landowner stated that he had received orders from the Government not to use his machinery except under the supervision of a white engineer. This order, he says, completely stopped his work. The machinery is used only at harvesting time; no white man would come and work for him for two months only in the year, and as he cannot afford to pay one for doing nothing in the remaining ten months, his costly machinery is reduced to so much scrap iron. This is the kind of discouragement and attrition to which Natives who seek to better their position are subjected in their own country. (Plaatje 1916)
The writers in Actors 1 all connect to a colonial relationship. However, different forms of modernization and education were articulated by countries like Japan and Ethiopia, which were not colonized. Here, cross-national attraction to education ideas took diverse forms, not always passing in a singular direction (Rappleye 2007, Barnett 2012). Education was also to be invoked as a key process of decolonization by leaders of anti-colonial movements, like Gandhi and Nyerere.
This history indicates how international development is a diffuse and complex political, economic, social and cultural process in which education intertwines with many relationships. Some are formal and highly structured, others are informal and provisional. Some might be organized to emphasize the technical and the rational, and others the affective, the aspirational and emotional. Some combine the two.
An important feature of the writings exemplified in Actors 1 are the connections between people in different countries organized outside state relationships, for example through religious or ethnic networks, which have also been part of the scholarship that feeds into education and international development. Thus Christian anti-slavery campaigners helped publicize the work of former slaves documenting education and the struggle for Africans, or those of African descent in Europe and America, to articulate their views (Thomas 2000). Women social reformers from England made connections with women in India, engaging with questions of education for women and girls to connect across differences (Ramusack 1990). Concerns with promoting ideas about Confucianism led to the establishment of the Tiong Hoa Hwee Kwan (THHK) founded in Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1900 by Chinese living in the East Indies, drawing on experiences of Chinese schools initially established in Japan (Suryadinata 1972). These international relationships, travelling along networks of affiliation, rather than formations of a bureaucracy, have provided some of the terrain of education and international development, and the history of these connections sometimes inform the analysis made in contemporary studies of global movements supporting Education for All (EFA) or gender equality in education (Mundy 2007, Unterhalter 2007b).
A significant phase in the history of these transnational relationships begins after the Second World War, with the establishment of the UN and associated organizations in the UN family that give prominence to education. The UN Charter of 1945 sets out the importance of enhancing cooperation between countries on education and addressing a range of social, economic and cultural problems. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 lists education as a key right. Education was seen to underpin peace building and international understanding, and therefore the mission of the UN as a whole, as well as being right in itself. The establishment of the UN and the growth of international organizations after the Second World War becomes an important context for education and international development providing elements of a rationale for some of its key concerns and a rich area for theory building.
UNESCO, the agency charged with overseeing the scientific, cultural and educational work of the UN, has principles of educational equality and the importance of negotiating between member states built into its Constitution. Throughout the 1950s, UNESCO organized regional conferences promoting access to free basic education, adult literacy and gender equality. As such, it was a locus for a particular engagement of education and international development work, which took seriously the role of the state, education rights and equalities. UNESCO did not only privilege economics, and placed particular emphases on aspects of planning and cultural diversity, but the association of education with modernization was a key theme (Mundy 1999, Peppin-Vaughan 2010). In the decades before 1990, when UNESCO became lead organization in EFA (discussed in Chapter 3), the organization played a major role convening international meetings and discussions and developing resources and capacity on education rights, adult, technical, vocational and higher education. It also participated in the drafting of the major global instruments concerning education including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).
UNESCO’s governance structures linked it closely to the concerns on which member states agreed to collaborate. In this it differed from some other organizations, notably UNICEF and the World Bank, which, from the 1960s, began to take an interest in education. Because of the way each was governed, UNICEF and the World Bank had levels of autonomy from the agreed concerns of all UN member states and consequently were able to approach the issue of education somewhat differently from UNESCO. Their engagement with this area widened the field of enquiry, the range of actors engaged and also identified particular signature approaches for each organization (Jones 2012, Jolly 2014).
The World Bank was established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference, which looked at establishing a global system to regulate exchange rates and the financial rules between countries. When the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which now forms part of the World Bank Group, was established, countries with large amounts of capital to invest in the bank, like the USA, took a leading role in deciding policy. The governance structures of the Bank tend to give more prominence to the concerns of the major shareholders, and the organization is thus less representative of the one country, one vote approach which governs UNESCO. This has meant that the World Bank has taken a distinctive line on education since the 1960s, sometimes differing from other UN organizations. Today it is a major development partner and also a prominent sponsor of research and center of knowledge of education. Its financial and intellectual strength often means that its work overshadows that of other UN agencies.
The World Bank’s original mandate had not included lending to education, which was at that stage associated with private rates of return. However, in the 1960s, the case was made, by the Director General of UNESCO, among others, that investment in education was crucial to economic growth (Jones 2006). This led to changes in perspective at the World Bank inaugurating a long period of engagement with research and policy discussion regarding education and international development, generally with a concern regarding growth, rates of return and system efficiency. In 1995, a key policy paper (World Bank 1995) argued that rates of return were significantly higher on primary education, and policy guidance, loans and research for around a decade took this direction. However, the World Bank currently sees its education mission in terms of a dual focus: ‘to help countries achieve universal primary education and to help countries build the higher-level and flexible skills needed to compete in today’s global, knowledge-driven markets’ (World Bank 2014).
In addition to the prominence given to education by UNICEF and the World Bank, other members of the UN family, such as World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Labour Organization (ILO) and United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM, later UN Women), all identified education as a core component of their remit. It can thus be seen that the history of new international organizations that emerged from the late 1940s gave a particularly prominent role to education.
Thus, education and international development stood at an intersection of global, national and local institutional and organizational forms and brought together a wide range of economic, political, social and cultural development concerns. The pragmatic demands of planning, which was a key feature of its beginnings in some UN organizations, gave education and international development a particular flavor that was concerned to ‘get things done’. This link to practice has remained a characteristic of the field. However, the other currents in the discipline draw on ideas about equality, rights, politics, social and cultural relations in diverse locations, some of which were generated by the complexity of the work undertaken by UN organizations and some of which spoke to the difficult processes of decolonization, postcoloniality, globalization, the Cold War and its aftermath.
From the 1960s, pathways through the discipline have thus been nurtured by the emergence of development studies as a particular area of enquiry in which development economics has meshed with sociology, politics, gender, critical theory, cultural studies and studies in information and communication technologies, environment and health (Desai and Potter 2013). Unfortunately, the networks of academic enquiry and the administrative divisions within governments and international organizations have meant that education and international development became a particular niche of scholars and practitioners, generally with few connections into the wider community of development studies or area studies, like African or South Asian Studies which developed in some universities from the 1970s. Education has only a very small space in an authoritative book reviewing scholarship in development studies (Desai and Potter 2013), and other areas concerned with health, urban planning and the environment have much more extensive treatment. Nonetheless, some of the concerns of development studies scholars, particularly aspects of the state, the market and international policy, have been enormously influential in the field of education and international development and were the key themes of some of the first overview works in the area (Fägerlind and Saha 1989, Carnoy and Samoff 1990, Colclough and Lewin 1993).
In later decades, the influence of development studies scholars in theorizing social and cultural relations expanded the scope of work on education and international development from policy, politics and economics. Thus, for example, the work of scholars on gender relations, such as Naila Kabeer, Ruth Pearson and Maxine Molyneux (Jackson and Pearson 2005), was applied to work in education and international development establishing a new field of enquiry (Stromquist 1997, Heward and Bunwaree 1999, Leach 2003, Aikman and Unterhalter 2005) that went beyond that outlined by researchers working for the World Bank (King and Hill 1993) which associated girls’ education primarily with economic development. The work of critical post-development scholars, such as Arturo Escobar and Gayatri Spivak, nurtured the emergence of an interest in postcolonial theorizing in education and international development (Tikly 1999, Hickling-Hudson et al. 2004, Andreotti 2011) and complicated some of the ideas of culture, themselves quite wide-ranging, used in earlier work in the field (Little and Leach 1999). Work on health and development in development studies which had looked at the implementation of health policies, inequalities in the social determinants of health and aspects of participation and service integration in health promotion resonated with work in education associated with nutrition (Pridmore and Carr-Hill 2010), the relationships between maternal health and children’s level of education (Di Cesare et al. 2013), and the intersection of children’s rights to health and education (Lloyd 2005). This work proved to be particularly significant in the decades of major concern with the HIV and AIDS epidemic and the ways in which schools could participate in work on prevention and support (Aikman, Unterhalter and Boler 2008, Smith et al. 2012).
While development studies was a fertile field for ideas in education and international development, a second major influence on the discipline was the older area of enquiry demarcated as comparative education. This was a less easy set of relationships or source of ideas, although ostensibly scholars in both areas were concerned with education. The contested relationship of education and international development with comparative education is partly tied up with the history of both fields; the autobiographies of some of the key individuals; and the local politics of particular academic departments, networks and alliances. Comparative education has a longer history than education and international development, taking its origins from the attempts to study how states in Europe and North America sought to establish and improve their education systems through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries partly by documenting and learning from neighbouring or competitor countries. Comparative inquiry into education was understood either as a science or as a particular form of history. This was long considered the most illuminating perspective on education systems and processes and continued as an area of academic investigation long after more specialist offshoots of scholarship on education had emerged with a focus, for example, on quantitative methods, curriculum studies and pedagogy (Philips and Schweisfurth 2008, Cowen and Kazamias 2009). Scholarship on comparative education often investigated reasons for the introduction of particular education policies and practices, how these were received and transmuted. This focus did not mesh easily with the work on education and international development which was often pragmatically and uncritically responding to consultancies from international organizations, more concerned to implement particular kinds of policy or practice and not to theorize the processes with too much complexity.
Some of the work done in education and international development became the object of study of writers in comparative education, who documented international policy transfer raising questions about why particular strategies, for example on teacher centres or school-based management, were promoted by governments or international organizations and how and why these were received and changed in the process (Steiner-Khamsi 2004). These studies often posed uncomfortable questions for those in education and international development who were directly involved in planning how to introduce these reforms. Attempts to bring the two fields together into single academic departments were often tense and unproductive. However, from the late 1990s, a number of key figures worked to bridge the divisions: some learned societies signalled in their titles that their focus was both comparative and international education, and a number of writers in the field of education and international development began to take up some of the historical, ethical and political issues that had concerned the comparativists (see, for example, special fiftieth issue of Comparative Education). Although in some universities these continue as separate disciplinary areas, in others they combine.
The disciplinary perspectives of education and international development and comparative education found much to study in a range of education initiatives associated with UN organizations from the 1970s onwards. These included support for mass literacy programmes; attention to women’s levels of education, partly to help reduce fertility and then later as a component of economic growth; ideas about skills and vocational education; and particular attention to planning, budgets and teacher training. However, the oil shocks of the 1970s and the debt crisis of the 1980s saw a sharp divide open up between the World Bank on the one hand, which used its economic leverage to promote structural adjustment and cuts in government expenditure on education, and UNICEF on the other, which pointed to the human costs of this approach. This division provided much interesting material for scholars in international and comparative education (Rizvi and Lingard 2011, Jones 2012, Klees 2012).
While the governments of many developing countries often had no option but to introduce structural adjustment, leading to the imposition of school fees and cuts in teacher salaries, these were vociferously opposed by education activists. Partly in response to this, UNESCO initiated the Delors Commission (1996), which delineated intrinsic, instrumental and constructive values for education, depicted as learning to know, to do, to live together and to be. UNICEF rallied member states behind the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was passed in 1989. In the 1990s, some of the intense divisions between the UN organizations started to lessen and collaborative initiatives such as EFA and the MDGs cemented cooperation. From 2003, the annual publication of the UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report brought together research, reflections on policy and detailed monitoring of aspects of education systems exemplifying some of these collaborations. The issues raised by these processes of global policymaking by UN organizations acting together and connection with national and local institutions opened up a particularly rich area for scholarship in education and international development and comparative education. It put on the table questions about the scope and significance of the global, the national and the local, and the nature of their relationship and attempted to theorize and contextualize these collaborations (e.g. Dale 2000, Schriewer 2009, Vavrus and Bartlett 2009, Verger, Altinyelken and Novelli 2011).
Opposition to structural adjustment in the 1980s and the enormous growth of civil society organizations in the 1990s in the wake of the end of the Cold War led to NGOs emerging as particularly important actors in the field. Some of the important organizations that ran programmes throughout the 1990s and became influential in the EFA movement after 2000 were Oxfam, ActionAid, Save the Children, Care, Plan and Concern. Their significance was not simply confined to the provision of education, which had long been their remit. In the 1990s, they began to develop and circulate specialist knowledge, engage in policy development and advocacy and later become partners with academic and activist researchers. This work brought to the field of education and international development a new range of issues, different interlocutors, partnerships and a new terrain for investigation.
Pathways to practice 1
Selected Education Projects of NGOs
Save the Children Fund (SCF) was first established to help feed children at the end of the First World War. It was an early campaigner for children’s rights and child protection. SCF has undertaken humanitarian work around the globe. In the last decade, as part of its involvement with EFA it has developed particular expertise in programming and advocacy associated with work on education and conflict.
ActionAid initially developed programmes to distribute donations to children living in developing countries but in the 1990s took a major part in building the civil society coalitions that supported EFA as a key member of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE). It campaigns for education rights and develops projects that combine research, programming and advocacy.
Plan is a global children’s charity, initially founded in the 1930s. It works on a range of projects with the world’s poorest children. It has published the Because I am a Girl reviews every year since 2007 and campaigned at international, national and local levels against violence against girls and women.
This outline history of some of the links made by scholars working in education and international development from the 1970s has highlighted partnerships with development studies, comparative education and alliances with UN organizations and NGOs. The narrative indicates that as a field of inquiry it has not proceeded down a conventional disciplinary pathway, sometimes identified with a single foundational theorist who provides a major conceptual mapping while subsequent generations engage in disputing, confirming or expanding this analysis. This was the path taken, for example, by comparative education, sociology and development economics. However, education and international development has had a messier history with scholars working across disciplinary areas, suturing together different theorizations to help investigate features of practice and talking with many partners in different institutional locations. The history of work in this area is thus characterized by hybridity and combinations of perspective. The next section illustrates this characteristic, drawing on some themes that have been of considerable interest to scholars in this field over the last ten years.
The ways in which the global, the national and the local can be delineated and the implications for education policy and practice has been a fertile area of investigation for comparative and international education (e.g. Robertson 2005, Unterhalter 2007b, Vavrus and Bartlett 2009, Cowen 2010). Here are three approaches to looking at the global, the national and the local which give us different ways of understanding selected areas of interest to the field of education and international development. Those to be discussed here centre on aid, notably development assistance, the links between public policy and private entrepreneurs and relationships of poverty and exclusion.
A contrasting view sees the global as a set of socio-cultural attitudes and dispositions which characterize the work of employees of particular kinds of organizations and networks, located globally, nationally and locally, who advance a particular set of ideas about education policy and practice inside nation states. This is the argument made by the school of neo-institutionalism, drawing on the work of John Meyer and others at Stanford University who have argued for a distinctive diffusion of Western-style education associated with the emergence of global institutions, international organizations and an increasingly common world culture evident after the Second World War (Meyer et al. 1997). In their argument, the take-up, for example, of ideas about transparent governance and accountability regarding education within governments and NGOs reflects the views of a particular class of advocates of this approach, who may be nationally located, for example working for a Department of Education or a large NGO to introduce school-based management committees which oversee the disbursement of aid and/or government capitation fees. The ideas of these supporters of what has been depicted as world culture may come into conflict with advocates of other approaches regarding local school governance, possibly a parent-teacher association, which may be responsive to local networks of affiliation. Sometimes these associations are portrayed as different to those associated with development cooperation and ‘backwardly’ linked to corruption, tradition or parochialism. From this perspective of analysis, it is not that one group is global and the other national. The group that articulates ‘world culture’ is also national but has a different network regarding patronage, ideas, funding and esteem. The group that opposes ‘world culture’ may well draw on ideas and affiliations that are not simply local. However, what this framework of analysis sets out to explain is why there has been a predominance of the groups with connections to centres of world culture.
This notion that the global is inside the national and the local is also a perspective advanced by students of international migrations of people or ideas, who show how there is no simple version of the global or the local in education or any other area and that people merge and mix ideas from many sources. Thus money for education flows along diaspora channels: sent home by migrant workers to support their children’s school fees or endow a classroom in their village or support a school association. Ideas about education also travel because of enhanced connectivity. Media portrayals or international conversations suggest particular ways of building or organizing a school. These ideas may be considered ‘global’ but may just be the outcome of diverse discussions on this theme as people criss-cross the world literally, virtually and in their imagination. From this perspective, poverty or marginality is not one set of static relationships as defined only by income. A person may be classed poor, earning little in a high income country but have many significant networks in the low income country in which she was born and because of the remittances she sends, have considerable status in her community.
A third view is that the global can be understood as a set of ethical ideas about rights, capabilities and obligations which enjoin particular ways of thinking about what we owe each other regardless of our nationality and our particular beliefs. This is the argument a number of authors have made concerning how we understand rights, cosmopolitanism and what approaches we might take to evaluating the work of global, national and local initiatives in education (Sen 1999, 2009, Nussbaum 2000, 2007). In this argument, development assistance is not only about the amounts of money we need to spend through aid but what ethical evaluations are made about the processes of disbursement; the inclusivity of the relationships formed; and whether aims entail transformation or merely reproduction of existing structures of power. Both the state and the private sector need to be rigorously scrutinized for how they deal with, protect and advance rights and opportunities. Here, poverty needs to be understood as multi-dimensional and the intersection of class, race, gender, ethnicity and age are investigated to develop relationships that are participatory, that take account of the complexity of context and that challenge injustices.
These three different ways of understanding the global, the national, the local and the relationships of aid for education illustrate both the diverse conceptual resources education and international development draws on and also the ways in which different kinds of policy and practice are discussed within particular framings. Scholarship in this field is often critically concerned with reviewing the implications of different framings in relation to each other.
