The film Schooling the World puts forward a provocative thesis. Is it necessarily the case that schooling (in the modern Western sense) improves life for the majority? The film reminds me of John Taylor Gatto’s point about compulsory schooling being damaging for families and communities. Like Gatto, it quotes Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of Stanford’s influential School of Education in the early twentieth century:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
But the film has more of an anthropological angle, in which education is understood as enculturation – ‘the process by which a person learns the requirements of the culture by which he or she is surrounded, and acquires values and behaviours that are appropriate or necessary in that culture’ (Wikipedia). Culture itself is conceived in terms of an ‘ecosystem’, in which people sustain ways of life within their physical environment. This relatively harmonious balance is disturbed when any one element is changed. When we introduce our own system of education (schooling) into such a culture, we change it irrevocably. The film undermines our notion that other cultures are ‘developing’, a notion that entails an assumption of superiority, with our own culture always more advanced along the developmental path, or perhaps even at the summit of attainment.
There are also echoes of Ivan Illich. Readers may want to visit the blog, and the FAQ page is also worth a read.
Simon Kidd 