The United Nations has convinced much of the world that getting more children enrolled in school is the same as expanding education. The consequences have been devastating.
Consider the following:
Worldwide, most children are “taught” via rote memorization.
Especially in the global South, most schools group children by age, put them in a classroom facing a teacher and a blackboard, and teach them to pass the test.
The result is especially chilling in developing regions, where far too many teachers feel they have succeeded if they can ask a question, and students immediately, in unison, without thinking, shout out the “right” answer. It’s the only system these teachers have ever known.(1) But a nation of parrots is not a well-educated nation.
Education is much broader than the 3 R’s.
These schools try – not always successfully – to teach reading and math, plus basic science, history, geography, etc. But this is only a smattering of what children need, to develop into happy, well-adjusted adults who contribute to their community and society. Any full list would surely include the following:
Habits and life skills: Critical thinking. Self-control. Perseverance. Dependability. Creativity. Planning ahead. Judgment. And using your mobile phone wisely.
Interpersonal skills. Sharing. Communication. Social awareness. Negotiation. Honesty. Cooperating — also competing in appropriate contexts. And a moral compass.
Life-enriching skills. Music, art, sports, handicrafts, dance, cooking, poetry, story-telling. Also building a tree-house, helping someone learn to read, enjoying a long mountain hike. These may become income-producing skills, but that shouldn’t be the goal of introducing them to children. They enrich people’s lives.
You don’t learn these from a teacher and a blackboard. You develop them through real-life experiences, by doing things with others or sometimes alone, by being guided and mentored but not “taught” the right answer. As school systems scramble to get more children into classrooms for more hours, and to boost test scores (largely without success) these are forgotten. Meanwhile, family and community now see “education” as what happens at the school, and think less about their own role in helping children develop.
U.N. policies are a major cause of the focus on memorization.
Every human society has educated its young – it would have perished otherwise. Indigenous societies didn’t do it with schools. They used various combinations of family chores, work, unsupervised play, apprenticeship, talk, imitation – and, yes, sometimes memorization. But the memorization was for an actual purpose, not to pass a test.
In the words of a Kenyan scholar: “[T]he most crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its relevance to Africans, in sharp contrast with what was later introduced.”(2)
Colonialism changed that. Western missionaries built schools for a range of motives, from altruism to paternalism to indoctrination. Colonial powers needed schools to produce obedient clerks. None of them wanted to encourage real thinking. Even after the colonies became politically independent, Western influence remained strong and Western-style schooling continued.(3)
In 2000, the U.N. launched its Millennium Development Goals. Goal #2, Education, focused only on enrollment, it ignored the question of whether children learned anything.(4) This was a flawed goal right from the start. Schools couldn’t handle the rapid influx of new students, and quality declined.
In the years that followed, after many observers pointed that out, the U.N. could have changed this goal. It did change other goals but not this one, and in 2015 U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced unprecedented success for the MDGs. The education goal was a great success, said the U.N., because more children than ever were in school. In 2015 the new Sustainable Development Goals add the word “quality” when referring to education, but in practice, both the U.N. and Western NGOs continue to focus on enrollment. They have no idea how to improve education quality, but lip service is enough for them to keep their jobs.
To be sure, the U.N. does not push for rote memorization. Quite the opposite. As you read these words, somewhere UNICEF is running a workshop about “child-centered” education. But by setting enrollment as the goal, wringing its hands occasionally about children not learning (and thus, UNICEF needs more funding to fix that), the U.N. created the incentives that have resulted in teach-for-the-test memorization, with no regard for whether children are learning.
A schooling monoculture.
The U.N. preaches diversity, but practices the opposite – on many levels.
Individually, children need diverse experiences. Instead, they get too many hours in the classroom, trying to memorize what the teacher says – or looking out the window, or looking at their neighbor’s ear, whichever is most interesting at that moment. And when they don’t do well on the test, “educators” call for more of the same, rather than realizing that students could make rapid progress in a setting which recognizes what is by now widely known: Children learn best by seeing, doing, copying, experimenting, asking questions, exploring their limits, following their imaginations, interacting with other ages… all the things that have no place in today’s classroom.
Within a school, different children need to learn different things, in different ways. Some will benefit from having more time to develop their musical skills, or writing a complex computer program, or just several hours a day to read. Society needs the diverse adults that this will produce.
Within a country, needs also vary. Children in the countryside may benefit from an extra dollop of agriculture science, and their school may need to accommodate those who miss several months at a time because of farm work.
Globally, the world desperately needs to experiment with different approaches to education. We do not know how a developing country can best educate its children. That is glaringly obvious, even if those in charge would rather recite enrollment figures than admit the problem. The U.N. pushes a one-size-fits-all approach, as if it has the answers. But it’s not even asking the necessary questions.
There are individual teachers and administrators who recognize all this, and heroically attempt to create an environment where children will thrive. But they are swimming against a strong current. Rarely do they succeed. They are more likely to get fired.
Rote memorization prepares children for low-pay, dead-end jobs — assembly line work, or cleaning hotel rooms. It creates neither the employees needed for more complex jobs, nor the entrepreneurs to create them. It’s time to stop mindlessly pushing more children into schools, and instead ask hard questions about what does, and does not, work.
Source: karma colonisation
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