The ‘Global Schooling Project’ and Its Intended and Unintended Consequences
Central Kathmandu is in a frenzy, brimming with young Nepalis searching the streets for possibilities, biding their time in this difficult place until they are able to find a way out. Many have left their home villages in rural parts of the country to discover “what’s out there,” and they somehow ended up here. Lining the streets you see billboards and signs for study and work abroad opportunities in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Dubai, etcetera, mixed with other signs advertising English Boarding Schools or University Business and Management degrees. It’s hard to go one block without seeing at least a handful of each ad.
“That’s why I work so hard, to make sure they can have a better life than I have,” a cab driver says to me about the schooling of his two children. His daughter is class 6 pass and his son is class 10 pass, which is roughly the equivalent of making it to 6th and 10th grade in the United States. He hopes they will be able to leave this place someday and earn money elsewhere. “Education is the only way,” he tells me.
‘Education’, in its many forms, has been utilized in different ways for different purposes. It has been used to eliminate Indigenous knowledge and to promote diversity of thought through dialogue. It has been used to ignite human imagination and has standardized the institutional confines that smother it. It has been withheld from some and made abundant to others. It has facilitated the connections underlying empathy, unity, and solidarity and has served as a catalyst for fear, ignorance, and division.
Related article: “EDUCATION: A COMMITTED FUTURE”
‘Education’ is also a foundational element of international aid policies and development practices. The scope and scale of aid poured into education in the Global South, or what was previously referred to as the ‘Third World’ or ‘developing countries,’ is substantial, with an estimated $30 billion invested into education between 2002 and 2008, and an additional $16 billion needed annually to meet the EFA (Education For All) ambitions for 2015-2020. Most importantly, the presence and the impacts of this aid in the lives of children in parts of the Global South are significant, and sometimes determinative. It is essential, therefore, to engage empirically with both the intended and unintended consequences of these development initiatives and with the tension that lies on the fault line between, on the one hand, the universalist possibilities for global citizenship, sustainable development, and humanist-oriented change that global education practices can carry; and on the other, the threat that the imposition of these global education initiatives across the world might pose in marginalizing and eroding local, particular foundations of diversity, knowledge, and sustainable alternatives.
In the Photo: Top: 12-year-old Anita returning from her morning routine of cutting grass to feed to the animals before she heads to school. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
The so-called ‘global schooling project,’ initiated by the United Nations and the World Bank in 1990 with the explicit intention of getting every child everywhere into school, is the point of departure of my PhD research at the University of Edinburgh. In exploring this topic, I aim to better understand how the ‘global schooling project’ impacts the everyday lives of young people and families in central Nepal. However, it would be incomplete to speak about schooling and education practices in isolation, without considering the many ways in which it is embedded into—and impacts upon—the complex, holistic everyday lives of young people and families, making ethnography a particularly apt method to pick up on the textures and subtle details of these lived experiences. The following, then, is based upon 6 months of qualitative, ethnographic research and time spent with young people and families in Nepal and seeks to provide a very general, succinct overview of some of the most significant ways in which I found the ‘global schooling project’ to be impacting upon their everyday lives.
First, the educational landscapes I encountered in Nepal are intricately intertwined with livelihood practices. Though the provision of education in the form of schooling is often seen positively and thought to provide greater opportunities to succeed in the future by young people, parents, and elders, the scene is not that simple. I found that the expansion of formal, institutionalized schooling practices also gave rise to new forms of inequality and exploitation. Once these opportunities reached rural areas, often through the support of various forms of international aid, there were still many children kept out of school due to a lack of family income who were therefore further marginalized. I also found that this need for income to be able to pay school fees was a key driver behind parents’ decisions to move to the city or go abroad to sell their labor, thereby simultaneously fueling both urbanization and proletarianization.
The educational landscape is also significantly impacting the hopes, dreams and aspirations of young people and their families in Nepal, and this in turn shapes their everyday choices and livelihoods. The heavy burden the push for formal, English schooling places on children to achieve, while also balancing work and livelihood responsibilities, is consequential, particularly when coupled with the pressure this places on families to secure the financial means to send their children to a costly ‘good’ school.
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- Photo: Anita finishing her English homework before preparing dinner. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
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- Photo: A group of young 7-10 year old girls gathering grass from the nearby hills on their way home from school. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
Furthermore, it’s important to consider how the ‘global schooling project’, as witnessed in Nepal, often marginalizes non-academic virtues young people may possess, concealing and suppressing diverse talents and unique capabilities by embodying a very narrow, linear conception of success, knowledge, and achievement. This is not unique to Nepal and the Himalayas and is prolific in many parts of the Global South where Education For All policies, as part of the United Nation’s SDG programs, have been deployed. The outcome of this and other similar research across the globe is the need for schooling and education practices to be reimagined in the pursuit of less exploitative, more sustainable alternatives that create space for the diverse, holistic nature of these young people’s lives, talents, and everyday choices.
Finally, the glaring problematic at the core of the educational landscape in Nepal is that these schooling opportunities more often than not lead to a dead-end for many young people, promising advancement and remote possibilities that very few students have the chance of reaching. So as young people and families internalize and begin to believe in the promises made by the global schooling project and opportunities associated with notions of Education For All, they are simultaneously agreeing to participate in the pursuit of something that was designed to exclude them, while also creating hierarchies of ability, access, and opportunity based upon criteria they had no hand in designing.
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- In the Photo: The morning assembly at a private school in Pokhara. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
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- In the Photo: Two girls kicked out of the classroom for not having their homework finished on time. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
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- In the Photo: A young lower-caste girl who cannot afford to go to school watching as the other children in the community who do attend school receive jerseys, tooth-brushes and shoes from a Canadian aid organization. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
This is the cruel irony of promises for education and opportunities for all within a capitalist framework, and this exploitation and disappointment have far-reaching implications, undermining young people’s sense of self-worth while simultaneously reinforcing destructive notions of success that revolve around the exploitative incorporation of labor and human activity into a defunct and dysfunctional global economy.
In conclusion, then, it seems urgent that some of these particular, yet universal, issues be addressed and taken systemically into consideration in global education policy formation and implementation to ensure that the promises embedded into the ‘global schooling project’ don’t forever remain aspirational, exclusionary, and unattainable for young people and families around the world.
In the Photo: A young boy meandering down a dirt path, headed to school. Photo Credit: Katherine Baxter
Recommended viewing: “RISING OUT OF POVERTY THROUGH EDUCATION IN NEPAL”
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Great photos! And great insights, a deep plunge into Nepal, a fascinating country I visited years ago, inspecting aquaculture projects across the country (that was back in the early 1990s).
Important points are made here about the development challenges facing the Global South, a real conundrum: what should be left behind, what needs to be retained, how to achieve this delicate balancing act without destroying local culture and traditions, and the key role of education in this complex process. The Schooling Project, now 25 years old is certainly ripe for evaluation, what a fantastic area for study and drawing much needed lessons…
The conclusion, highlighting how too often this schooling experience does not lead to the expected, yearned-for result (a good job) and therefore fuels disappointment and disaffection, is deeply troubling. One would like to know what should be done: re-directing the schooling to more practical ends? Redefining what kind of training local economies really need?
Hello Claude and Carmie, thank you for your comments. I think you each raise questions that require us to take a deep, hard look at what kind of world current, dominant education paradigms are feeding into and where this leads young people. Since education is, as i’m sure you both know, a fundamental component of achieving the SDGs, it seems that the content and form of global education practices should be reimagined in light of our most pressing global challenges, climate change being one. I would argue that we need to go much further than redefining what kind of training local economies need to fundamentally calling into question the sustainability of the logic underpinning current manifestations of the capitalist economy, namely: growth, profit, accumulation, linearity, exploitation of resources, etc. Infinite growth on a planet of finite resources isn’t a balanced equation, and the future of work and any chance of everyone securing a good job is only becoming more and more precarious for much of the world’s population. So how can education practices and learning spaces be reimagined to foster systems of resiliency, holisticity, balance, autonomy, and renewal? I certainly don’t claim to have been able to come up with a fix-all solution, but I would be interested to hear each of your thoughts on this.
If this kind of schooling leads students to a dead end, then I think the curriculum must be changed. Perhaps a skills-based type of education (aka vocational courses) can complement the academic side?
Hello Claude and Carmie, thank you for your comments. I think you each raise questions that require us to take a deep, hard look at what kind of world current, dominant education paradigms are feeding into and where this leads young people. Since education is, as i’m sure you both know, a fundamental component of achieving the SDGs, it seems that the content and form of global education practices should be reimagined in light of our most pressing global challenges, climate change being one. I would argue that we need to go much further than redefining what kind of training local economies need to fundamentally calling into question the sustainability of the logic underpinning current manifestations of the capitalist economy, namely: growth, profit, accumulation, linearity, exploitation of resources, etc. Infinite growth on a planet of finite resources isn’t a balanced equation, and the future of work and any chance of everyone securing a good job is only becoming more and more precarious for much of the world’s population. So how can education practices and learning spaces be reimagined to foster systems of resiliency, holisticity, balance, autonomy, and renewal? I certainly don’t claim to have been able to come up with a fix-all solution, but I would be interested to hear each of your thoughts on this.
I completely agree with your, Katherine, that the logic underpinning capitalism – calling for “infinite growth on a planet of finite resources” as you put it so well – is leading us into a wall: crash!
There are really two major challenges ahead: (1) artificial intelligence and automation of jobs that will kill off most jobs in developed countries, and (2) customs and traditions in the South that clash with Western values and ethics. How we respond to them will shape how we address Agenda 2030 and sustainability, and by that I mean what kind of culture/ethos/living style is required to address climate change and ensure the viability of mankind in future.
Wow, that was a mouthful but you know what I mean!
So I think we are facing really different challenges whether we are addressing schooling requirements in the South or in the West. And indeed, in both cases we will have to redirect/redefine our education goals in function of local needs, i.e. we will need to consider where the local community is sitting on the economic growth curve – and we will need to remember that, overtime, it will flatten for everyone, as our planet’s resources are exhausted.
Of course, the end point will eventually be the same for everyone, whether a citizen of the South or of the West: we’ll need to learn (1) to respect the past and local culture, and (2) make do with stagnant economies and no jobs (in the traditional sense).
I assume some form of universal basic income will become the norm, and people will have to shift their life aspirations to different goals than just making money (since “making $$$” will become meaningless). How do you shift aspirations? To what kind of things? In my view, the answer is Art and Science. Those are the two single areas of human activity that, in the course of our long History, has always given satisfaction without remuneration!