My friend has a gently expanding house cat. She hates to be held, but has no choice when you hug her close. Said cat is on a diet. A diet is worthless without exercise (even the diet pill companies are forced to admit this), but she has never been outside. Imagine that. Never knowing there was an outside. Now, he has a leash that straps around her back and tummy so that he can walk her around the complex. She submits to the servitude, but then believes she is unable to walk. She has to be dragged around like a sled. Take the leash off and away she goes.
She believes she cannot walk, perhaps because when you hold her she is helpless. Maybe. This is common, apparently - there are pictures all over the internet. I have not tried this with my two, because I am convinced I will not be able to walk afterwards.
I have just returned from Namibia, travelling around primary schools from Windhoek to Ondangwa, about 14 hours by car. I went in with certain assumptions that guided the questions I was going to ask: What resources do you need? How do we manage large classes? What level of visual literacy do the learners have?
I came out with fewer assumptions. Now, you know, regular reader, that I am conscious of the politics of representation, even in the way one views another person, on a daily basis. I despise the way tourism turns culture into curiosities that ultimately convince us of the superiority of our societies and amenities. 'Can you believe they live without toilets? Poor things,' says a woman to her husband. 'They believe in an omnipotent praying mantis,' sniggers her child. I know what I feel is not that.
The types of people I met on my travels (on- and off-road) were as varied as our own neighbours. Some were wary, some were disdainful, others judged me believing I was judging them, and others were unbelievably kind. The children were mostly amused by my skin colour and by my inability to understand their language - I'm pretty sure the learners of one class were tricking me by saying rude words when I asked questions.
Sometimes in publishing we think we are 'saving' the children (or 'empowering' them, we say, nodding at our own altruism). Those children do not need saving. I'd argue that they don't need empowering except in the eradication of the belief that they need to be empowered. That they are somehow lacking something that we have. The people I saw were self-sufficient. They have honed their skills, making them marketable and profitable. So we judge them because they don't bow before the altar of commercialism? Because they don't have toilets?
Without ever once venturing beyond our television sets, we proclaim our liberalism, our belief in the value of diverse cultures. What we are really doing is cataloguing the ethnological differences between other cultures and ourselves, creating an 'us' and 'them' where we invariably come out on top. Or we talk about the 'noble savage', about the simple life living in communion with the earth. Please, let's not impose our complexity on these poor souls!
I respect the people that I saw and their lives, knowing that I was creating my own story about them. Driving out of the last school, along a dirt track, past village upon village and young children shepherding animals, all I could think was that those children have skills and knowledge. By seating them in those classrooms, we convince them they know nothing. Teachers complain about the lack of resources when all I saw were the rich resources they were already using: language, the feedback of the learners' peers, learners' own pictures of different concepts. The rich resources they could use: number lines of string, clips and numbered paper; numbering the desks; numbering the learners; the structures of the learners' first languages.
If a learner can identify a tree in the yard under which they play and its structures, they can understand photosynthesis. If they notice the sand beneath their feet and how they pile the grains into heaps, they can understand atoms and elements. Together with their community, they can build structures of mud and thatch. They can even build multi-roomed houses with bricks. Then surely they can understand almost any structure, wherever it appears.
Who exactly do we believe we are saving? Who exactly are we empowering and to do what? As I see it, the more we do this, the more we tighten the leash around these people's backs.
So let me tell you my vision for education: To strengthen the sense of value in at least one learner's own skills, in their environments, in their communities. To allow them to tell their own stories. To identify the genuine needs in a community and to plug those holes themselves. In a community such as my urban one, to see one person see the value in the ramshackle structure they build of found materials. A person doesn't perceive their own value when 'we' save 'them'; it happens when I respect you and vice versa.
