Review of Schooling The World: The Last White Man's Burden

A polemical, one-sided look at the damage done by exporting western models of education to non-western societies, with a particular focus on Ladakh. Lots about how western-mode education destroys traditional culture and robust, locally-adapted societies, which are seen through a rose-coloured filter. Yeah, Ladakh does seem pretty great, and the way in which western-style education has been imposed as part of a development model that assumes the path followed by the West is the best and only way to develop is pretty awful. A more nuanced film would have taken a more critical look at some of the other non-western cultures, where sometimes there is a genuine, well-founded and justified hunger for any education...think about the girls that the Taliban is preventing from getting any kind of education. I suspect the Taliban wouldn't have many problems with this film.

There is of course plenty wrong with the western model of education, which was designed to discipline working-class children for a life in factories and mills, and to teach them what they needed to know for that life, and to indoctrinate them into cultural submission to the values of capitalist society. Even with its own terms it's not a great success. 

And there's no doubt that, as the film illustrates with quotes and artefacts like old posters, the export of this model was tied in to the expansion of imperialism; there most certainly was an intention to eradicate the "backward" cultures of those who were sitting on land that the imperialist powers wanted. There was a similar move to eradicate Welsh, and Catalan, within the metropolitan territories of the imperialist powers.

And it's lovely to see the ethnobotanist Wade Davis interviewed as one of the talking heads in the film. He makes lots of good points about what might be thought as "cultural biodiversity" - that as we increasingly inhabit a world of multiple concurrent crises one of those "primitive" cultures might contain something that we are going to need, and it would be shame if it were too late to pick it up because we'd extinguished it.

But there's lots left out that doesn't fit into the monodimensional critique that the film offers.Most of all I missed even a hat-tip to Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educational theorist whose "Pedagogy of The Oppressed" not only anticipated the film's critique but actually proposed something more positive, and more useful, than the "everything traditional is just great" panacea that the film effectively endorses. And there are other kinds of informal and community-organised education that ought to be recognised...I know I'm partial, but think of the musical education provided by brass band culture without conservatoires.

The uneasy feeling that I had as I watched was that in essence this film is rooted in the conservative critique of modernity, not a progressive critique. Traditional societies are not, for the most part, utopias. They are often hierarchical, oppressive, and reactionary. And outside tiny isolated pockets they don't really exist...in a capitalist world everything is touched by the hand of capital. We can do better than this.