NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Alice in Wonderland: The reality of popular education in the world of development policy
By Chris Martin, formerly Ford Foundation, Mexico
Email: cmartinlemarchant@gmail.comThe bases for public education come from three perspectives. The first considers education valuable in its own right, something that makes the individual and society a more civilized and healthier place. The second is from the perspective of social justice and wellbeing: that education is a public good and a fair society should ensure that all have access to it since all citizens are equal before the law. The third perspective is pragmatic. It sees education instrumentally - as a motor for employment and economic growth via the formation of ?human capital? an ingredient of capital, and those who possess it as ?human capital?. These views are not mutually exclusive and tend to coexist.
Situating of public education in the economic growth policy framework, predominant in recent years, can easily make us lose sight of the fact that each of the views propounded above arose from particular interests in society. Public education did not originate only in, nor is it the preserve of, the government. Its principal sources lie in civil society and even while we rely for its administration on government bodies, the driving force and inspiration for change and continuity in public educational provision remain civil-society-driven, even though governments may shape these drives. This paper affirms this view in relation to Mexico. It does so, particularly from the standpoint of the most vulnerable sections of the civil society, the urban and rural poor, and examines their contribution to public education. In so doing, the article challenges the illusion, commonplace in government circles, that significant educational changes emanate from official policy-making. This illusion was ridiculed in the Mexican press coverage of a recent ex-president?s visit to the USA. The president characterized Mexico as a wonderland over which he presided, and in which all manner of amazing things could happen. The press subsequently dubbed his complete lack of grasp on reality as Alice in Wonderland.
In contrast, the marginalized sections of the population who wrestle with the problems real life in Mexico and tend to see their attempts to overcome their conditions, in part through education, have more often than not experienced frustration, at home, and the decision to migrate abroad. But in some cases, where a set of factors come together in a propitious way, the result has been the generation of home-grown solutions to the deficiency of existing educational provision. What poor communities see as their cultural richness and strength, contrasting with their material poverty and exclusion from prosperity, is what has helped to generate educational innovations of value to other disadvantaged populations, and to educational development more widely, as has been recognized recently in UNESCO, the OECD (CERI) and PREAL.
One of the most well known examples of a local level innovation that emerged from local popular aspirations developing user-based educational solutions is the Escuela Nueva [new school] of Colombia. But throughout Mexico, too, as in other parts of the continent there are a wide variety of such innovations, each addressing the educational concerns of the users with appropriate, often home-grown solutions. Typical among these are indigenous and intercultural educational projects that conserve and develop local language and cultural identity, and teacher dissident movements that seek democratic reforms inside their union, and undertake new pedagogical and curricular approaches in response to local learning needs and traditions.
Valuing these typically small-scale, local educational innovations is not easy. The public, governments and international agencies tend to be more impressed by accomplishments that resound at the highest levels of our societies or which have the widest impact. Yet the stress on impact and up-scaling misses the point that the local initiatives are not meant to be replicated and up-scaled. Their strength is their specific response to specific conditions. Since the circumstances in each setting are unique, the solutions must be so too, prohibiting standardized, ?one-size-fits all? solutions. What can be transmitted more widely is the methodology of making education more locally responsive, democratic and something in which the users take ownership.
To make this sustainable, the small-scale initiatives need to network, to disseminate and share their work as well as to campaign for support to enable them to grow and flourish as a legitimate part of public education. This in turn requires a very different partnership between civil society and the state in which the latter does not so much control, but establishes the conditions that facilitate, regulate and propitiate local education within a wider, national framework.
In summary, this paper takes issue with the assumption that the size of a social phenomenon is the measure of its importance and that the further from mainstream, growth policies it is, the less value it has. In education the opposite may be true. What ought to be the criteria of value is the quality and nature of the work it accomplishes. Popular educational initiatives challenge the idea that public education is best driven from above, and counterpose it with the view that being a public good it concerns the public not just the government. Popular initiatives also act on the conviction that educational advance can be effectively achieved by de-centering it and making it serve the public, and the aspirations of its divergent sections. In this way their sustainability is most effectively secured.
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