I had never really considered the negative aspects of education before. I’ve always thought of gaining an education as a good thing. How sad though—to educate away a culture, traditions, and way of life! How sad that we are becoming a monoculture and our diversities are being destroyed!
The whole film was very powerful, but some of my biggest take-aways are that there is more than one "right" way of being and living in this world. We shouldn't insist that our way-the western way--is the only educated way, because if we as westerners aren't careful we are going to destroy cultures and languages and leave the people we are trying to help in between cultures with no where to really belong. This tragedy is what has already happened to so many people living in the slums. They've lost their history and culture; they've lost everything and that is why their existence is now so miserable. We have to realize these people we consider "uneducated" have thrived for generations living in their ways. They know things we don't know. We have much to learn from them. They have answers we need. They have wisdom that we as westerners could benefit from because our western culture seems to have moved from wisdom to knowledge, and from knowledge to information. Some of our information might help them. But some of their wisdom would benefit us.
The film pointed out that our western culture isn't totally desirable. We have poverty and slums. Our children are on drugs and kill each other. We spend our lives seeking money at the expense of quality time with family and friends. Our children are locked in cinderblock boxes for six-eight hours a day to learn about nature that they no longer get to experience first hand.
This monoculture inducing type of education has happened and still happens in the United States today. The United States is known as the "melting pot" where people have come from all over the world and lost their cultures and languages to become American. It hasn't been until recently that being bilingual has been thought of as desirable. In the past students and families from different cultures were strongly encouraged to stop speaking their mother tongue completely in order to speak English. And even today, immigrants are expected to assimilate and their cultures are to a large degree lost and not passed on to their children.
This film is related to Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory in that culture shapes cognitive development because culture determines what and how the child will learn about the world. Previously in these unwesternized countries the children were taught alongside their parents to live off the land, to weave cloth, and to practice their religions and traditions. The children interacted with their parents and other family members to learn how to survive in their world.
Now these children are not learning how to survive in their world from their parents and family members. They are learning from westernized teachers how to survive in a globalized economy. This change in education is changing their development, the skills they learn, the languages they speak, the way they live, their culture, and their identity.
The solution that I came away with from watching this film is dialogue. Instead of us as "superior westerners" rushing in to "help" these inferior cultures" by "educating" them we should create a dialogue with them and together we can learn from each other. We teach them what works for us, and they teach us what works for them and together we appreciate and help each other. We celebrate our differences and stop insisting on being the same.
I really enjoyed the ideas this film introduced to me. I'm not sure what to think anymore about education. I love what education has done for me personally. I have benefited greatly from modern medicine and technology. I am grateful I can attend the university. I LOVE to read and learn. However, I recognize it is a tragedy for languages, traditions, and cultures to be lost. I recognize there is more to life than participating in the global economy. I am aware the global economy has a lot of problems, but would I be better off, would I be happier, if I couldn't read and write and travel and use technology? I'm not so certain.
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