Though I’ve spent many years as a teacher, I question whether the things I have taught would outweigh the things I have unlearned. Working in the ‘development’ field in some of the poorest regions of Asia, there was always a great enthusiasm for education, and ‘critical thinking’ was an oft-used buzzword that symbolised an uncritical ideology: teach children to think better and a country will develop economically.
There is some truth in this idea that education can change societies-I wouldn’t be a teacher if I didn’t believe that to be the case-but too often in the field of international development, such a view is put in service of a practice that depoliticises the economy, seeing it as a field in which individuals alone roam. Development, in this view, is akin to a video game where all you need to do to move to the next level is to push the lever labelled ‘intelligence’ and then, through some unspecified process, more money starts coming in.
What's missing then, is the ways in which education is inextricably linked to the rest of society, in particular, the social division of labour and resources. In this article, I look in particular at how education in the Global South links to economy in a world system. What I’m interested to explore is the ways in which education has mirrored the asymmetrical global economy. Schools produce labour, but in what ways does the architecture of the economy produce schools?
The model of global capitalism is built on trade circuits and supply chains. Patterns of production and consumption emerge, with regions, countries and even continents seemingly designated a role within the world system. In very general terms1 the North consumes what the South produces.
The Northern states have outsourced much of their production and, with a combination of military and economic power, exert a gravitational pull on the global South2, which takes the role of cheap labour to produce resources and goods for the core.
When developmental economists go around the world telling countries to open up their economies to foreign investment/exploitation, they also “advise” that education systems are similarly restructured. For instance, at the turn of the century, university staff in Argentina were disturbed to find that those twin imperial harbingers, the IMF and World Bank, had the power not only to shape trade and industry but to shift the direction of education, from a model that served the public to a market-driven model that would ‘transform human resources to match the labour market’. What this tends to mean in practice is that humanities subjects, such as languages, history, and social studies, are removed as non essential in favour of more vocational subjects. It’s a common story that has gone hand in hand with restructuring across Asia and Africa for decades.3
As a way of measuring these changes, the development industry will often cloak itself in technologies, both material and bureaucratic, as a way to pretend it is moving things forward when in fact it is serving the dynamics of inequality on a global scale. Academy schools are an ingenious way of legalizing what natural justice would call wholesale theft. Also known as Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs), the model takes public money from the government purse and pays private companies to run schools instead. I’m not against non-state education, and indeed, I work with many colleges who reject the state’s curriculum. But the main difference between a private school and a community school is the extent to which they are embedded within communities. PPPs by their very nature put profit above everything.
The justification for PPPs is that they improve educational outcomes, but the studies that supposedly prove this often leave out the fact that with low democratic accountability, these schools are free to choose and reject pupils as they see fit. It’s called ‘cream skimming’ and means that the obligation for local schools to education to serve whole communities and not just pupils who can get high grades, is lost.
Emblematic of neo-colonial schooling is Bridge Academies, a chain of private schools in Africa with funding and support from the World Bank, The UK Government, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. The schools boasted tablet computers (ooh shiny!) for some of the region’s poorest children. The computer technology isn’t creating a new generation of high tech whiz kids though. The tablets are used to download ready-made lesson scripts for teachers (non unionised) to deliver in a rote monotone to children. The technology also allows for Bridge headquarters to monitor teachers at a distance, ready to rebuke them if they dare to stray from the script4. Do you think that Bill Gates would allow his own children to attend such as soulless schooling program?
Sure there are still routes for a thin strata of the upper class in the South to access quality education, but in general the aim of core state capital is to consolidate their position as net exploiters by maintaining supply chains in which Southern labour is used for tasks that are menial, repetitive and require little creative thinking5. No one will dare say it out loud, but the practice is screaming it: We don’t need to teach the world’s poorest people how to think.
What is Non-Education?
Education in the United States plays a dual role in the social process…On the one hand, by imparting technical and social skills and appropriate motivations, education increases the productive capacity of workers. On the other hand, education helps defuse and depoliticize the potentially explosive class relations of the production process -Bowles and Gintis, 1976
“not all those who are dispossessed find a place within the system of capitalist production...they are condemed to the world of the excluded, the redundant, the dispensable, having nothing to lose, not even the chains of wage-slavery. Primitive accumulation of capital thus produces a vast wasteland inhabited by people whose lives as producers have been subverted and destroyed by the thrust of the process of expansion, but for whom the doors of the world of capital remain forever closed.- Kalyan Sanyal, 2007
Critical educational sociologists have long identified the role of education, at least within the core capitalist states such as the USA, UK, France, as training some to lead and others to follow. Yet if education serves the labour market, what happens when when the labour of entire societies is surplus to capital’s needs?
An essential phenomenon within capitalist development is land grabbing, with or without state complicity, and the subsequent migration of the dispossessed rural poor towards urban areas in search of land. However, there are never enough jobs available to match demand. In Marx’s time, he noted that the unemployed formed a ‘reserve army of labour’, who presence helped to keep wages low. In the 21st century, the poorest countries play host to vast slums. Kalyan Sanyal, in his 2007 book Rethinking Capitalist Development, argued that these areas in the Global South are not the same as the reserve army of labour, because they have no chance at all to enter into the formal capitalist system of wage labour. For Sanyal, the slums of the modern urban poor were not a reserve army of labour but a distinct social group; the ‘world of the excluded, the redundant, the dispensable, having nothing to lose, not even the chains of wage-slavery.’6
What happens with education in the ‘wasteland’ of capital? Produced by capital but entirely surplus to the needs of capital, these places, termed non-capital by Sanyal, are not required to produce the next generation of workers, as they might do (or have done) in a Northern capitalist state such as the UK or France. If education is a commodity, then why waste money educating these people? So the logic goes. It’s a horrific premise, and thankfully we have not yet fully reached the point where such statements would be tolerated. And yet, it’s happening anyway.
One way to look at education is its function within society as a ritual, a recognisable series of actions that are validated by society. The credentialist school of education sociology argues that the true value of education is not what you learn, but the rights you get from completing schooling. In short, whatever you learned in school is secondary in importance to the certificate you get. It is not just students who participate in these rituals but the schools themselves and the states that validate them. For the wasteland, a place where retreating states have been replaced by a technocratic development practice led by Northern donors, schooling is measured by the number of years completed and grades achieved rather than the quality and practice of the teaching and learning.
And so, what we get education that is all form and no content. A shell with no filling. This non-education goes through the motions, chasing donor money with easy to digest quantitative stats that elide the actual purpose of education: involving learners in the pursuit of knowledge. This is what the economy wants at this stage in capitalist history. Sure, it requires some people to have quality education, but it does not need nor want this for everyone. The function of non-education is twofold: in certain circumstances it allows capital allocated to development and welfare to be siphoned off by Northern companies. Secondly, by preventing meaningful education it also slows down any political response to imperialism.
Yes I am speaking about the economy as if it were a ‘thing’, an entity with its own conscious being, that sits at the behind the curtain of World Bank meetings, speaking poison into the ears of the economists and world leaders. This ‘thingness’ is essentially just a shorthand for an ideology that would treat education as a commodity rather than an intrinsic social value. A religion doesn’t have to be true to exist.
But I don’t want to end on a negative note. Because it is in these places of non-capital, where some of the world’s most positive stories about education can be found. See, when the state retreats from social services, it also creates a vacuum. It’s in the ‘wasteland’ then, where despite the influx of development logic, there are also spaces of independence and struggles for autonomy. Credentialism is obviously a bad thing when it obliges students to attend poor quality education just for the certificate. However the mechanism of credentialism also allows for new ways of learning to gain a solid footing within the communities they are embedded within.
A lot of my work in South East Asia has been with independent colleges and schools that offer an alternative to the poor fair served by the state. Their strategy is two fold: offer higher quality education, while building relationships with communities so that their certificates are recognised. These schools often open up spaces for new discussions on capital, colonialism and the reproduction of indigenous cultures. Elsewhere in Brazil, the citizen school project, which centres student democracy, has gone someway to transforming what counts as official knowledge against a neoliberal hegemony.7
I’m always at risk of over romanticising these types of schools. They aren’t pure anarchist institutions springing up like roses through concrete and there’s often times where the distinction between community school and for profit private school can be difficult to pinpoint. While progressive social reproduction and transformation may be prioritised in these rebel schools, they still need to reproduce themselves in terms of financing and the realities of local labour markets, which means that pragmatic decisions need to be taken in terms of curriculum and entrance.
Still, a running theme of ExMultitude will be that some of the most well formed challenges to capitalism are coming from the Global South. The schools that are emerging from the spaces that capital fears to tread, offer an alternative to market demands for low quality and ritualistic education. The development industry has decided that private schools run by Northern companies that churn out statistics at the expense of learning are the best way to funnel donations. A better and more viable route for solidarity would be through schools that already exist at the margins and that are showing that another world can be found in that vibrant creative space between the teacher and the students
-Ewan
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This needs doubly stressing. Yes there are exploiters in the South and exploited in the North. Many. But what we're looking at here is a general pattern.
In this article I use the term Global South and North as a shorthand for poor (exploited) and rich countries (exploiters). It is an inelegant tern, and geography does not conform to the world system exactly, but it is preferable to alternatives such as developed/underdeveloped (which has normative implications about the right way that a society should operate).
See for example: Rhoads, A. R., Torres, C.A., Brewster, A. (2015) Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Latin American Higher Education; Luke, A. (2010) Educating the Other: Standpoint and Theory in the ‘Internationalization’ of Higher Education. Ramrathan, L. (2016) Widening Access Through Higher Education Transformation: A Case Study of University of KwaZulu-Natal.
See https://medium.com/learning-re-imagined/education-in-africa-1f495dc6d0af
Let’s be very clear here though. The process of production and manual labour is not intrinsically non-intellectual or un-creative. It is the current arrangement of this labour into small repetitive tasks for the purposes of profit that has stripped it of creativity.
Sanyal, K. (2007) Rethinking capitalist development. Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. Routledge. New Delhi. p.53.
See the work of Luis Gandin for more on these schools e.g., Gandin, L.A. and Apple, M.W. (2003) Educating the State, Democratizing Knowledge: The Citizen School Project in Porto Alegre, Brazil
Beautifully written! I am a firm Marxist myself!