Why Efforts to Fix Global Education May Deepen Global Inequality
Imagine you step into class and are told this:
You are Chief Albert Luthuli. You are President of the African National Congress. The year is 1961, and you have just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for your role in your organization’s non-violent resistance to Apartheid.
Still, it is unclear whether your efforts our working. Your organization recently suffered the bloodiest day in its history, in what became known at the Sharpeville Massacre. Nations across Africa are gaining independence, but you do not seem to be any closer to ending Apartheid.
Your Youth League, led by young firebrands Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, have been pushing for an end to the policy of non-violence and the creation of an armed resistance wing. Other members of your coalition, particularly the Indian Congress, are adamant that the ANC should maintain its commitment to non-violence.
The ANC has always been a consensus-driven organization. This issue threatens to split it. You must (a) figure out what the right thing to do is, and (b) drive consensus within the ANC, so that you can move forward as one.
Each year, we place this challenge to our 9th graders at African School for Excellence to open the unit we call “The Albert Luthuli Case.” It never fails to yield interesting, thoughtful discussions and debates.
A few years ago, I stepped into a classroom to find a girl named Mandisa standing in front of the class and the teacher sat behind a desk, looking on.
“I don’t want to hear anything else about this Nobel Peace Prize,” she said, “or the idea that because Chief Luthuli won some prize for peace, we can’t be violent. The Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless anyway, and shouldn’t exist.”
I was already intrigued. I don’t think I had ever heard someone speak so strongly against the Nobel Peace Prize before. Is there a more venerated, unquestioned institution in the world?
“Think about it this way,” she continued. “These white people are going all around the world oppressing people, correct?” The class nodded. “They’re doing it here in South Africa, they’re doing it across the African continent, they’re doing it in India, and they’re doing it elsewhere. Correct?”
No disagreements.
“Well, how are they doing it? With charm and warm hugs? Or with violence?” She paused, as the room took in her meaning. “Now, how are these same people going to use violence to oppress people, then turn around and award a prize to the people who just let them do it, who refuse to fight back? And why are we supposed to respect that prize? We should not. So I don’t want to hear anything more about it. It’s meaningless.”
“Wait a second!” another girl said, raising her hand. The teacher nodded silently at her. “Are they really the same people, though? Are the people giving the Noble Prize and the people with guns here in South Africa really the same? Just because they have the same skin color doesn’t mean they’re the same.”
“But they’re on the same team!” a boy called from across the suddenly-noisy room. “They’re part of the same team,” he repeated, as the room quieted. “The might not be the same people, but they have the same goals, or related goals. They help each other accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.”
And as the room moved into a heated debate about the validity of Mandisa’s point. Many were adamant that Mandisa was painting with far too broad a brush: wasn’t it racist to act as if all white people were part of the same undertaking and should be held responsible for others’ actions. But ASE students react to racism accusations as strongly as anyone else does, and a heated argument ensued.
When I travel around the world talking to education experts, when I read reports by major multinational educational institutions, and when I observe where the investment and philanthropic capital is going in education, I can discern two distinct challenges being addressed:
The first question is: How can we achieve the basics for all of the poor, disadvantaged kids whose schools teach them virtually nothing (if they’re in school at all)?
This is the question asked by most American charter schools, African school networks like Bridge International Academies and Omega Schools, governments throughout the developing world and especially in Africa, international aid organizations and impact investors focusing on the developing world in general and Africa in particular.
The second question is: What does the school of the future look like? Given technology advances, shifting labor demands, and new insights in cognitive science, how can we create a new, 21st century version of schooling?
This is the question of Silicon Valley disrupters such as AltSchool and Minerva University, a few progressive charters such as High Tech High, and wealthy, forward-thinking nations such as Finland and the Netherlands. It is the question that those with money and power consider with regard to their own children’s education.
The first question presupposes a system and takes that system as a given, before asking how schools can help students improve within that system. The second question is open to the idea of a new system, or is so confident in its students’ ability to succeed within that system that it opens them up to learning that transcends it.
The first question implicitly accepts what David Tyack and Larry Cuban have called the “Grammar of Schooling” — relatively unexamined ubiquitous realities such as discrete classes in a range of subjects, begun and ended by bells, with students in age-group cohorts progressing through grade levels and studying set curricula, a set of examinations to prove their knowledge, etc. — while the second question is willing to question all of those current realities.
The wealthy and powerful, of course, feel empowered to critique the system in a way others do not. They expect to succeed, and can achieve all of our society’s markers of success while simultaneously exploring novel learning options. They also possess the means and the education to read and understand what cognitive science tells us about learning, and to adjust their children’s educations accordingly. The global poor lack these luxuries.
There is another, subconscious idea at work here, which can perhaps be demonstrated by this tweet:
The implication here is clear: Because former candidate Andrew Yang did well on all of our traditional markers of success, he has the right and the authority to criticize them. This seems like an idea we all acknowledge. If you’ve done well in a system, you can criticize it. If not, complaining is just sour grapes. When a welfare recipient complains about inequality, society rolls its eyes. When Warren Buffett says the same thing, we sit up and listen.
When you think about it, this is utter nonsense, especially when considered at a global level rather than an individual level. The colonial education system is currently being rejected and re-thought by the former colonial powers, but the former colonies must stick with it for now, because…they haven’t succeeded? Stick with what doesn’t work, until you can make it work. Then you can change it.
What?
The problem with our two education questions is that the “school of the future” discussions are only happening in the contexts where they’ve always happened. The wealthy and powerful define what the future will look like, while the money devoted to educating the poor is used to extend the last century’s ideas. Innovations are designed to increase efficiency and succeed within the current system using fewer resources.
The most ambitious, interesting ideas from the best minds will continue to be designed for the already privileged, who will then use their success using these new measures to justify their continued hold on power, while simultaneously proclaiming their liberalism and progressiveness. Children of privilege will continue to succeed on “merit,” because their homes and schools developed the “21st century skills” needed for the future, while those stuck in the traditional system did not.
Beyond the injustice of this reality, there is the practical problem: Our ideas are limited by our experience and perspective. I had never thought to question the Nobel Peace Prize; Mandisa made a strong, coherent critique of it before her 15th birthday. Is that because she’s smarter than I am? Probably! But it’s also because she approached the question from a different perspective, with a different set of experiences.
The true solutions the will transform our society are unlikely to come from the most privileged sliver of society. They are far more likely to come from the Mandisa’s of the world. For them to develop those ideas, however, they need the type of education imagined by the architects of the “school of the future,” not an education designed to efficiently achieve the goals of yesterday.
We need to ask our second question not only for the children of Silicon Valley and Northern Europe but for the poorest, most disadvantaged students. The solution may look different, but it should be in the same spirit, underlain by the same assumptions about human potential. If we hope to achieve it, we need to put the same resources behind this question that we do to the two questions we are currently pursuing, which each attract tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
(We also need to rethink our measurement and assessment system so that it no longer rewards backward behaviors, but that is a question for another blog post.)
A few months ago I found myself at a conference in Kenya with Dzingai Muzimurumba, the first education minister of a democratic Zimbabwe and the architect of arguably Africa’s greatest educational success story. Zimbabwe’s education system has eventually succumbed to the crushing poverty brought on by the Mugabe administration, but for decades it was by far the highest performer in the region. The products of the system Dzingai developed hold prominent positions all over the globe.
Dzingai and I stayed up late into the night, drinking way too many whiskys as I peppered him with questions and he regaled me with stories from his time running the ministry. For example, just a few years after taking over the Zimbabwe education system, he started a pre-service teacher’s college…in Cuba. Zimbabwean teachers visited Cuban schools, studied under both Zimbabwean and Cuban professors, and brought these ideas back to Zimbabwe with them.
Now, I’m not suggesting that all of the pedagogical methods used in Zimbabwe in the 80s and 90s are the same ones I would recommend today. Nor am I suggesting that Cuban teachers’ colleges are somehow the solution to our education challenges. I’m merely describing the type of boldness and outside-the-box thinking required to solve such an intractable problem.
This bold thinking may include sending teachers abroad to places like Finland and Singapore as part of structured, reflective learning programs to gradually transform the culture of teaching and learning. It may include Lab Schools designed to test and refine novel educational ideas with representative populations, staffed by some of our best faculty. It may involve deep and broad programs of structured lesson study and mandated reflective practice.
Most importantly, success will involve a change in mindset toward low-income students and their teachers, viewing both through the same lens we currently view the children of the wealthy and privileged: as high-potential thinkers capable of mind-blowing achievements.