Education, Part 3a
Education,
Neo-Colonial Style
In the second part of his
essay called “Cross‐Cultural and Historical Perspectives on the Developmental
Consequences of Education”, Mike
Cole is telling us quite plainly that the ideology underlying education in the
era of neo-colonialism is racist and patronising, based on the assumption that
unschooled people are not adults, and that what makes them adults, is schooling.
“C.P.
Hallpike summarized decades of psychological research comparing the intellectual
performance of educated and non-educated people of various ages on Piagetian
and a wide variety of other cognitive tasks. With very few exceptions, the
schooled participants outperformed those who had not attended school. These
differences between schooled and non-schooled children led him to conclude that
most of the time, ‘primitives’ do indeed think like small children [Hallpike,
1979].”
Whereas Cole’s own findings,
together with his colleagues Sharp and Lave, following research in Yucatan,
Mexico, were:
“... the
information-processing skills which school attendance seems to foster could be
useful in a variety of tasks demanded by modern states, including clerical and
management skills in bureaucratic enterprises, or the lower-level skills of
record keeping in an agricultural cooperative or a well-baby clinic.”
In other words, school
prepared the children for a capitalist society, and not for life in general.
The remainder of the text
describes various means of “managing diversity” in schools. The four scenarios
given by Cole towards the end of this excerpt are not hopeful.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Cole,
Perspectives, Part 2, Post-Colonial Consequences, 2005.
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