There was an article in yesterday’s Financial Times about Room to Read, an education charity that works in similar situations to us. I thought it worth mentioning here because it is a very typical article about poor people in foreign places/ charity. It paints that cliche picture, yet again, of hopelessness without industrial style education. It’s subtle, and something we have all become quite accustomed to, but I think it jolly misleading. It is written, as they often are, without consideration for the quality of the education or the wider implications that that education has, beyond the economic, and health to an extent, benefits of it. In this type of schooling there are many potential benefits, but there are also many potential destructive elements too, and for some reason these seem to be under, or not at all, considered by the vast majority of ‘education’ organisations.

To illustrate; the article starts with a fairly typical picture of destitution, using such fragments as ‘for miles no sign of anything’, ‘ trudging through a roadside ditch’ and ‘trickle of a river’. Nothing too sinister, but it is all diminutive stuff. At this point we are talking about western Nepal which is for the most part stunningly beautiful, and these are the children on their way to school, so the nothing for miles is actually their homes, fields and communities. Not a terribly nice description really. It goes on to talk about illiteracy and education synonymously, as if the ability to read is the only measure of education, assuming that is that they view education as capacity. At this point the dusty road by a ditch becomes a ‘pilgrimage’, suggesting that schools are something to be revered and somehow special and out of the ordinary, disconnected from the every day around them.

The opinion of schooling equally in education is further bolstered by references to sporadic schooling resulting in one girl’s sporadic education. From this it can only be assumed, and there is certainly no attestation to the contrary, to any degree, on any level, that a person can only be education, thus capable, if they have gone to school. The skills of the area and generations of knowledge and culture can only be the knowledge of peasants then, worthless and ‘uneducated’.

It makes other unconsidered comment, such as the markers of the free uniforms and textbooks they give the children qualifying the school, with no comment on what the children are being taught or the quality to which it is being taught, let alone a balance of the skills the children aren’t being taught, and are being denied learning through the restriction of conformity and obedience.

Worldwide there are schools being run and built and people thinking it good that education is coming to the masses, such as the UN’s millennium development goal of universal primary education. But there are relatively so few looking at what those schools actually provide it is really rather worrying, and articles such as this only go to prolong the myths of education while not addressing what it means to be educated.