Schooling the World Transcript

(chanting) a film by Carol Black Ladakh, India (Ladakhi woman) My older daughter has gone away to the city to send her children to school. My youngest daughter has also gone away to go to school in Leh. I stay here alone to take care of the farm, water the fields, take the cows out to graze. It’s not like i t was before. They are all educated now. So they don’t stay. It would be happier if we were all here together. But they say they have to send them to school. (music: Look Back In) An 1872 painting called call ed “American Progress” shows a white woman floating acros s the plains of the American West. White settlers follow her as Indians and wild animals flee. On her forehead she wears the star of empire. In her right hand she carries a school book. As America moves west, thousands of Native American children are forcibly taken from their families and sent to government-run boarding schools. The overt goal is to destroy their way of life. “To civilize the Indians…immerse them in our civilization, and when we get them t hem under hold them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”—General soaked.”— General Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School “Let all that is Indian within you die.”—Carlisle die.”— Carlisle Indian School commencement speech In India, the British are also schooling a nation. “We must at present do our best to form…a class or persons, Indian in blood and color but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect.”—Lord Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” Next to be educated are the Cubans and the Filipinos. The U.S. Army invades the Philippines. Over 500,000 civilians are killed. An army of schoolteachers is sent to educate the survivors. A cartoon from the period shows a white man carrying a dark-skinned figure to a school house. It is captioned, “The White Man’s Burden.” “THE AMERICAN FLAG HAS NOT BEEN PLANTED IN FOREIGN SOIL TO ACQUIRE MORE TERRITORY BUT FOR HUMANITY’S SAKE.” SCHOOLING THE WORLD: The White Man’s Last Burden

(teacher’s (teacher’s voice) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Okay! (school bell / children’s voices) (Dolma Tsering) Traditionally, we were taught kindness and compassion, how to live by the teachings of the Buddha. But now, with development, everyone sends their children to school. With modern schooling, the old values of cooperation and compassion are starting to decline. Now people are thinking, I have to be a doctor or an engineer, and the traditional ways of helping one another, of kindness and compassion, are slowly dying out. (Wade Davis) Through our cultural myopia, we think that we educate our kids, we send our kids to school, we have a form of enculturating kids into our society, which is education, and peoples who don’t mimic those same patterns of education somehow don’t educate their kids. Well, of course, that is absurd.

Schooling the World Transcript 1

(Ladakhi woman) Before modern schooling, our education focused on the spiritual teachings. But now the emphasis is on material success. People go to school so they can make a lot of money, have a big house, drive a nice car. The whole idea of learning has been turned around to mean, “ How can I make a lot of money?” (Helena Norberg-Hodge) Today, western schooling is responsible for introducing a human monoculture across the entire world. Essentially the same curriculum is being taught, and it’s training people for jobs— jobs —very scarce jobs— jobs—but for jobs in an urban consumer culture. The diversity of cultures, as well as the diversity of unique human individuals, is being destroyed in this way. the old missionaries (school bell) Moravian Mission School, Leh (Reverend Elijah Gergen, Principal, Moravian Mission School) Now this particular school that was established, called the Moravian Mission School, was secular in the sense s ense that of course some Christian teaching was given as a part of an evangelistic outreach by the Moravians. (drums) The Moravian Mission School was founded by German missionaries. It is considered one of the best schools in Ladakh. (Rev. Gergen) In 1887, when the school first started, there were certain perceptions that were wrong. For example, a school started by the missionaries…on mi ssionaries…on a street corner…must have an ulterior motive. Of conversion. Of teachings that are in conflict with the teachings of the traditional society. Of the religion. (students) Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven… (Rev. Gergen) And I have been told that children had to come by force to the school. They wouldn’t like to. People just wouldn’t send children to the school. (students) And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us… (Rev. Gergen) I strongly believe that a secular education system and a cosmopolitan school society should not be at the expense of losing “Ladakhiness.” (students) And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen. (Rev. Gergen) If you have lost your history, you have lost everything. (Buddhist chanting) A living culture is an ecosystem, a complex web of relationships between human beings and th e land they live on. As in any ecosystem, every element is intertwined with all the others. And, as in any ecosystem, sudden changes have unpredictable effects. (music: Youth of the Nation) CASH ADVANCE ON CREDIT CARDS six thousand voices


(Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer) You know, the great lesson of anthropology is the idea that the world into which you were born doesn’t exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that your lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago. And the other peoples of the world aren’t failed attempts at being you or, in our case, failed attempts at modernity. They are, by definition, unique facets of the human imagination, and when asked the meaning of being human, they respond with six thousand different voices. And those voices collectively become the human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. We always have this idea of our society as not being really a culture, but being the real world— world —and these other cultures, outside, those are the cul tures. But that kind of cultural myopia we really can no longer afford. You know, we aren’t the t he real inexorable wave of history. We’re just another set of possibilities. We’re just another cultural reality with choices that we’ve made. And that’s why in the whole realm of child rearing and education I think it behooves us to look at models of enculturation, of initiation, of bringing children into the realm of adulthood that other societies have celebrated and developed over thousands of years of experience. (Helena Norberg-Hodge, International Society for Ecology and Culture) There is n o doubt that if we look honestly at the traditional forms of education and compare them to today’s modern education system that the traditional forms of knowledge fostered sustainability. All t hese cultures were not perfect. But they did know about their own specific climate, soil, water. A nd they did manage to survive— survive—independently, in charge of their own lives— lives —for generation after generation. In the modern economy, and with the modern educational system, the children l earn nothing about that, but instead they learn how to use essentially corporate products in an urban consumer culture. So once they’ve been educated in modern schools they literally don’t know how to survive in their own environment. (Ladakhi woman) The ones who go away to school just stand around with their hands in their pockets. They don’t know how to take the animals up to graze; they don’t know how to care for the crops. They don’t know how to do anything. (Wade Davis) Education is not simply the transmission of information. It’s by definition the transmission— transmission—indeed the enculturation— enculturation —or one could say, more harshly, the indoctrination— indoctrination —of a child into a certain way of knowing, a way of learning, a way of being. And again, when we project our notions of what education edu cation is or what a way of being is overseas into other peoples’ lives we forget that we’re projecting just something that we m ade up. And one of the things that I see in my work is that different ways of knowing, different ways of being, different ways of learning really create different human beings. If you’re raised in i n Colorado to believe that a mountain is an inert pile of rock waiting to be mined, you’re going to have a very different relationship to that mountain from a kid from southern Peru who believes in the fiber of his being that a mountain is an Apu spirit, a protective deity that will direct his destiny throughout life. Now, the interesting observation is not whether that mountain is in fact a spirit or whether it’s just a pile of dirt. The int eresting observation is how the education system into what that mountain is creates a different human being with a different relationship to the earth. I was raised r aised in the forests of British Columbia to believe that those forests existed to be cut. That was the foundation of the ideology of scientific forestry that I was t aught in school and that I practiced as a logger in the woods. It was based on the idea that we had to eliminate all the old growth to get some healthy plantations growing in their wake because, after all, the incremental addition of cellulose would be higher i n –but this was a construct! But, critically, that belief system made me a very ver y different human being with a very v ery different relationship to that forest than my friends from Native communities who believed that that forest was the abode of Huxwhukw and the crooked beak of heaven. Because of my ideology, my education, those forests no longer exist. “School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of God’s own handiwork… It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual…a manufactory for grinding out uniform results. I was not a creation of the schoolmaster: the Government Board of Education was not


consulted when I took birth in the world.”—Rabindranath world.”— Rabindranath Tagore, 1913 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature macaulay’ macaulay’s children (drums and music) “A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mold in which whi ch it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”—John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” (man’s (man’s voice) One, two, three, four! Five, six, seven eight! One, two, three, four! Five, six, seven, eight! Nine, ten, eleven, twelve! Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen! (Vandana Shiva, Navdanya / Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology) I think the way western education has grown over the last few centuries, especially with the rise ri se of industrialization, was basically not to create human beings fully equipped to deal with life and all its problems, independent citizens able to exercise their decisions and live their responsibilities in community, but elements to feed into an industrial i ndustrial production system. They were products, with partial knowledge. We moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now w e are moving from knowledge to information— information—and that information is so partial that we are creating incomplete human beings. (Helena Norberg-Hodge) If we look back at the beginning of so - called “education,” the agenda was very clear. There was an elite that wanted to train people to serve their needs, to essentially create cr eate an extractive economy that served the few at the expense of the many. So there’s very explicit literature— very clearly education was there to train a class of people to serve the needs of the elite. (Vandana Shiva) When Macaulay came to India —I don’t know how many of you know, but Macaulay was the guy who created, in the “Minutes of Macaulay,” it’s called, “Macaulay’s children.” And “Macaulay’s children,” he said, would be brown on the outside, but white on the inside. i nside. They would basically know only one thing, how to rule India as if they were Europeans themselves. (Manish Jain, Shikshantar: The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development) If you go back to the sixties and you look l ook at a lot of the modernization literature it’s very clearly written that local language, local tradition, local customs are barriers to modernization. And for communities to progress in the stages of development these things need to be eliminated. (Helena Norberg-Hodge) 99 percent of all the activ ities that go under the label of “education” come from this very specific agenda that grew out of a colonial expansion across the world by Europeans. And now in different countries in the so-called so- called “Third World,” the basic, fundamental agenda is the same. It’s to pull people into dependence on a modern, centralized economy. It’s to pull them away from their independence and from their own culture and self-respect. “Modernization…proceeds at a limited pace within a society still characterized by traditional low“Modernization…proceeds productivity methods, by the old social structure and values… The population at large must be prepared to accept training for an economic system which increasingly confines the individual in large, disciplined organizations, allocating to him narrow, s pecialized tasks.”—Walt Rostow, “The Stages of Economic Growth,” 1960 “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw materials— children— children—are to be shaped and fashioned into products. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”—Ellwood down.”— Ellwood P. Cubberly, Dean, Stanford University School of Education, 1898


“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.”—John hands.”— John D. Rockefeller, General Education Board, 1906 (school bell) education for all (Manish Jain) There’s actually a very big global program that is going on right now called “Education for All.” And every person I’ve met who is associated with it has basically no questions around its agenda or intention, which is very disturbing. It’s a program which is sanctioned by every government in the world; it’s a program which the World Bank and the U.N. agencies support; it’s a program t hat major corporations, McDonalds and many others, are also behind. And the agenda of the program is to get every child into school. The claim is that, by going to school, communities will be able to develop and they’ll be able to become part of the mainst ream society. Now I think we need to question, question, “What does it mean to become part of the mainstream today?” And that for me is very much tied to a very clear agenda of becoming part of the global economy and shifting one’s own local economy, one’s own local culture, one’s own local resources, both personal as well as collective, into the service of the global economy. (Helena Norberg-Hodge) So you will find prime ministers and presidents of countries regularly saying, “We have got to change our education system to make us more competitive in the global economy.” That means, “We have got to train our young people so that they will suit the needs of giant, mobile corporations.” the new missionaries (Julian Schweitzer, World Bank, Director of Human Development for the South Asia region) The “Education for All” initiative is an attempt to redress what was seen as a serious imbalance in funding for primary education. The intent really is to get every child into school. The stated mission of the World Bank is “to reduce global poverty.” (Julian Schweitzer) I think we see education as crucial. It’s an absolutely necessary condition for sustained poverty reduction. But many have come to question whose interests the Bank really serves. (Julian Schweitzer) The demand now for education is not just coming from people like the World Bank and outsiders. It’s coming from businessmen, who are discovering that they can’t grow their factories because they can’t grow their businesses because there’s a shortage of skilled workers. BUSINESS HEADLINE: “India’s New Teachers” But who really benefits when every child on the planet is educated in the same way? (Julian Schweitzer) We need to be very v ery careful about not being paternalistic to so -called ancient cultures. We can help them and certainly not ruin or try to wreck their own cultures. But on the other hand, I think we should be careful about trying to preserve their culture in a kind of cold storage. If they don’t want that, we should be there to help them. “THE AMERICAN FLAG HAS NOT BEEN NOT BEEN PLANTED ON FOREIGN SOIL TO ACQUIRE TERRITORY BUT FOR HUMANITY’S SAKE” (Julian Schweitzer) If you tour a tribal area in India and you sit with a group of women, and you say to them, “Why is education important for your children?” I mean they look at y ou as if you’re completely


stupid. I mean, of course it’s important for our children. So you say, “Well, why, tell me why?” “Because we don’t want them to live like we live.” so live like we live (music: Living in America) ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER 16,000,000 U.S. children suffer from depression and other emotional problems 1,600,000 are currently on 2 or more psychiatric drugs 69,000 girls between 13 and 19 regularly cut themselves 78 U.S. children have been killed or wounded in school shootings in the past 8 years 120,000 have tried to kill themselves in the past 12 months 55.5% of U.S. high school students believe the government should not be able to censor newspapers 32.5% believe the government should censor newspapers 12% don’t know Percentage of American public school students who FAIL TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL New Orleans 46.6% Detroit 78.3% Dallas 53.7% Pittsburgh 35.9% New York City 61.1% Kansas City 54.3% Atlanta 54.0% Chicago 47.8% Los Angeles 55.8% 13,247,845 U.S. children live in poverty (chanting) “As the mass of population are uneducated, illiterate, they…will r emain backward and follow old and religious superstitions.”—Ladakhi superstitions.”—Ladakhi economic textbook backward and primitive “As majority of people are illitrate [sic] and backward, their standard of living is low as compared to their counterparts who are well educated and advanced.”— Ladakhi economics textbook (Helena Norberg-Hodge) When modern western education is introduced into traditional cultures around the world, it creates a huge sense of inferiority. The schoolbooks talk about a western, urban,


consumer culture as progress— progress—as the only way to be —and the end result is that children end up feeling that their own culture, their language, their way of doing things is backward, primitive, and shameful. (young girl) I heard from my m y grandmother that before the development, they don’t used to go to school, they just stayed in the house, and they went to… like they… they went with the cows in the mountains. And they come back in the evening and they make food and other thin gs. (Manish Jain) One of the things I’ve seen that education has really created is a sense of inferiority at many levels, one at the level of elders. I’ve visited many villages wanting to learn from elders all kinds of traditional practices, pr actices, and the first response is always: “I don’t know anything, go and talk to my son; he’s a tenth class pass, or he’s a twelfth grade pass. And I don’t know anything. I don’t d on’t understand anything.” And so that has always, in my life, that has been one of the most painful things I’ve heard over and over in villages. (Dolma Tsering, Women’s Alliance of Ladakh) In the past, the women used to enjoy and respect their work on the land. Now, with development, they think that education is only reading and writi ng. They say, “I’m not educated. I don’t know anything.” But they had so much knowledge, more than those who went to school. They knew how to run a house, how to grow food, how to spin wool. They knew how to manage everything. (Ladakhi woman) My elder son is in Leh. One grandchild is in Jammu. The other one is in Delhi. My youngest son is in Delhi. What can I do? I have to stay here to guard the house, look after the land. Once the children go away to school, they th ey can’t stay here. They have to make money. T hey have to go away to make money. (heavy traffic noise) poverty (Helena Norberg-Hodge) Norberg-Hodge) There’s a widely held belief today that it is through modern education that we’re going to raise people out of poverty. But if we look honestly at what’s been happening, we’ll see that it’s the advent of colonialism, development, and aid that have created poverty. In the pre -modern, or pre-development, systems and economies you will not find the kind of poverty that you do in the modern slums of Calcutta, Mexico City, Beijing. Today, in most traditional villages, whether it be in China, India, or Africa, people are led to believe that the future is this modern, urban, consumer culture. And they are going into debt; they are selling their houses, to give their child an education. The great hope is that they’re going to get a good job as an engineer, as a doctor, in the modern economy. Less than ten percent are succeeding. Ninety percent end up failures. They might get a job as a servant, or as a car mechanic. But it is not the glorious life that people had hoped for. (young boy) Most of the students of Ladakh, they don’t do very well. Amongst ten, two will be good, more than good. But about the eight, they won’t be better. (Dolma Tsering) A lot of the students aren’t getting work getting work after they graduate, and they get v ery depressed, frustrated, and angry. (Manish Jain) One of the things that is most disturbing to me at a level of justice and morality is that you have an institution that is in place globally that is branding millions and millions and millions of innocent people as failures. Very brilliant, wonderful, talented kinds of people are always introducing themselves in India to me, “Oh, I’m an eighth class fail, or I’m a tenth class fail.” And that’s their introduction. What’s What’s amazing is that people who are claiming to be concerned with social justice j ustice cannot see the huge kind of social hierarchy h ierarchy and inequity that is created through education, modern education. It’s mindmind-boggling for me how people don’t see that. The other t hing is a loss in terms of


the kind of richness of imagination i magination and cultural resources that people could bring because I think those who are branded as failures actually have a wide variety of capacities to think in different ways. And that is all being suppressed and lost, and so people who can only think in a very v ery fragmented, one-dimensional kind of way, those people are getting rewarded. (shouting orders) (Manish Jain) Anybody who claims to be concerned with social justice, we need to have a serious conversation around that. (Vandana Shiva) I come from the central Himalayan region, which is called Garhwal. And the women of Garhwal worked very hard to make sure their kids would have schooling, but of course the schooling was the institutionalized schooling of the kind that doesn’t teach you anything about your local ecology, your local culture, your local economy, or your ability to be productive. It basically teaches you to be a semi-literate semi- literate for another system to which you have no entry because you don’t b elong to the right class, you don’t belong to the right privilege, etc. I now go back to those same villages, vill ages, and the women say the worst mistake they made was to think that that kind of education would help. We have a saying in Hindi [speaking in Hindi] that, t hat, you know, it’s the washerman’s dog who belongs neither to the place where the washing is i s done, nor to the home. They’re in -between people. And they’re falling through the cracks of an in-between in -between world. (music: Tumbi) Creating a new India. See what life can be. STOP BE ELIGIBLE FOR 8,50,000 [sic] I.T. JOBS. Change the way the world sees you! India’s first lifestyle channel. What are you searching for? mental aid (jet landing) (traditional Ladakhi drums/music) (Helena Norberg-Hodge) Norberg-Hodge) It’s just so sad to t o see how many westerners come out to remote, relatively sustainable, relatively intact economies and cultures and fall in love with the place. They want to stay. They want to come back. They love the people. They find the people incredibly happy, incredibly kind, incredibly helpful. And then they want to “help,” “develop,” bring in western schooling to “improve” the lives of these people. (Western missionary) Well, my name is Heidi. I come from Germany, from the southern part. That’s Bavaria. And as I live in Bavaria, I am keen on mountaineering. And that was the reason why of course I wanted to go to the Himalayas. And as I was a teacher —I was teaching English, German, ethics—that’s ethics —that’s a kind of religion— religion—I was interested in schools. And so I happened to meet Lamdon School here. (Instructor) One, two, three, up! One, two, three, up! The Lamdon Model School is considered one of the best secular private schools in Ladakh.


(Western missionary) And of course I got so much from the people here, from their religious belief, from their mentality, the way of compassion, tolerance, that I thought, “Well, I must do something for this school.” Step by step, I tried to find sponsors. I tried to collect money. For instance, I’m proud. Over there there is a hostel, a girls’ hostel, h ostel, for a hundred pupils. And this mainly done, built, by the money I could collect. Thanks to Heidi, hundreds of children from villages all over Ladakh are able to leave their families and homes to board at Lamdon School. (Teacher) Here is a list of possible po ssible reasons why one uses a mirror. First, to check one’s appearance. To check one’s appearance. Do you do that? Mirror for checking? And to look beautiful. To check appearance, yes? You check appearance? You check appearance not only to see how you look, but also how you are dressed up, okay? Right? How you are dressed up. And t hen —to look beautiful. How much important is it? Vanity. Beauty, Everybody cares for their looks, okay? Everybody cares for their looks. How you look, right? How you look is very important. (Western missionary) Even if they stay s tay here for one or two years and sometimes so metimes they have to go back, forced by their parents to work in the fields, to look after younger children, they gain something for their life. Some go to military forces. Then they are good tradesmen. They open shops and sell all those necklaces and sweaters and these things. Or they learn special jobs. And now mainly as I know and as I hope in computer techniques. So they go to India and have a good chance. So I think they have overcome real poverty here. And some people say, “Well, why don’t you go to Congo, or so?” but I think they still need help. It’s not only to throw them into the water and the n let them swim. They need, they need everything from clothing to mental aid. (from Rabbit-Proof Fence ) For if we are to fit and train such children for the future, they cannot be left as they are. And, in spite of himself, the native must be helped. “You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current c urrent prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be.”—Doris be.”— Doris Lessing, 2007 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature connecting the dots (Helena Norberg-Hodge) When I look at the number of really well -intentioned people who are trying to “help” other people with this package of schooling and aid, I really don’t think there is any bad intention behind that. I think it’s purely out of good -heartedness and a will to help other people. It’s just that they don’t connect connect the dots; they don’t often stay long enough enough to rea lly look at the overall impact. And they simply don’t look broadly enough. (young girl) I did my schooling from Moravian Mission School, which is in Leh, which I think is the best school of Ladakh. (young boy) Starting, I was in Lamdon Model School, Leh, until 6th class. (young boy) I did my higher secondary school in Delhi itself. I’ve been in Delhi for the past eight, nine years. (young boy) When I was at the age when I did my first class, then I was shifted out here. I shifted out here in Mussoorie, then Dehradun, and then in Delhi. (young boy) I don’t know about my culture very much. We are not very much aware about our tradition and all.


(young boy) Basically, when students come to Delhi to study, they’re exposed to an environment which is very different from Ladakh. And they tend to forget their own culture. They even sometimes they don’t even know how to speak their own l anguage. They forget their traditions. And I think that i s not a good sign for Ladakh. (young boy) Nobody speaks the fluent Ladakhi, which was origin before. (young boy) But we are here and follow the global tradition. We are trying to be —we are trying to compete with them. (young girl) We’re just after money, money, money. (Buddhist nuns chanting) english commands the world (Wade Davis) You know, the year that you were born, there were six thousand languages l anguages spoken on Earth. Now, a language isn’t just grammar or vocabulary. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of every culture comes into the world. Every language, I’ve always said, is like an old growth forest of the mind, an ecosystem of thought, a watershed of social and spiritual possibilities. As we sit here, half those languages are not being taught to children. (Rev. Gergen) In some areas we are very strict. For example, speaking in English. (young girl) My school is English medium school, and every children are speaking in English. And when they are in the playground also they speak in English. In class also, everywhere in the school, we have to speak in English. (Rev. Gergen) We are strict that the children speak in English with the teachers in the class and with each other. (young girl) Yeah, if somebody speak the other, Ladakhi or Hindi, then teacher give him or her punished. (Carol Black, Filmmaker) What happens when somebody gets punished? (laughter) (young girl) Umm… Yeah, it’s… money. Yeah, it’s a fine. Money. Five rupees. (Rev. Gergen) But that discipline inculcates incul cates a habit of English. And English is one language that commands the world today— today —be it the cyber world, IInternet, nternet, anything, business— business —you have got to learn English in India. (young girl) When we go to other countries, it’s—we have to speak in English. We don’t have English speaking, we can’t go to other country and speaking, yeah. It’s—English It’s— English speaking is very good. When I graduate I will go to other countries. (Carol Black) Where do you think you’ll go to study? (young girl) In Delhi. (Carol Black) Will your mom miss you when you move to Delhi? (young girl) Yeah, I will miss her. Miss my mom.


(young boy) I miss my home town, really. And my parents. Because I have been here —not here properly but out of my town —about 10 or 12 years. And about a place called Ladakh —you have seenit’s a heavenly— heavenly—really it is heaven. I miss it. I miss Ladakh too much. Because home is home, right? (singing, laughter) human + nature “The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. It I t is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”—William world.”—William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889- 1906 (bus engine) (door slamming shut) (Manish Jain) One of the great gr eat tragedies of schooling is how it has ripped people out from nature and an d locked them up into rooms for eight hours a day. And I think the profound kind of damage that it’s doing to us, only we’ll recognize generations from now and then we’ll look back and say, “How could we have done this kind of thing to people?” Thinking th at, you know, creating concrete jails and locking people up into that and giving them books that tell them about nature is a better way to think about life than actually spending time in nature. (teacher) Why is it called— called —why it is given this name? Can you tell me? Do you have any idea why we call it this name? The spelling is “xerophytic.” It’s xerophytic. Why do we call this name? Xerophytic vegetation. The type of vegetation that we have here in Ladakh is xerophytic. Now, can you cite me the reasons why we call this type of vegetation as xerophytic vegetation? Anyone in the class? (from Ferris Bueller's Day Off ) Anyone? Anyone? (teacher) Do we have heavy rainfall here? No. We have scanty rainfall here. h ere. So for that reason, we, as we have discussed that we don’t have good type of vegetation here. We can’t expect to have, you know, forests, good forests. We can’t expect to have gr eat vegetation here. And we are, here I just wanted to add that with the distinct type of plants, animals, and the environment, hum an is also included in the ecosystem. Understand? Now how is human included? Why do we say that human is an integral part in the ecosystem? (students turning pages) (teacher) How do you think that human are involved in the ecosystem? Anyone in the class? (from Ferris Bueller's Day Off ) Anyone? Anyone? “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside asid e from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.”—Albert freedom.”—Albert Einstein “What does education often do? It makes a straight -cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”—Henry brook.”— Henry David Thoreau (Dolma Tsering) Traditionally, parents taught their children to keep the water clean. We learned neve r to dirty the springs or streams s treams since people downstream need clean water for drinking, or for offering to deities. Having learned this when we were very young, it remained in our minds forever. Now, maybe it is development, or progress, or parents are not telling children about these things, or the children are not listening to them. Everywhere, people are throwing things in the water and polluting all the surrounding environment. The land is our real mother. The land is our bank. The land is


something that we can keep safe for generation after generation. When we talk of education, we need to pass our knowledge of the land and how to grow food down to our children. A lot of people who leave Ladakh to study outside come back and say, “What is there in Ladakh? There’s nothing here.” People say that tourists and foreigners are lucky. They are so rich and don’t have to work hard. But in fact, we have our own land. We have our own homes. We have our own food and traditions and culture. Where has the development taken people to? many sciences (Wade Davis) The amazing thing, if you think about it, is that biologists have finally proven it to be true, what philosophers have always dreamt to be true, which is the fact that we’re all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means that all human populations, all cultures, in general, share sh are the same raw mental capacity, intellectual capacity, mental acuity, whatever. And what that means is that, whether a people place their genius into technological innovation, as has been the tradition in the t he west, or, by contrast —in the case of the Tibetan Buddhists, into spending 2500 years trying to understand the nature of existence —in what we call, always, a science of the mind— mind —and why do we use the word, “science?” Because what is science but the pursuit of the truth? And what is Buddhism but the empirical pursuit of the truth? As Matthieu Ricard, a Tibetan monk and former molecular biologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, always sa ys, Western science is a major response to minor needs. We spend all of our lives trying to make sure that we live to be a hundred without losing our teeth or our hair, and in Tibet people spend their lives trying tr ying to understand the nature of existence. He says, all of our billboards advertise naked n aked young children in underwear. Their billboards, which are mani walls, walls, are engravings in stone of prayers for the wellbeing of all sentient beings. “Real freedom will come only when we free ourselves of the domina tion of Western culture, Western education, and the Western way of living.”— Mahatma Gandhi (Manish Jain) One of the things that’s always quite surprising to me is people’s understanding of Gandhi. All over the world people claim to be big fans of Gandhi, and if you actually start to look at what the man wrote, he was extremely, extremely critical of modern education. And particularly of western knowledge. That was something that Gandhi was openly questioning —What is the great contribution of western knowledge actually to the well-being of lif e on the planet? And so people misunderstand that, you know, they thought that Gandhi was against the British. And actually he said, I have no problem with the British. But they need to understand that these systems that have been created all over the world are fundamentally disempowering, dehumanizing, destructive, not only to human beings, but to all life on the planet. And they cannot sustain themselves. He said this in 1909. And he said, we’re not just trying to get rid r id of the British and keep their systems— systems —He used a very nice phrase. This freedom struggle is not about getting rid of the tiger but keeping the tiger’s nature. “Education is a compulsory, forcible action of one person upon another. Culture is the free rel ation of people. The difference between education and culture lies only in the compulsion, which education deems itself in the right to exert. Education is culture under restraint. Culture is free.”— Leo Tolstoy (Wade Davis) And, you know, we don’t think of ourselves ourselves as a culture. Therefore, when we export something like our economic model, we don’t see it as what it is, which is just one option, one way of organizing economic behavior. And yet when you think about it, all the indices indic es of the development paradigm say almost nothing about quality of life. People talk about per capita income quadrupling. Well, what does that mean? It might mean that some farmer has gone from a non-cash agrarian economy into a sweatshop in a slum in Delhi. Has his quality of life gone up because his income has quadrupled? I mean that’s another part of our cultural myopia. We put out this idea— which I think is a blatant lie— lie—that if people buy into the dictates of our economic paradigm that somehow they will magically achieve the wealth that we enjoy in the West. Ain’t gonna happen. Just on energy resources


alone, it would take four planet Earths to bring the whole global population to our l evel of consumption. So, you know, we project this worldview overseas with this illusion illus ion that if people buy into it they’ll achieve what we have. And then you have to back up and say, well, what is it that we have that makes us so spectacular? Many wondrous things. I mean, believe me, if I get in a car accident and my arm’s cut off, I don’t want to be taken to an African herbalist, I want to be taken to an emergency room. I’m not knocking our culture. But, on the other hand, you look at the way we make money— money—the way we earn our daily bread— bread —is based on an economic paradigm that by any scientific definition is changing the biochemistry of the biosphere. This is not trivial. And it certainly doesn’t suggest that our way of life is a paragon of humanity’s potential. what is knowledge? what is ignorance? what is wealth? what is poverty? (chanting) (Helena Norberg-Hodge) Norberg-Hodge) The way for cultures to survive in today’s world is not by isolating themselves and cutting themselves off. In fact I believe that more than ever ev er we need a deeper dialogue between the West and the non-industrialized parts of the world. We need that dialogue because the media and conventional education are perpetuating a lie, basically, about a way to succeed and how we can all attain this glorious, wealthy, luxurious lifestyle. lif estyle. We urgently need to sit down and talk to each other and communicate the fact that this model isn’t even working in America, which is the center of this dream. (Wade Davis) And it’s really important that as we think of different cultures, there’s th is sort of idea that these other peoples, quaint and colorful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away, as the real world, our world, moves on. Nothing could be further from the truth. These cultures are not frail and fragile. On the contrary, they’re dynamic, living peoples, being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. Why is that so important? It’s important because culture is n ot trivial. You know, culture is not decorative. It’s not feathers and bells. It’s not dances. It’s not eve n ritual. Culture is the blanket of moral and ethical values that we insulate the individual with. And if you want to know what happens when culture is lost and yet the individual survives, a shadow of their former selves, unable to go back to the comfort of tradition and roots, but cast adrift into an alien world, where generally the destination is simply the lowest rung on the economic ladder that goes nowhere, you just hav e to look at the seas of misery that are the demographic centers of the Third World. (music: Vaishnava Janato) the road to hell (Wade Davis) There have been many cases in history where overt acts of the violation of human rights, dislocation of peoples, have been absolutely motivated by economic and political interests of elites and of vested power structures. No question about it. I think, in a strange sense, the greater threats have come about through the good intentions of those who don’t understand that those good intentions may not be appropriate and may reflect just, you know —a projection of our own ideologies. If someone goes to another culture and says, “I’m here to educate your children,” I mean, that’s one of the most outrageous and audacious things you can ever im agine. If you go to that culture and say: “Hey, you know, we’ve got go t some skills that you probably could use—“ use —“ To me, that’s the sharing of information that should be both reciprocal and honored. But i t’s very different for me to go and say— your ways are no longer acceptable, you know, get with the program, educate your kids in this school, get rid of your superstitious ideas and accept some of mine. (Helena Norberg-Hodge) There is an assumption that western education, western knowledge, is universally applicable, is something that is superior. There is a sense that we have evolved to a higher level of being, and that these people, however lovely they are, they’re going to benefit from this superior knowledge.


(Manish Jain) The saddest state is of the NGO’s, who actually think that they are going in and helping communities by helping them lose their languages and helping them lose their self-sufficiency and tying them into the global economy and getting them more cash, which ultimately leads to them having less control over their own lives. A lot of them are very well -intentioned, good people, who are actually thinking they’re doing something good for children and for communities. But they don’t understand, I think, the much larger game in which they are pawns. (Wade Davis) The bottom line is we’re living through a time of tr ansition that it just behooves us to pay attention to. It’s like what Margaret Mead said before she died— her greatest fear was that as we drifted blindly toward this blandly amorphous, generic world, whatever it’s going to be, we would wake one day as from a dream, having forgotten that there were even other possibilities of life itself. These peoples, these visions, aren’t failed attempts at being us. They’re unique answers to the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? And many of those th ose peoples, when they answer that question, they answer it in ways that have allowed them to live sustainably on the planet, for, by definition, generations. This species has been around for a long time. tim e. Who knows when you want to say it began as a social form, 150,000 years ago? The Neolithic revolution that gave us agriculture, that’s only ten thousand years ago. Modern industrial society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. That shouldn’t suggest that we have all the answers for all of the challeng es that will confront us as a species in the ensuing millennia. directed and edited by Carol Black (music: Little Boxes)


Schooling the World Transcript

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