Translator: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
You know, in 2006, Greg Mortenson published a book 'Three Cups of Tea'
that went on to sell five million copies
and generate 50 million dollars of donations
to the Central Asia Institute, an NGO run by the author.
And the mission of the institute was to build schools in Afghanistan,
and its core conviction was that terrorism could be defeated
if only we could educate children, particularly girls,
and so get them out of the clutches of Islamic fundamentalists.
Now, the American military loved this so much
that every single soldier dispatched to Afghanistan
got a free copy of the book.
The book kind of reaffirmed
America's faith in the inherent simplicity of the world.
And then things began to unravel:
It turned out that the book was more fiction than fact,
including his account of being kidnapped by the Taliban.
It turned out
that the institute and the author were spending millions of dollars
to purchase media coverage in order to promote the book;
indeed, they were buying tens of thousands of copies of the book on Amazon
to keep it at number one.
And as the author was flying around doing lectures on a private jet,
very few schools were actually getting built in Afghanistan.
Indeed, the treasurer of that institute famously remarked
that Mortenson was using the institution as his personal ATM.
Now, a very sad story, but the real question that it begs is,
Why do we have this faith in Western education to be the panacea
to lift people out of poverty, to address social justice
and in the case of the Mortenson scandal, to solve the problems of Afghanistan?
You know, it's one element of the development paradigm
that is never challenged,
but my experience has always been
that the education, particularly in the developing world,
is more about enculturation
than it is about the transmission of information and knowledge,
let alone the fomenting of creativity.
And this certainly was the role of education
on the coast of British Columbia during the colonial era.
You know, Justin Sinclair famously says
that there are only three things in life to know about:
who am I, where do I come from, and where am I going.
And he said that when missionaries arrived,
they essentially said to the First Nations of the coast that,
'All of your answers
for all of those questions for all of your history
have been wrong.'
Now, how would we feel, for example, if some authority
that we could not challenge came into our lives,
took away our children at the age of three and four and five years old,
knowing for well they were in the process of indoctrinating them
to have complete contempt
for everything that we and our grandfathers had stood for?
Well, that's exactly what happened in the residential schools.
But there are two important things to remember about it.
These institutions were created with the best of intentions
by people whose concern for the well-being of indigenous people
in the wake of the conquest
was matched in its intensity
only by their ignorance of Native American life.
Secondly, we forget that these residential schools
were still functioning as late as the 1970s,
and even more importantly,
the essential pedagogy continues to be the pedagogy of this Western curriculum
that is imposed on peoples throughout the world.
Now, the idea, of course, and the difference, I suppose,
is that in place of a process of conversion to Christianity,
now the conversion is to the cult of modernity.
What is this thing 'modernity'?
Because we created modernity,
we tend to think of it as existing outside of culture and history
when, of course, it's a product of both.
Modernity as we know it is not 300 years old,
and that shallow history shouldn't suggest to any of us
that we have all of the answers for all of the challenges
that will confront us as a species in the coming millennium.
Modernity then, if you think of this process
of transition from tradition to the global economy or modernity,
whatever you want to call it,
as being a kind of chemical equation where the catalyst is education.
And this is how it works.
In the pastoral nomadic traditions of East Africa,
particularly in the Kaisu Desert of Northern Kenya,
drought is not some kind of cruel anomaly, but rather a regular feature of climate,
and surviving drought is the key imperative
that allows a people to be.
And as pastoral nomads, of course, it behooves the people
to have vast numbers of herds of cattle and camels
so that if you do have a devastating drought,
at least some of your biological capital, your economic wealth, will survive.
And that becomes something that sort of moves through the entire society.
In order to have lots of cattle, it's helpful to have lots of children,
so it should not surprise us to learn that these societies are polygamous,
and it's not unusual for an elder to have three, four, even five wives,
but that creates a problem.
What do you do with young men of marriageable age
who don't have access to wives?
Well, you basically get rid of them
if you control the power of the politics and the magic,
and you exile them to remote encampments.
But to make their separation from the community desirable,
you envelop it in prestige,
in the most important moment in the young man's life,
a moment he has trained for for at least a decade.
It's his public circumcision where he sits still,
his back supported by the knees of his best friend,
as cow's milk is poured over his body,
and he waits for the ritual circumciser who will slit his foreskin seven times
transforming him from a child into a warrior.
Now, should he flinch or show any sign of pain,
he will shame his clan and his people forever.
But few flinch, for the honour is so great.
And so transformed into a moran, a warrior,
he lives the life of Riley, living in remote fora, encampments,
raiding the enemy for cattle, protecting your own herds,
serviced by these young squires
who come out dazzled by the power of the warrior,
living on a diet of herbs gathered in the shade of frail acacia trees,
mixed with milk and, of course, blood drawn with the ritual arrow
from the jugular of a heifer -
a kind of salty strawberry smoothie.
But you still have this problem of the human libido.
What do you do with all these young warriors
who don't have access to women of marriageable age?
Well, you solve that problem
by allowing them to come back to the community
as long as they don't engage with the women who are married,
and they are encouraged to openly bead, or have lovers amongst the young maidens,
and those relationships can continue
up until the moment the woman is engaged to an elder,
and then the relationship must stop.
But the warrior is expected to come to the girl's marriage ceremony
and openly mock the virility of the old goat who has taken her away.
But the marvellous idea is
that a single adaptive imperative - surviving drought -
bifurcates throughout the entire culture and in a sense makes it what it is.
Now, here is where we get back to education.
One key way of surviving drought is to have one foot in the cash economy,
so there's a great incentive to educate an elder son, which is fine.
But the problem is that these boys go off to schools
controlled by the state or in some cases, by missionaries,
where they acquire a modicum of literacy
but in a context that, critically, teaches them to have contempt
for who they are as pastoral nomads
because pastoral nomads don't fit Kenya's image of itself as a modern state.
So, as a result, they go into school as a nomad,
graduate as a clerk, can't go back,
and going forward simply means to join an economy
with a 40-percent unemployment rate for highschool graduates,
so they drift to the slums of Nairobi,
and they try to scratch a living from the edges of the cash economy.
Now, that looks to the development paradigm all for the good:
per capita income has gone up, urbanization has gone up,
literacy's gone up,
but in fact, quality of life has gone down.
And how often do we hear Third World leaders saying,
'We've got to prepare our people for the global economy'?
What does it mean to a Huaorani warrior in the forests of Ecuador,
a people first contacted in 1958, known to the outsiders as Auca,
a pejorative term in Quechua meaning 'savage'?
And, of course, they thought all outsiders were 'quadi'.
But the Huaorani welcomed the contact because it broke the cycle of blood feuds
that had resulted in 54% of the mortality being due to them spearing each other.
And they welcomed education
because it offered access to outside goods.
But these were true natural philosophers of the rainforest.
They knew that forest so well
their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces
and tell you what form of life had left it behind.
Well, what did education mean?
The arrival of Ecuadorian or Quechua teachers
who had utter contempt for the Huaorani culture,
the language, the way of life.
They were enculturated only to become consumers
in the national economy of Ecuador,
and as a result,
highschool graduates of the Huaorani
know less about the forest upon which their people depended
than young children of five
who have yet to have their spirits crushed in these schools.
I made a film with Carol Black called 'Schooling the World',
and our crew dropped into a classroom in Ladakh.
Now, all through India, Ladakh, Nepal,
the vestiges of the old British educational system is there,
and remember what 'Minute on Education' that Macaulay wrote said:
our goal is to make people brown on the outside and white on the inside.
This is education by rote, it's militaristic kind of pedagogy,
and of course, in the end,
it's the generation of a sense of humiliation,
and here's how that happens.
We walked into the schoolroom,
and the biology teacher was teaching a course in botany
in a curriculum she didn't understand,
in a language she could hardly speak
to children who couldn't understand that language either: English.
But these students are not allowed to speak their native languages,
just like the people up and down the coast here
were forbidden to speak their native tongue.
So, she's saying to the people 'xerophytic plants'.
Now, a xerophytic plant is simply a plant that grows in a dry habitat.
But she didn't quite understand the concept,
so she's saying, 'Xerophytic plant, bad plant, grows bad places, Ladakh,
xerophytic plants, lots of plants, Ladakh, bad places'.
So, the message these students are getting
is that Ladakh is somehow an inferior place.
When you look out of the window of the school
and you see this stunningly beautiful flora,
and you know that the grandparents of every one of those kids
know that flora with the perspicacity of a Harvard-trained botanist.
And yet, they are seen and taught to be ashamed of who they are,
and another part of this, of course, is two classic myths.
We promote Western education around the world
as if it's landing in a void,
as if peoples throughout the world did not educate their children.
Well, of course, they did.
In complex, sophisticated ways,
whether it was 2,500 years of empirical observation
as to the nature of mind in Tibetan Buddhism,
the nocturnal studies of the elder brother
who literally believed that their prayers maintain the cosmic balance of the world,
in the textile traditions in Peru, throughout the South Pacific.
So, the other great myth
is that somehow education lifts people out of poverty.
On the contrary,
the process of globalisation cements people in the poverty.
I have never in my life in traditional cultures seen
the wretchedness that one encounters around the periphery of almost any city
in the so-called Third World.
And in the end, then we have to ask ourselves even,
What is this thing of Western education?
How great is it?
If we look at our own culture and the United States, for example,
the average American youth by the age of 18
has spent four years watching television and playing video games,
contributing to the obesity epidemics
so severe that has been seen to be a national security issue
by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In the cities as diverse as Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles,
Chicago, Detroit, New York,
less than 50 percent of high school students
manage to graduate.
Sixteen million American high school students
suffer from clinical depression.
1.6 million are on more than two antipsychotic drugs.
120,000 have tried to commit suicide in the last 12 months.
So, what exactly are the benefits of this worldview
that allow us to have such confidence
that it is the way of life for all peoples of the world?
And this is where we get back to terrorism.
You know, culture is not trivial.
The one lesson of anthropology is that culture is not the songs we sing,
the prayers we utter, the clothes we wear,
even the cosmologies we celebrate.
Ultimately, culture is about a body of moral and ethical values
that every culture places around each individual
to keep at bay the barbaric heart
that history teaches us lies within each of us.
It's culture that allows us to make sense out of sensation,
to find order and meaning in the universe,
to do what Lincoln said: always seek the better angels of our nature.
And if you want to know what happens when culture is lost,
when people through volition or coercion
turn their backs on the constraints of tradition,
often because they aspire to a world of affluence
in which they will never find a place.
The only place that will be theirs will be the lowest rung of an economic ladder
that goes nowhere.
Disaffected, alienated, taught to be a failure,
unemployable, with no access to employment,
they settle around the periphery of the cities of the world,
and that is where terrorism comes from.
Terrorism comes out of hopelessness,
and hopelessness can come about
when we do not fulfil the promises of education,
even as we tear people from the constraints of their traditions.
And it doesn't have to be like this.
The issue isn't to say that education is wrong.
Of course, it's a wonderful thing,
but it all depends on the context and the manner
in which the pedagogy is promoted.
If, for example, the issue isn't a traditional versus a modern,
it's the rights of free people to choose the components of their lives.
No one is talking about keeping people frozen in time
any more than we are suggesting
that any of us go back to the pre-industrial past.
The issue is, How do we find a way for all peoples
to benefit from the best of international education, if you will,
without, critically, that engagement demanding the death of their ethnicity?
Because again,
when you lose those constraints, anything can happen.
Now, if we go to a success story, the northwest Amazon of Colombia,
the homeland of the people of the Anaconda, the Barasana,
the Makuna, the Tanimuka.
When I first worked there in the 1970s, it was a sad place.
You felt that something important had happened,
but a very long time ago.
The missionaries seemed to be everywhere.
And then, an amazing thing happened.
The president of Colombia
said to a friend of mine Martín von Hildebrand,
'Do something for the Indians.'
And in five extraordinary years, Martín did more than something.
He secured legal land rights for an area of land
collectively the size of the United Kingdom
for the 57 ethnicities of the northwest Amazon.
And behind the veil of isolation
created by the absence of the nation state in that part of the lowland forest,
the forest incidentally the size of France,
a whole new dream of culture was born.
I went back there to make a film for the National Geographic
a couple of years ago
with Stephen Hugh-Jones, Head of Anthropology at Cambridge.
And Stephen had been part of a film series called 'Disappearing Worlds'
in the early 70s,
in which he predicted the demise of all these peoples.
'A tragedy unfolding', as he put it.
He walked into a longhouse, the size of this room,
250 Barasani in full ritual regalia, men, women, children,
three days and nights of taking yagé, ayahuascan celebration of Cassava woman.
He got on the satellite phone to his wife, and he said, 'Christine, it's incredible!
The only thing that disappeared are the fucking missionaries.'
(Laughter)
And we asked an elder, 'Why did you let these missionaries do this to you?'
And he said something very powerful:
'They promised us they could make us human.'
And that's the process of colonisation:
is to persuade the colonised of their own inherent inferiority,
and we cannot do that with education.
And if you look around the world,
you'll see that every one of these cultures has something to say,
every one should be heard.
Each are part of our overall human repertoire.
We need the prayers of these young monks
just like we need the hopes
of this young warrior on the Serengeti plain
because these diverse voices of humanity,
their intuitions about the nature of being alive,
their own educational systems are all part of our collective geography of hope.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)