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Education
Introduction
Education is the process through which we learn our culture. In
western society, the structures under which this replication of
society is carried out is considered to be natural, normal and a
universally accepted method of teaching. People would argue, though
that this system empowers those whose culture is being reproduced,
particularly those in the middle and upper classes. People from
other cultures and from other groups within western society tend
not to be successful in the current education system, because it
isn't their culture that is necessarily being presented as natural.
There are other ways of approaching education and the work carried
out at Yirrkala, provides an interesting account of a way of thinking
about the education process from a different cultural perspective.
What is at stake?
When we think of education, we normally think of schooling. 'Universal
education' developed out of the industrial revolution, and spread
around the world. Today formal schooling is almost universally regarded
as the path to health, happiness, economic development, and freedom
from oppression.
However:
- Does formal schooling offer its salvation to everyone,
or do some sections of society benefit from education
to the exclusion of others?
- Is the generally accepted model of how knowledge is
produced relevant or justifiable in a setting where different
knowledge traditions are working together?
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What is the status quo?
Universal education is celebrated to have three important features.
It is:
- free,
- compulsory,
- secular.
In the west, it is generally considered to work on a transmission
model, where the teacher holds knowledge in her or his head, which
is transmitted as if by a conduit, to the heads of the students.
The content of education is often held to be value-free. That is,
it is:
- scientific truth,
- objectively verifiable,
- universal.
In this sense, education as it is ordinarily understood, is part
of the wider 'enlightenment project'. Its role is often understood
as to take people out of poverty and ignorance, and lead them to
knowledge and wealth.
What are the alternatives?
Sociologists have demonstrated that formal compulsory education
has the effect of actively reproducing, rather than eliminating
the social and economic inequalities at work in western society.
For example, it has been demonstrated that the forms of language
which are necessary for success in the school room happen to be
those which are spoken in the homes of middle class children.
So schooling doesn't offer the same opportunities for success to
working class children as it does to middle class kids. More recently,
the European bias of formal education has been criticised by Indigenous
philosophers of education. Not only does western schooling bear
with it a cultural bias, but as it colonises the territories of
Indigenous peoples, it somehow renders invisible the traditional
ways of teaching, learning, making knowledge, and growing up young
people.
Much work, for example, has been done by the Yolngu Aboriginal
people of Arnhemland to articulate their own philosophies of education
as a way of resisting the assimilating effects of white education.
This work includes traditional Yolngu epistemology which argues
that all knowledge is negotiated (ie agreed through careful negotiation
by people from diverse perspectives), situated (ie relevant to its
place of production) and performative (ie it's something you do,
not something that you hold).
What happens when different knowledge systems
speak to each other?
Increasingly, instead of education being the site of the transmission
of knowledge, it is becoming the site of the production, negotiation
and contestation of divergent knowledge systems. Epistemology has
a major role in this process.
- What exactly is knowledge, and how does it relate to
power?
- Can knowledge be understood as in any way universal,
or should it be considered contextual (ie that knowledge
means something only where it is made, and the transfer
of knowledge from its site of production requires careful
re-negotiation)?
- Who has the right to teach?
- How do we distinguish healthy or productive education
from oppressive or assimilationist education? Who has
the right to decide?
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Resources
There are a wide range of resources that you can use to develop
your understanding of education and alternative education philosophies.
Reading 5.2
Marika-Mununggiritj, R, and Christie, M.J. 1995 'Yolngu metaphors
for learning', International Journal of the Sociology of Language,
no. 113, pp 59-62.
Other references
Apple, M. W. 1982 Education and power, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London.
Harris, S and Malin, M. (eds) 1997 Indigenous education : historical,
moral & ethical tales NTU Press, Darwin.
Malin, M. A. 1990 'The visibility and invisibility of Aboriginal
students in an urban classroom' Australian Journal of Education,
v.34, no.3: pp. 312-329.
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