I have to share this via Nancy Sullivan. The glorious first sentences on a document about Rainforest Norways work in the Amazon: Reading, writing and having access to formal education are almost universally seen as unquestionably good. Illiteracy and not having access to schools are equated with lack of development. Schools and literacy are a sign of progress. Rainforest Foundation Norway does not share this view. Schools and educational systems can also serve as extremely efficient mechanisms of oppression and cultural disintegration. Most of the schools that reach out to traditional communities in the depths of the rainforest actually have this function, to a greater or lesser extent. They become instruments for making the orally transmitted local knowledge irrelevant, for creating the fiction that what is put in writing is more important than what is not. Badly prepared teachers from the majority culture may not have so much success in teaching their ethnic minority pupils mathematics and writing, but they often succeed in shattering their self-esteem. When a youngster who is able to stutter his way through a written text considers himself more important than a previously respected elder, then that community is in real danger of succumbing to the pressures from the surrounding national society.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:35:58 +0000
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