Education, Part 3a
Education,
Neo-Colonial Style
In the second part of his essay called “Cross‐Cultural and Historical Perspectives on
the Developmental Consequences of Education”, Mike Cole is telling us quite
plainly that the ideology underlying education in the era of neo-colonialism is
racist and patronising, based on the assumption that unschooled people are not
adults and what makes them adults is schooling.
“C.P. Hallpike summarized decades of
psychological research comparing the intellectual performance of educated and
non-educated people of various ages on Piagetian and a wide variety of other
cognitive tasks. With very few exceptions, the schooled participants
outperformed those who had not attended school. These differences between
schooled and non-schooled children led him to conclude that most of the time,
‘primitives’ do indeed think like small children [Hallpike, 1979].”
Whereas Cole’s own findings, together with his colleagues
Sharp and Lave, following research in Yucatan, Mexico, were:
“... the information-processing skills which
school attendance seems to foster could be useful in a variety of tasks
demanded by modern states, including clerical and management skills in
bureaucratic enterprises, or the lower-level skills of record keeping in an
agricultural cooperative or a well-baby clinic.”
In other words, school prepared the children for a
capitalist society, and not for life in general.
The remainder of the text describes various means of
“managing diversity” in schools. The four scenarios given by Cole towards the
end of this excerpt are not hopeful.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Cole,
Perspectives, Part 2, Post-Colonial Consequences, 2005.
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