Tragic attack on a child! Tragic reaction?

[Abraham Heinemann]

 

I happen to be doing a teacher training course at the moment. Today I received a forwarded email from my department about the evidently horrible case of a school girl being shot. This material http://educationenvoy.org/ was where we were directed  (I have just had a constructive conversation by email with the member of staff who sent it, after I voiced my concerns to the baggage that this case is bringing forward). I also notice a fair number of friends sharing a link to this petition http://www.avaaz.org/en/malalahopenew/?fKbfbbb&pv=48.

Is this reaction to a tragic event, a taking advantage to further embed education in a 'white mans' burden' type narrative to bolster a neo-colonial agenda through the utilisation of a 'poor poster child'?

Perhaps less critically it is at the very least a narrow minded approach that cannot deliver its promises, because it was never designed too.

Even more simply, I have problem with advocating education, when what is meant is a certain type of schooling designed for certain purposes. I feel like we are stuck in a rut of being commandeered by people who no longer exist, who had very different motivations and plans.

At the very least it is an inherently unholistic, oligopolistic, and insensitive approach to mutual dialogue.

What are people hoping for in terms of 'Malala's hope'?

Need I say more?

[John McCreery]

Would you rather have a world in which Malala had no chance to be anything but a submissive, second-class member of an extremely patriarchal and male-chauvinist society or an opportunity—albeit at considerable personal risk—to escape that fate?

[Keith Hart]

Avi, this clip was produced by a UN department committed to promoting school education worldwide. if you don't like it, you have to attack its premises in specific terms, not just spin out your own propaganda, partly as a question and partly by assertion. Basically, you reacted emotionally to this clip in the opposite way that it hoped for. What is it you object to: schooling? western stereotypes (are they)? the depiction of misery in poor countries? are you for child labour and child marriage or just for cultural relativism and against dominant ideology? Do you think young children are better off outside school? If so, say why. Perhaps it's loading so many different themes into an evocative clip that you object to. As things stand, your claim that this is all a neocolonial ploy can be easily rejected as being confused.

I could mount a case that the sequestration of children in school is a feature of rich modern societies and that their withdrawal from the workforce has historically followed economic development, not been its cause. I could also say that much of what children get from school is of little use to their adult prospects. A different set of arguments relate to child marriage. Who could be for blind children getting no public care? And so on. You need to think a bit more before you set yourself up the way you have here. Setting one cluster of stereotypes against another gets us nowhere.

[Abraham Heinemann]

As I should have done to begin with I will reply with a more comprehensive answer soon. Thank you for your replies