Abstract
One of the last facets of the Western impact on developing societies to be opened up to criticism or even close scrutiny and analysis has been education. It has been considered one of the few obviously valuable spinoffs of colonial and postcolonial exploitation. It is seen as self-evidently “a good thing.” First, it is held to civilize the backward peoples of the world, to remove them from the chains of ignorance and superstition in which they have been confined for centuries. This attitude often has about it a strong whiff of (usually “Christian”) duty: that it is our duty to the values of our civilization to propagate them far and wide, and bringing them to the poor and hungry people of the world is the least we can do to mitigate those intransigent material hardships they suffer. Of course, this is something of a caricature and its ethnocentric and patronizing assumptions are now widely acknowledged, but it would be a mistake not to recognize that such views continue to inform the moral dimension of educational aid.
The title, of course, refers to the famous Faure Report, Learning to Be, which represents the quintessence of the “education as a human right” approach to education in developing societies.
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Notes
See Anthony Smith, “Reflections and Refractions on the Flow of Information,” Times Higher Education Supplement (London), March 28, 1980; reprinted in this volume.
Quoted in Keith Buchanan, Reflections on Education in the Third World (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975), p. 34.
Randall Collins has done as much as anyone to identify technical-functional theory as an application of a more general functionalist theory of stratification and to expose its shortcomings. See Randall Collins, “Functional and Conflict Theories of Educational Stratification,” American Sociological Review 36 (1975): 1002–19.
Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 51.
Caroline Hutton and Robin Cohen, “African Peasants and Resistance to Change: A Reconsideration of Sociological Approaches,” in Ivor Oxaal, Tony Barnett, and David Booth, eds., Beyond the Sociology of Development (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 115.
This list is distilled from Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, Becoming Modern (London: Heinemann, 1975);
and Everett Rogers, Modernization Among Peasants (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961).
See Robert F. Arnove, “Comparative Education and World Systems Analysis,” Comparative Education Review 24 (February 1, 1980): 48–62. On the effect of international organizations on national educational policies, see Roger Dale and Ann Wickham, “International Organiza-tions and National Education,” unpublished paper presented to the International Sociological Association Education Research Committee, Paris, August 1980.
Philip Coombs, The Fourth Dimension of Foreign Policy: Educational and Cultural Affairs (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
See, for example, Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: McKay, 1974).
See, for example, Philip Altbach and Gail Kelly, Education and Colonialism (London: Longmans, 1974).
Most notably laid out in Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972).
See Bill Williamson, Education, Social Structure, and Development (London: Macmillan, 1979), chap. 5.
Ronald Dore, The Diploma Disease (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), p. 30.
See Richard Devon, “Education and the Development of Underdevel-opment,” Comparative and International Education Society Newsletter 47 (April 6–7, 1978).
UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook 1972 (Paris: Unesco, 1972).
Randall Collins, The Credential Society (New York: Academic Press, 1979).
Joel Samoff and Rachel Samoff, “The Local Politics of Underdevelopment,” Politics and Society 6, no. 4 (1976): 417.
John Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production (London: Mac-millan, 1979).
For an expansion of this assertion, see Roger Dale, “Education and the Capitalist State: Contributions and Contradictions,” in Michael W. Apple, ed., Economic and Social Reproduction in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
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Dale, R. (1982). Learning to Be… What? Shaping Education in “Developing Societies”. In: Alavi, H., Shanin, T. (eds) Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Sociology of “Developing Societies”. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16847-7_32
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