Saturday, March 15, 2008

Is School Cool?

After my stay in the village, and more specifically speaking so much with Joshua (my 25 year old translator), my brain is struggling with the concept of education for rural farmers. Everyone! E-very-one, who had been to school and completed senior secondary school wanted to get employment. And this is no surprise. Isn’t it the same in Canada?

The reason why it bothered me was because there are only jobs in town. The only employment opportunities available are located away from the rural areas. This made me question what we were trying to accomplish by promoting education. It is obvious that we invest in the rural people because they constitute the majority but as well so that farmers stay farmers. Investing in the agricultural sector and avoiding what Schumacher would call the twin evils of mass migration and mass unemployment in the already over-crowed urban centers.

Urban migration is one of the leading contributing causes of unemployment in cities and thus crime. Governments can hardly keep up with the job creation required for satisfying the demand placed on it by the supply of urban graduates; let alone all the rural poor looking for opportunities. So why are we educating rural farmers so that they can simply leave the rural parts and head to the cities?

Some would argue that a literate farmer is better than an illiterate farmer, and I completely agree. But what I noticed is that you get a growing divide with young adults returning to rural life with urban educations. Not only is there now a tension between traditional beliefs and modern ways of thinking, but also you have educated adults with a bit of a chip on their shoulder. Understandably so, they believe that they deserve more than their uneducated peers, nor do they want to continue doing the labour intensive farming practices their forefathers performed.

A close parallel to this is what happened after the war in Sierra Leone. Within the internally displaced persons (IDP) and refugee camps, education was closely monitored and administered. In fact the UNHCR did quite a good job. But when the war was over, Sierra Leone was in desperate need of infrastructure. The people leaving the camps were educated however, and didn’t want to do labour.

The intuitive response to this undesired outcome is to train farmers in skills and educate them on relevant subject matter to their livelihoods. In essence help farmers become better farmers. I am immediately reminded of a scary scenario illustrated in Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people’s futures are decided for them. Is it right to alter the curriculum for a certain audience in the hopes of providing incentives to take a certain profession?

Which makes me question investing in farming altogether. As I said before, everyone who had been to school was looking to leave the village. It’s because they knew of a city life and wanted it. I ask you, who goes to school and decides they want to be a farmer? In Canada we PAY our farmers subsidies so that they will farm. We provide financial incentives! What incentives are there for rural farmers in Africa? Farming is hard, somewhat risky, and not lucrative whatsoever. So is it so unreasonable for farmers to want their children to have a different life?

1 comment:

Spencer Robertson said...

Great question to be pondering. As I read along, I was thinking as well about teaching farmers farm sciences.

How are the conflicting views of life (village/modern) conflicting with each other in Ghana? When I interacted with people with a village mentality (people raised in villages and not educated as we would define an education) I found that modern ways of thinking caused conflicts. An example: we met these khoi/san people that still lived as hunter/gatherers. Every week a medical convoy would be at a specific place. Traditionally these people used a powder made from grinding up a red root (also used to tan leather) as a contraceptive. One of the women in the group we met started using a modern pill form of contraceptive, but because her concept of time (not nearly as important to her as it is to us) she either wasn't taking the pills daily - as directed - or missed the convoy (which one it wasn't clear). Either way she became pregnant, and now this group of people do not trust modern medicine.

I recently watched an interesting debate program on the BBC where they were talking about worldwide farming, and one of the main ideas that persisted throughout the program is that we (as a planet) cannot maintain small farms, as they are not efficient when looked at in a context of economies of scale. Now mass production with an aim to increase consumption is how we got ourselves in this problem to begin with, isn't it.