Before visiting schools in Nairobi, Kenya I remembered my earliest encounters with underfunded government schools in Africa. I organized these experiences, categorizing my reactions—the number of children to a classroom, the lack of books, the material deficiencies—in order of the increasing effect on my sensitivity. At the time, the solutions had been as simple as more funding. I had maintained an almost similar pragmatism this time around so that my sensibility was prepared.
My experience with the revived school system in Nairobi, however, was completely unexpected. “We owe this sort of commitment to the children,” said a community leader turned teacher when I asked him about how the government was paying for all these teachers while making both primary and secondary schools free. Signs of this progress were everywhere—en route to Mombassa we encountered mobile schools on camelback trailing poor nomadic herders. In Mombassa a system called harambee facilitated a kind of social contract where the community tries to meet governmental initiatives while subsidizing economic and social capital.
Increased attention to the education sector is, however, somewhat statistical in nature with little thought given to what education means to the Kenyan student. The main concerns are outlined in government pamphlets—the increase in literacy rate, the consequential rise in secondary and tertiary enrollments. The logic is seemingly intuitive—increased numbers translate into better-educated students, and the efforts on both ends—local and legislative—are worthy of veneration. In fact, looking around at the growth of school systems in both Mombassa and Nairobi, more modern western structures became difficult to question. It meant questioning my understanding of western education systems in their entirety.
So, at first, I was content with the simple fact that my expectations were unsatisfied. The progress in Kenya is, on the surface, a glossy and promising visage—a time to relish budding progress and all its possibilities. It wasn’t until I paid attention to the substance of Kenyan education that the real consequences of this benign developmental initiative began to manifest themselves.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described education as an institution that “reproduces the social order and attempts to perpetuate a set of habitus, historical relations, beliefs, and values internalized through perception, appreciation, and action.” I thought back to the schools in Nairobi, the school systems that culminate in British examinations, dedicating only a couple of class periods to Kenyan history and Kenyan languages. Education had institutionalized the worst of the colonial ambitions— it had made the Kenyan culture a subject such as Latin or Greek.
In a way, Kenyan culture is being discontinued in place of British culture, transforming Kenyan high school students to a paradoxical minority within their own borders. Forced assimilation of Kenyan students into an external culture is akin to Benjamin Barber’s argument that traditionalism’s willful relinquishing to forces—in this case, previous colonizers—is not only ultimate but the inevitable result of a “global village.”
The process by which the dominant culture imposes cultural discontinuity is most visible within multicultural school systems, but the disparity is hardly ever realized, and the culture being oppressed is hardly ever self-aware. Bourdieu’s definition of education puts culture at the center of the conflict. It asks us to think about the dangers of measuring development against one specific model, of trading thoughtlessly between meters and feet.
Kenya was revelatory because it offered visibility to a systemic problem. The cultural differences were laid out—both that of the population and that of the educators. It goes without saying that one must be educated to understand this world, but that education becomes limiting if it’s merely a form of conditioning, if it undermines who you are and where you’re from and evaluates your culture according to some uniform standard of worth. This is often invisible in urban education systems, in collegiate classrooms, and even in western culture en masse.
In the Obama era, in which questions about cultural differences can easily be mistaken as inconsequential because an African American overcame overwhelming cultural disparities, Columbia students should take the time to recognize these forces—the conflicts in cultures and in their own environment—through the periscope of their own human experience. We are all submerged in some system, in some set of habitus, in some set of social orders. This is the inevitable price of education, but it can be approached differently, more diligently. We can view our education as the means, not the end, of our understanding. Our education can shed light on the oppressors, the dominant culture, even if it is one that identifies our community as such. Our education can become a way of realizing our society in all its consequences, in all its faults, so that we don’t just casually force another culture and another way of life. Ultimately, we can view education as an extreme privilege and find in this recognition relevant ways to develop other cultures and suitable systems for their own enlightenment.
Like those in Kenya, urban education models such as those in Harlem lack this sort of self-awareness. They try to cater to underprivileged children without understanding the administrators and the educators as part of a working dominant culture. They simply take as a given that the prevailing culture—all that it demands as suitable behavior, suitable belief—is necessary for modern education. Both school systems would do well with a dose of reflection, one that establishes root cultures both as relevant and as possible foundations for development.
The author is a senior majoring in environmental science and regional studies.