Education – the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world….true or false?
The problem with half a truth is that it only gets you half the distance.
We so often hear that we need to focus on getting access to education for all; that education is the silver bullet in ending poverty; that getting a child educated is the most powerful weapon to change the world. And no one is going to dare disagree with that. But it’s an incomplete statement and it leads to an incomplete outcome.
When I started Emerging Leaders it was on the back of funding the start of a school in one of Lusaka’s most fragile areas. What I discovered when I finally got to visit the school for myself were children packed in box rooms, with no resources, being taught by unqualified teachers and girls being abused by the head teacher! And I had to ask myself – will this change the world?
As we have continued to work in other countries we see the same challenges. Children come to the school. Yes. But they are then subject to fear and beatings and shaming. I watched one child sitting, facing into the corner of a classroom in South Africa. I asked why they were there? What was their crime? They had forgotten to bring in some yogurt from home for the cookery lesson. This was a child from a community where up to 90% of children come to school with no food in their stomach and go home to no food……and this child was expected to bring yogurt and was punished for forgetting!
I have seen teachers simply not turn up because they were so abysmally paid that they either could not be bothered to come to school, or were having to do a second job to feed their own family. Many teachers have no qualifications and so their ability to teach and their own personal level of educational attainment is very low. Teachers who hated being beaten when they were children, who knew that fear and shame crushed their self esteem, the bedrock of learning, are now repeating the same violent, shaming behavior on their own pupils. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed[1] is the classic study on this repeating dynamic of how the very system that we say will change the future, does in fact reproduce the past. Poverty is an intergenerational phenomenon and the system that breeds it needs to change and that includes the school. So it isn’t enough to content ourselves in saying we got children to school. We need to look at the quality of the school we get the children to, or it may just be the vehicle for repeating the cycles of poverty, not ending them.
If we want to end global poverty we need to know where we are headed. It’s no good to keep on saying where we don't want to be – poverty. Where do we want to be? What does it actually mean to end poverty? We know the parameters of what poverty is, the main writers on the subject broadly agree[2], but what is it…when it no longer exists?
To have ended poverty means that......
People have choices and opportunity
It means they have recovered a sense of dignity
It means they can participate effectively in society
It means having enough to clothe and feed your family
It means you have a school that your children can go to
And a clinic that the family can attend
It means having land to grow your food or a job that you can earn a living from
It means having access to credit
It means security
It means empowerment
It means social inclusion of all individuals, households and communities
It means protection from violence
It means living in recognized and resilient environments
It means access to clean water and sanitation
So we don't just want to make our goal “get kids in school; get them into education”. We want all children into good education; we want all children into meaningful education - that is, education that will enable them to thrive because they have broken their way out of intergenerational poverty. We have to face head on the fact that children don't just grow up within circumstances of poverty and their parents and grandparents didn't just grow up in circumstances of poverty. Poverty has systematically got inside of them. Poverty is deeply embedded in the mindsets. When a child has learned mindsets that tell them “I’m useless; I cant; it wont work out for me; nothing ever changes; its too hard; its hopeless; let me just get what I can; I just keep coming up with the same old solutions to the same old problem; I’ll never finish what I start” then they are already writing a story of poverty for their own lives, just like their parents did and their grand parent did before them. Without mindset change, the story will stay the same. Unless education changes poverty mindsets, then the child is scripted for poverty.
But here’s the problem. The deep, deep problem. Many of the teachers in front of their pupils are still trapped within this internal battle within themselves. The teacher unwittingly is part of the system of oppression rather than the cure for it.
“almost always….the oppressed instead of striving for liberation (of the child) tend themselves to become oppressors”[3]
This is why good, meaningful education is so, so vital, because we have to do war with poverty mindsets and that is the fundamental domain of education.
So what does a meaningful education look like? Good, meaningful education must begin with the teachers themselves, it must then draw in the parents who encompass the remaining hours of that child’s life and finally it must invest real, meaningful education in the child.
It starts with the teacher
The teacher is a product of the system they were educated in. They often learnt within a context of poverty, and often exposed to a system shame, violence and abuse, subject to a power based model of learning, and taught in a uni-dimensional method that only taught rote learning to pass exams. The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed[4] demonstrates that this is the system that the teacher will have internalized and it is the system they then use on the pupil in front of them. The cycle of poverty thinking and enactment must be first changed in the teacher. The teachers self esteem, their ability to see their own amazing potential, to be creative problem solvers, must be liberated if they are ever to do the same for the pupils seated in front of them. It is for this reason that Emerging Leaders Lead Nowprogramme for young children actually starts by us investing our Leadership for Lifeprogramme into the teachers first and letting them see their own lives transformed. We must end poverty in the teacher if the teacher is going to be instrumental in ending poverty for the pupil.
Secondly, the root of the word ‘educate’ means ‘to draw out of’. A teacher plays the vital role in calling out that potential in a child. Only a transformed teacher can call out the potential of the child. School is far more than attendance and rote learning of subject information. Neuroscience tells us that a child’s prefrontal cortex, their ‘newest ‘ brain, actually needs someone to call out to it. Literally speak to it. “I see your amazing potential; I see who you can be; I see your uniqueness”. A teacher who hasn't gone through this transformation for themselves will only replay the old tapes of a system that didn't work for them and wont work for their pupils. One study into the person who was the most significant in impacting a child’s life showed that the first person was the child themselves, their own ability to call out to their own potential. But the second most significant person was the teacher[5]. We have to start, not in just getting children into the school, but getting teachers into schools that are true teachers.
We call in the parent
When Emerging Leaders was carrying out its own informal research into schools in South Africa townships, one of the main laments of the head teachers was the total lack of engagement of the parents in the child’s education and well-being. Why? Because the parent is part of the same poverty system. The parent didn't go to school themselves, or finished school early, or hated school for its unsafe, shaming, uni-dimensional forms of learning. School didn't help them. School didn't transform them and didn't provide them with the route to a livelihood and so they have little interest in the school or their child attending it. In other countries we see a very high value that parents put on school because they know that whilst they themselves failed within the system, they believe that it is the only route to a different life for their child. The problem is that they don't know that what happens when the child is at school may not be actually helping them to a different life and when they come home they don't know how to support the child in the journey of life learning.
Teaching parents how to lead their own lives becomes the new bridge that can enable the parent to create a shift from their own poverty mindsets to create new stories of hope in their own education, livelihoods, security, savings, and community. But it then acts as this bridge to the child, who is learning the same lessons in life leadership at school. Whether it is teaching the parents and children together after school or at the weekends, or teaching them the same lessons separately, breaking the mindsets of intergenerational poverty through leadership development transforms the conversation at home. If the conversation is now around proactivity, a new self-belief, creative problem solving, courage, planning new stories for their lives, then the family now becomes a mutually reinforcing system of life education. We have seen parents and children literally sitting round the kitchen table learning what it means to lead their lives, relationships, health, finances and livelihood’s. One study into Emerging Leaders programmes showed an 85% increase in the families engagement in education.
We invest in the child
It’s one thing to focus on just getting every child into a school and thinking that our job is done. In fact, whilst getting every child to school is a big challenge, the real challenge of mindset change, to end cycles of poverty, has hardly started and in many schools wont start, because their system is still designed around the dynamics of poverty creation, not poverty eradication.
What do we actually need a child to know when they leave school? They need to know they are of inestimable value and full of amazing potential. They need to see themselves as the leader of their own life story; they need to see that heart and character sit at the centre of them making a meaningful contribution in the lives. They need to know how to work out what story they want to write in their lives and learn how to write that story. They need to be proactive, be able to see problems and take responsibility for the solutions. They need to be able to focused. They need to be able to problem solve and think creatively. They need the mindsets of entrepreneurs to create their future employment in a global job market that is catastrophic for youth. They need to know how to lead their finances and to save. They need to be able to lead their relationships and groups or teams of people in order to get things down at home, work or in the community. They need to be resilient and courageous to deal with the tough challenges that life will definitely throw at them. They need to be able to be competent at languages and numbers in order to communicate and deliver the story they want to write. They don't just need to know what to think and what to learn, they more importantly need to know how to think and how to learn.
“Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world”[6] - true or false? Mandela’s statement is true, but unless we capture the poverty-ending meaning of his words, then we end up with an answer that will prove false. We need to get beyond the statement “education for all”. It isn’t enough to say “get a child to school”. It needs to be a school where a teacher is leading their own life, can call out to the leadership potential of all their pupils and involve the empowerment of parents as leaders of their homes. Emerging Leaders Lead Now programme, in tandem with their Leadership for Lifeprogramme, is pioneering exactly this integrated strategy for schools. Lead Now was carefully designed and tested to teach young children all of these things in a simple, multi dimensional way, through their teachers and parents or associated youth workers.
Trevor Waldock Founder & CEO www.emerging-leaders.net
[1] Paulo Freire Pedagogy Of The Oppressed trans M R Ramos Penguin1993
[2] Amarta Sen; UN Statement, June 1998; Martha Nussbaum; Tim Jackson
[3] Paulo Freire Pedagogy Of The Oppressed trans M R Ramos Penguin1993
[4] Paulo Freire Pedagogy Of The Oppressed trans M R Ramos Penguin1993
[5] Teachers Make A Difference, What is the research? 2003 John Hattie University of Auckland
[6] Nelson Mandela