Jonah Sanders

IDC-201-201
Dr. Deanna Reinard
Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden Reflection

Schooling the World forced me to come to terms with some internalized biases I had

developed in my relationship with education. The introduction we receive to Ladakh is one of a

mother alone, left to face the hardships of farm management on her lonesome, which is quickly

contrasted with imagery of Ladakh Indians dressed in Americanized outfits in streets full of

litter, dirty water and overall too crowded to function. I had seen the work “American Progress”

before, but the importance of the angel in that work wielding a schoolbook in one hand had never

resonated with me as deeply until viewed through the lens of “Schooling the World”. Possessing

a deeper knowledge of colonialism now than on prior viewings of the work, I see now the

weaponization of this school book against the native population, its utilization in the piece an

instance of “saying the quiet part out loud” so to speak- while the white men behind her view the

book in her hand as a sharing of knowledge, education being her major tool for movement across

the nation showcases just how deep seated the use of education as a form of indoctrination really

is. The goal of this style of education that these students are being given is inherently designed to

destroy their way of life and better suit the needs of western capitalism.

In our discussion I expressed an initial discomfort with the film, fearful that I was

misinterpreting the message as one that was anti-education as a whole. This led me to another

conclusion I had to reckon with, however: what did it say about me that my gut reaction to a

decrying of this style of education was nervousness that the filmmakers hated all education? I hit

a wall for a while, until I realized that this was what the documentary meant to express to me; I
had an unrealized bias that the American style of education was the only one, and I was growing

defensive of a system I didn’t actually agree with on the basis of the fact that it was all I knew.

When watching the introduction, I had unknowingly brushed aside the schools that

“taught” the Native American peoples the ways of white men as being a separate, antiquated

style of teaching that was somehow distinct from the education given to the Indian population

today, when in reality it is a continuous extension of the very same settler colonialism. Reaching

this conclusion led to a far greater understanding of the work, as I realized that help is not help if

it is unnecessary and only furthering a destructive status quo. To watch these agrarian villages be

stripped of their children after being sold a better way of life was heart wrenching, exacerbated

by the lack of work and constant images of failure that those children were confronted with. One

of the most impactful moments in the documentary was delivered by Manish Jain from The

People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development when he described many students

coming up to him and introducing themselves with the year that they failed out of school. I think

back to a small comment made by Dr. Reinard about the global response to the sentence “what

do you do?” where Americans typically lead with their occupation, other nations are asking

“how do you spend your free time? What do you do with your life?” The emphasis that a

capitalist driven education system puts on one’s value as a labor dehumanizes to the point that

these young men and women have internalized failure as one of the key features of their human

experience that others should know about them. The primary among these is replacing the values

instilled by the parents and community leaders in these indigenous cultures with those favored by

the western world. Instant gratification, western beauty and light skin are featured at the forefront

of the modernized cities seen throughout the film. The children in the film have no desire to live

in the culture which they were born. The issue here arises not in that the children might want to
go out and find a better life in western society, but rather that western society has intruded upon

these cultures, and instilled its own beliefs into the fundamentals of the education of these

children worldwide- to such a great extent that success and failure as rated by the systems of

western education are fundamental to the way that these young people live their lives. The way

that education has been posed to these children is one that labels their home cultures as being

wrong and therefore punishable, as with the way that the boarding school in the film treats the

speaking of native languages: a monetary fine! Not only are the languages of these villages being

wiped out intentionally to eliminate the barrier they pose to modernization, but the very tools of

this system are again used to punish the student. This monetary punishment has been instilled as

an extremely dangerous one to these kids, and a result the values of traditional cultures have

been usurped by the value of the dollar.

The village that we see throughout the documentary was clean and happy before currency

was introduced as a means to get a better life, but these children were educated in such a way as

to isolate them from the ability to live their lives as their parents had. The resources that were

allocated to education through this region were not granted to enhance the education of parent to

child in a way that is sustainable, rather they were applied in such a way to force them to become

dependent on the structures of capitalism. What value does this give? For those with capital and

a direct vested interest in maintaining the status quo, it means more money in their pockets and

more Indians desperate enough for work to enable a cheaper outsourcing of labor- the

manufacturing of young minds into material goods to be bought and sold. But for the average

human? We see misery, a fundamental shift in the way that these people perceive themselves and

a continued burning of our planet’s natural resources for nothing but the sake of corporate

profits. I plan on being an educator with a core goal of developing my students’ independence,
not stripping it away, and “Schooling the World” gave me a tough lesson in what that really

means- but one I needed to hear.