Scholarship
as Liberation?
“We find
little evidence for modernization theory”-Willa Friedman et al.
Chambi Chachage
Willa Friedman, Michael
Kremer, Edward Miguel and Rebecca Thornton’s (2011) article on ‘Education as Liberation?’ reignites the debate on impacts of formal
education. Based on a follow-up survey of a randomized girls’ merit scholarship
program in Kenya it provides empirical evidence on the efficacy of
modernization theory vis-à-vis empowerment and liberal views in explaining
gendered impacts of education.
As
someone who has worked in a non-governmental organization that advocates for
the right to access education, known as HakiElimu, in Kenya’s neighboring
country of Tanzania after being trained by a professor of international
education, Kenneth King, I find the findings particularly interesting. On the
one hand one of their overall conclusions that they find that there is little
evidence for modernization is startling as far as gender is concerned. Since
gender is very central in Friedman et al.’s survey – as the scholarship program
is primarily about uplifting the girl child in an education system that is
still modernist – any compelling evidence of such uplift would be a significant
affirmation of modernization. In fact the researchers confirmed that the
program persistently raised the girls’ test scores and secondary schooling. However,
by associating the link between democratization and education without unpacking
the nature of patriarchy and the type of democracy that has been promoted in
Kenya the researchers tend to conflate modernization, empowerment and liberal views
in their explanation on the social and political impacts of the program as
evidenced below:
We
find that exposure to the program reduces young women’s acceptance of the right
of men to beat their wives and children and there is evidence it reduces the
likelihood that parents are involved in choosing their daughter’s spouse. These
findings are broadly consistent with both modernization theory as well as the
view that education promotes a desire for autonomy and empowerment, but are
harder to reconcile with the claim that education tends to reinforce existing
patterns of authority (Friedman et al. 2011: 4-5).
The
empowerment view, at least in the ways it had been advocated by the likes of Antonio
Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and even Julius Nyerere, all of whom the researchers
quotes, was not centered on liberal democracy that is at the heart of the
political dispensation in Kenya as it is in its education system. When this is
unpacked one can locate the following findings within such a liberal conception
of democracy:
The
evidence on attitudes beyond the household is not consistent with a
modernization perspective but is more readily explained by the empowerment view
of education. In particular, there is no evidence that the human capital
created by the [Girl Scholarship Program] GSP leads to more pro-democratic or secular
attitudes, or weakened ethnic identification. In fact, there is suggestive
evidence that ethnic identity grows stronger among program beneficiaries,
despite the Kenyan school curriculum’s stated aim of promoting feelings of
national unity (Friedman et al. 2011: 5).
On
the other hand, however, the researchers provide a compelling innovating way of
unpacking confounding explanations on causality. They used experimental designs
to measure, by way of separation, the impact of the program on acceptance of
authority, that is, in such a way that the possibility of reversal causality as
thus illustrated is controlled: “if those who are less willing to accept
authority are less likely to stay in school, cross-sectional correlations
between education and acceptance of authority will confound the causal impact
of education on willingness to accept authority with the impact of acceptance
of authority on education” (Friedman et al. 2011: 5). They thus strongly show the
evidence that “education reduces willingness to accept authority” (Friedman et
al. 2011: 26). But, again, their reluctance to unpack liberal democracy as highlighted above
leads them to interpret this as affirming that ‘there is little support for the
direct impact of education on ‘modern’ values” (Friedman et al. 2011: 16).
In
line with the researchers attempt to combine experimentation and
non-experimental literature it is recommended that they also rigorously engage
with critiques of liberal democracy in Africa. Such critiques, particularly
those emanating from transformative feminism, unpack the ways in which
patriarchy continue to manifests itself through the imposition of liberal
democracy and market fundamentalism in the social sectors such as health, water
and education to reproduce gendered patterns of domination. In such a setup a
seemingly benign educational program could promote empowerment with one hand
and take it with another hand. What one may observe as the fostering of
individual autonomy could actually be an imposition of another form of
authority.
