The Role of Power in Education

By Jon Kimbell Sy

Introduction

My view of education and the role that teachers play in it has always been very limited. I think my total experience as a teacher, and a very unofficial one at that, only totals to about a year and a half. During this time the one experience that struck me the most was when I taught one of my younger students in the pre-school how to eat noodles properly. When I first met him I noticed that he held his fork incorrectly and often ended up with more noodles on the table than in his stomach. After helping him along, sometimes by literally holding his fork properly with him, he eventually got used to scooping only a small amount of noodles, to deliver the noodles from the bowl to his mouth with minimal exposure to the table, and to chew his food properly. It took me two weeks but it was worth seeing him eat noodles cleanly and efficiently. For me teaching has always been just a simple transmission of skills. This class changed all that and made me realize that there were more underlying issues behind education. The thing that struck me immediately from the very first day is how important power plays in the field of education. In my definition, as gleaned by numerous first hand experiences and various articles Ive read (and I apologize if this definition was clearly stated in any of the readings given and I only forgot that Ive read it in any of them), power is held by those with the most resources. The more articles Ive read and discussions in class weve had the more I realized that power is the determining factor of how education is presented to the people. This understanding of how power is held in different contexts is important in my mind since knowing

the source of human agency for education will mean that if change is to happen then it must be from this source. Over the next few pages I will highlight certain cases that I believe proves my point in how power, in different forms specifically race, gender, and market, have made impacts in existing educational systems.

Education as dictated by the power of the superior race

The superiority of ones race has always been a driving force in history.

Roman

conquerors have dominated numerous races, including the Greeks, just to prove their superiority. Hitler started World War II with the belief of white race superiority, particularly over the Jewish people. Eve n in our own history weve been subjugated by various races who believed that they came here to give us civility and enlightenment. In the article of Rusself Bishop on Changing the Power Relations in Education related to the Maori Culture this fact is made obvious. The Maori people were the first people in New Zealand. They had their own language and culture even before the colonials welcomed themselves in to their country. While at first there was a treaty between the whites and Maori in 1840 that made it seem like equality was all the whites desired, the idea of dominance and subordination eventually emerged. The end result of this colonization is staggering. As mentioned in the article by 2003 only 8% of the Maori are fluent in the vernacular and over 38% over the Maori leave school without any formal qualifications (Bishop, 2003). Moving over to the other side of the world we look at another race whose education system is now severely lacking, or at least lacking in the eyes of their conqueror. Henry Walcott describes in his article The Teacher as an Enemy his experiences as a teacher within the Native American community. In the consensus website of the United States it shows

that this race, who were living first in the United States, now just makes up 1.2% of the entire American Population. There are actually more Asians (5.1%) living in USA than the very people who had originally laid claim to this country (USA Census, 2013). The result of white dominance is that the education system of the Native Americans has been all but ignored, or at least that was the image presented in Walcotts article. In it he writes his experiences in teaching the Kwakiutl, or as they preferred to be called, the Kwakwaka'wakw. He mentions his hardships in trying to teach the natives using western curriculum. The students do not understand the need for schools, or at the very least have a very narrow definition of what western school is. In this framework we see the teacher initially seeing himself as a savior of sorts to the students. He tries hard to enforce his type of education over his class. Later on he realizes his mistake and realizes that whether he likes it or not he has to understand that he himself in the enemy of this minority. After all the author is part of the race that subjugated the race of his students. (Walcott, 1994) In these examples I can see the decline of the natives educations due to their conquerors. For both the Maori and Native Americans theyve steadily lost their culture and language in the presence of their conquerors and eventually they had to succumb to the education, or re-education, from their conquerors. By a combination of sheer numbers and physical might, their conquerors have forced them, at least for the greater part of their history, to slowly lose footing within their country and become a minority, which, though politically incorrect as mentioned in class, is still the reality as they make up a small part of their countrys population. This resulted in a great shift in power resulting, as mentioned earlier, a loss of their personal races identity in the schema of the education in their country. However the power that one race has over another is not limited to race by nationality but also by provincial superiority. In the Philippines where there are about a hundred and ten

indigenous peoples communities with fifteen to twenty million members (around 15-20% of the total population which may seem large but IF, and this is a large if, each of those community has a different language and the population of 20 million is distributed equally among those communities then each community will only comprise 0.1% of the total population) (ECIP) the education system that most of them have is still NCR-centric, which is in turn, to my knowledge, based on the American education system (another effect of race superiority). As Enkiwe-Abayao mentions in her article, The Ifugao students learn about Shakespeare but remain ignorant of their own epics such as the Hudhud and the Alim (Enkiwe-Abayao, 2003). Within countries where the focus of population is centered in one or two provinces the indigenous people, just as with the Native Americans in USA, and the Maori in New Zealand, are forced to take classes that fail to take in to consideration their culture and practices that are no less important than that of the majority.

Education as dictated by the power of masculinity

Men and women equality has been a goal for the longest of time in our society. After all the study of feminism wouldnt have come in to existence if the balance of power didnt lean towards men. In a 2011 report by the Geneva-based World Economic forum entitled Global Gender Gap, which ranks the countries based on four categories (educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation, and political empowerment) that determine a nations gender gap, Philippines ranks at number 8 getting a perfect score of 1 for the first two categories, a 0.763 on the third, and a 0.331 of the last one. For Pakistan, which is the focus of Jackie Kirk

in her study about the experiences of women teachers in Karachi is at 133rd, which is only two ranks higher than Yemen which has the worst gender gap (Remo, 2011). The results of the study Kirk made then were very reflective of this ranking. In her article Kirk quotes Petra Munro, an Associate Professor of Education and Womens and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University, as saying to be a woman is to lack authority, knowledge, and power. To be a teacher is to have authority, knowledge, and power. As Kirk spreads out the interviews she received from Kiriachi teachers as well as discusses the undertones from the interview it is painfully obvious that they dont feel as empowered as they want to feel in their professions. While on one hand they do feel pride in their work, most of them either said outright that they only fell in to the profession as it was a job that was almost expected for them to fall in to by their families. The helplessness that these teachers already feel with them choosing teaching as their career, which is described by one of the women as a profession often seen by others as for those who have no other options, is compounded by the fact that the governing board is predominantly in the hands of men (Kirk, 2012). This balance of power geared towards men within the field of education is obvious for all to see in this article. Even in the Philippines where in 2009 there were only 13.7% male teachers in the public elementary and high school sector, Antonio Tino, chairman of the militant Alliance of Concerned Teachers and a UP Diliman Instructor, noted that despite the small number of male teachers, men seem to hold more management positions. He said that there were more male principals and other school officials. (Esplanada, 2009).

Education as driven by the Market

One of the main reasons why people study in the first place is to find a decent job. After all one of the very first things a recruiter looks for upon looking at ones resume is the appliers academic qualifications. Most colleges entice students in to enrolling with them by creating courses that are marketable, like nursing and HRM. Even those universities who rarely add to their curriculum new courses still make it a point to highlight existing degrees that are profitable for graduates. In 2011 CHED projects that by 2014 that the top 5 disciplines with the most enrolled in will be Business Administration (29%), IT-related (14%), Education (13%), Engineering (12%), and Medicine (10%). However in 2005 Business Administration and Medicine were actually running neck and neck with each other with graduates from each discipline making up for 23% and 22% of the total graduates respectively (Ched, 2011). The high unemployment rate of nurses by 2010 was one of the factors that eventually shifted the balance to Business Administration (Jalandoni, 2010). The fact that education is in the third place though is for me an outlier and needs a different type of research to learn as to why despite the fact that it is not a degree that is usually found in lists of most marketable degrees. This reality, that education is constantly market driven, is a point driven by Glynda Hulls article on Critical Literacy and Beyond. In the article Hull tells the tale of Mr Parker who handles a vocational class that is targeted towards graduates finding employment in the Bank of the Pacific. Throughout the story Parker describes his dream to find students a job. While his intentions are noble his very curriculum is dictated by the Bank of the Pacific both indirectly (his curriculum is geared towards employment as proof operators even though the bank didnt initially dictate what they need from their employees) and directly (when the bank intervened the board of the school from making changes in Parkers curriculum when the board wanted to make it more holistic by shifting the focus to theory in banking). By the end of the article Hull presents

the idea that in the long run Parkers curriculum while helpful for temporary enrolment doesnt really empower the graduates with a degree that will allow them to find a better career path. The degree in which the Bank of the Pacific had in terms of influence to Parkers education plan ended up to be more damaging in the long term for students as they had graduated from school with a severely narrow specialization (Hull, 1993). In studying the statistical data within Philippines as well as reading Hulls article the point that the market has the more direct influence in education than other sources of power is clear for me. Even the government that dictates the education policies of most school follow the trend of the market and react accordingly.

Conclusion

Power, in its many forms, has always been a determining factor in our worlds history. Nations have been destroyed by more powerful nations. Systems have risen backed by intellectual, and sometimes even physical, superiority. Religions have come and gone bowing to the power of either the faith of the majority or science. Education then is no different. As much as I would like the masses to dictate the passage of education as it should be geared towards their needs and not the needs of the few at the top, power is in the hands of the few and it is them that affect change in education. Even when it comes to racial superiority the power of the dominant race itself is held by those at the top. However just because power is always the one that determines our culture it does not mean that the only thing that results from power is the personal need of those holding it. In New Zealand where the Maoris culture has been slowly losing footing the government has already called for an education system that will slowly resurrect the

Maori culture. During my stay in New Zealand I had talked to one of my moms friends who had lived there for almost ten years and was taking up early childhood education through an online course. She showed me some of her assignments which included a personal poem translated in Maori. When I asked her why she was doing an assignment like that she told me that schools in New Zealand now prefer teachers with some degree of knowledge on the Maori culture and their knowledge. A quick search in seek.co.nz, a job portal site for New Zealand, confirms this as most posted hiring ads for teachers had this as a qualification. We are in this class, as written by Jeanne Pietig in her article How Educational Foundations Can Empower Tomorrows Teachers, to become moral agents. We have both the power and the responsibility to motivate our students to become moral agents of their own right (Pietig, 1998). By helping our students to understand the existing power structures as well as teaching them the values needed by society we enable them to affect change by (hopefully) working within the schema of power in our society. While this may seem like a call for the teachers to focus on the elite alone, what I really mean is that even those from the masses can be called upon to rise in to power to affect change. After all one lawyer, regardless of her background, who understands the plight of the masses and also the intricacies of the existing power structure, can do a lot of good. Sometimes to shake the existing power structure the best way to do it is from within. The Trojan war was not ended by the numerous forces outside the walled city of Troy but by the famous Trojan horse that allowed Menelaus forces to attack from within.

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