23959: RE: 23940: Chin (Discuss) - touchstones and touchiness (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Elizabeth J. Chin <ejc@oxy.edu>

>From Elizabeth Chin (ejc@oxy.edu)

I tried to go to touchstones website but it wasn't up -- but in basic response to the discussion about radical approaches to edcuation, research, etc, the problems educators and researchers face in Haiti aren't that different, fundamentally, than those being faced in the U.S., particularly among the poor.

The main problem is that schooling and development institutions --like so many institutions--inevitably begin to develop in ways more designed to promote their own longevity than to actually solve any problems. I have seen this through my own work in schools in Los Angeles, Connecticut, and Haiti.  Schooling for the poor, wherever they are, has always been about subjugation and control, certainly very few schools for the poor actually are structured to develop in people the skills and knowledge they need to move out of poverty.

Of course it's sad in a way -- in a way that reflects on the larger failures of Haitian, American, and Global society -- that projects like Touchstones are needed, but to fault those who are in the trenches trying to change educational and social institutions from the ground up is largely to shoot the messenger.  I have seen too many teachers oppress their students by slapping them, forcing them to sit at desks with their hands folded and heads laid down, or stand in rigid silence for extended periods of time -- and that's in the UNITED STATES.  It might seem obvious that education is too authoritarian but that realization has hardly changed our schools or any one else's.

As for the money issue, here again, it is of course wildly obscene that Haitians are as poor as they are and that most Americans are as rich as they are.  But this is not really individual obscenity, its collective obscenity.  Requiring aid workers and the like to take vows of poverty begs the question of global inequality.  As a college professor living in one of America's most expensive real estate areas (median house price is now over $450,000) I am aware that my salary is a vast multiple of that of my Haitian friends.  So on a personal basis I do what I can to help them, and on a professional basis I do what I can to educate others about Haiti, the world, and why capitalism sucks.  But even if I gave 3/4 of my salary away--heck even if I gave it ALL away, it wouldn't solve the problem.  This is not to say that NGO budgets and spending shouldn't be reasonable, because the money that can get thrown around and thrown away can be frightening.  But the larger agendas at work--pressures of political entities, economic interests, etc., are where we should turn our anger and our energies.

Elizabeth Chin
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Occidental College  Box M 37
1600 Campus Road
Los Angeles, CA 90041
(323)349-0632
http://faculty.oxy.edu/ejc/
(323)349-0635 (fax)