What's So Great About Universal Primary Schooling?

The excitement over this quick fix has generated a large bodyof research in the social sciences in general and population studies inparticular. The consensus that has emerged most strongly seems to be on thematter of ‘whom’ to educate - girls and women now get overwhelming priorityin all policy prescriptions related to education, not only because they havelagged behind males in education in all parts of the underdeveloped world, buteven more so because a case can be made that female education contributes moreto improvements in welfare than equivalent levels of male education.

On the question of ‘how much’ to educate the girls andwomen on whom educational resources are now being focussed, universal primaryschooling has become the development mantra in a range of documents andresolutions supported by a range of national governments and internationalorganizations. The Cairo Conference on Population and Development, for example,identified universal access to primary education as one of its key quantitativegoals. This goal was also explicitly stated in The World Conference on Educationfor All of 1990; The World Education Forum of 2000, the Millennium Summit of2000, and the United Nations Special Session on Children in 2002.

But how valid is a goal of primary education for socialdevelopment? The answer seems to depend on the outcome variable that one islooking at. It also seems to depend on the socioeconomic and cultural context ofthe population being studied. It appears that there are many outcome variablesand many socioeconomic situations that require higher levels of education beforea change is observed. Educational levels need to climb to some threshold,whether in terms of percentage of the population covered, or in terms of theminimum levels of educational attainment by individuals, if results are to besignificant and lasting. Providing just primary education may not be effectiveif one of the goals is, say, fertility reduction. Achieving lower fertility mayrequire girls to have at least a middle school education. Indeed, below suchminimum levels, not only may education not reduce fertility, it might in somecases even raise it.

There seems, however, to be no such awkward bump in therelationship between maternal education and child health and mortality. Avariety of data sets find a uniformly linear inverse relationship with the riskof under-five survival falling by 2-5% for every additional year of maternalschooling. Moreover, the improvements in child survival are seen at the verybeginning of female education, whatever the initial conditions - socioeconomic,cultural, public services - and however unsatisfactory the nature of theschooling experience. 

This linearity is so striking that exploring it is a good wayto draw some general conclusions about what it is that primary educationdoes to individuals. 

What is it that happens to the young woman with only a fewyears of school that leads her to become so much more adept at getting herchildren to survive the riskiest period of their lives? It is not connected withthe most obvious correlate of education, income. Not does it have to do with aheightened knowledge of disease aetiology - certainly any such improvedknowledge is not acquired in the school experience itself - that experience istoo far removed in time from her child-rearing experience. The few empiricalstudies that have reported on this matter have not found any evidence to suggestthat women with some schooling have very different views from uneducated womenon the prevention, causes and treatment of illness. 

The second knowledge-related attribute of schooled womenmight be an increased ability to access information important for childsurvival. That is, while schooling does not itself teach child-rearing skills,it helps women to later in life know how to acquire these skills, how to workout disease aetiology for themselves. It makes them good at understanding decontextualizedinformation, information that is provided by impersonal sources like the massmedia and health workers 

This is a provocative hypothesis, but it fails to explain whythe knowledge base of educated women is not much better than that of theiruneducated sisters. If they have learnt how to access now forms of information,it is not clear why this information does not get revealed in quantitative andqualitative surveys on the subject. 

But the hypothesis is still useful because it suggests thatthere is something larger than the school curriculum that is at work here. Thevery fact of schooling seems to confer some new abilities on women,abilities that are so useful in protecting their young children from theconstant threats to survival and well-being that confront the impoverished Thirdworld family. And when one when looks at actual behaviour, as opposed toknowledge, it does appear that even slightly educated women are more likely toseek and obtain effective health care to treat the common childhood illnessesthat account for much of child ill health and mortality. 

The question that then arises is, why does even a very smallamount of schooling make women more able to access life-saving health care, bothpreventive and curative? The social science research on population anddevelopment issues has been keen to devise notions of ‘autonomy’ and ‘empowerment’to explain this behaviour. 

Autonomy and empowerment represent the best possible outcomesof transformative educational processes and they probably account for at leastsome of the demographic and social effects of relatively high levels ofschooling - past secondary level for instance. But from all that we know aboutthe elementary schooling experience in the developing world, it does notseem very likely that children, and especially female children, come out of itgreatly independent and empowered. 

Nevertheless, the idea is tempting and is worth following up.The literature in education and educational psychology is sparse on what it isthat a mere few years of schooling imparts to students. But some relevant hintscan be obtained from the vast literature on what has been called the ‘hiddencurriculum’. This term is applied to a variety of experiences, not allschool-related, in which what is transmitted explicitly is not all that istransmitted implicitly or even consciously. 

Put another way, the focus in this literature is on what is learnedin school, as opposed to what is taught in school.This twist ofperspective allows one to better search for the things that are picked upthrough schooling without being part of an explicit curriculum. In particular,the hidden curriculum is believed to impart certain ‘social values’ - likeachievement and independence - which are often in conflict with the familyoriented values that dominate the non-schooled child and that make the schooledchild better able to deal with the modern world of citizenship and work. 

However, these things - achievement, independence - areconcepts that good school is supposed to indirectly promote in principle.But all accounts of the primary school experience in developing countriessuggest that it is these very attributes that the experience is quick to kill.For example, one of the few qualitative studies that we have on the primaryschooling experience in India, the report prepared by PROBE, did not find muchevidence of a hidden curriculum that transmitted the values of independence andautonomy. It concluded instead that what the child in a typical primary schoollearns are the virtues of obedience, discipline and routine. That is whatthe hidden curriculum inculcates, not the idea of actually making choices, orquestioning the norm. 

The report identified several kinds of implicit values thatthe slightly schooled child gains. The first of these is the idea that certainmembers of society are rightly figures of authority, who are benign and know itall. This notion of benign authority figures is embodied, first of all, in theteacher, even when the teacher’s behaviour is far from benign. It thenextends, through the nature of the lessons and (especially) illustrations in theclassroom, to include all kinds of other people deserving of respect - fromnational leaders, to bureaucrats, to specialists in white coats, to thefrequently exploitative village leaders.

From the acceptance of their authority, the primary schooledchild moves naturally to the idea of obedience of this authority. What theteacher or the doctor or the village leader says is correct by definition, it isnot to be challenged, openly or implicitly. He (it is generally a ‘he’)represents the best that the modern world of science and technology has to offerand doing his bidding is one way of belonging to this world oneself. 

The PROBE report went on to demonstrate the teaching andlearning rules that strengthen the obedience mentality in primary schools. Mostlessons are incomprehensible enough to be followed only through the routine ofmemorization and regurgitation; certainly there is very little understandinginvolved even when the lessons are taught in what is supposedly the child’smother tongue. This routine and the discipline that this inculcates arereinforced by the entry into children’s lives of what the historian SumitSarkar has called ‘clock time’, the breaking up of one’s day intostructured periods for different activities. 

All these things - the respect for authority, the obedienceof authority figures, and the ability to follow a time table of routine - go along way towards making the slightly educated woman more able to seek and followthe dictates of health care providers in later life. When a child is ill, sheturns to the authority of the doctor or nurse; and then she obeys theinstructions on timed medication that this figure dispenses. When such obediencedoes indeed lead to the resolution of illness in the child, faith can only befortified. 

Viewed in this light, the hidden curriculum of primary schoolexperience in the developing world is well suited to achieving several socialand economic objectives.In addition to encouraging better childcare, it is alsowell suited to the work-force requirements of a developing country and it is notsurprising that studies have concluded that for low income countries, primaryeducation provides the best returns to investment. Naturally - workers withprimary schooling are likely to have just the qualities of obedience anddiscipline that a developing economy depends upon. The trouble of course is thatthis obedience and discipline can be manipulated by larger fascist forces topromote mindless social conflict as easily as it can be exploited for assemblyline work. We have enough urban examples of this in recent years. 

Indeed, if primary schooling did change in the direction ofactually making learning a joyous experience and promoting a healthy scepticismof authority, we might need to re-evaluate some of our pious views about theeconomic and social effects of schooling. These views are based oncross-sectional data on adults - that is, on individuals who were educated inthe past, when schooling was the autocratic, disciplinary experience justdescribed. If newer generations of children experience something quitedifferent, we might well find that these effects become much more ambiguous. 

This gloomy conclusion is by no means meant to put a damperon current policies to provide universal primary schooling, though it isembarrassing that after fifty years of development planning, that is as far asour national ambitions go. It is only to wonder if in the long run, theconsequences of schooling will be far more impressive and far more sustainableif the ‘quality’ of schooling and the ‘length’ of schooling are bothpushed upwards, so that they come to represent the true liberation of mind andbody that words such as ‘autonomy’ are meant to capture.

Alaka M. Basu is Associate Professor of Demography, Department ofSociology, Cornell University, USA.