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E309 Block 5 Week 26 cont. - Coggle Diagram
E309 Block 5 Week 26 cont.
The role of education in development: an educationalist’s response to some recent work in development economics
Simon McGrath
https://www-tandfonline-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1080/03050061003775553
education is not the lead discipline when it comes to development.
Economics
still retains pre‐eminence, not least because of its dominant place in the dominant development institution: the World Bank (King and McGrath 2004)
NOT AN OVERVIEW OF EVERTHING JUST REVIEW OF THESE 4 TEXTS
All four hold university chairs, but three (William Easterly, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Collier) have also spent time employed by the World Bank, whilst the other, Jeffrey Sachs, is Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary‐General and former Director of the United Nations Millennium Project
focused on recent work. Ignored notable authors as work not current (1999). These guys also have notable work from early 2000 which have impacted this more recent work. But the recent work is the focus
what do you mean by north & South?? Not explicit!
Easterly: The white man’s burden (2006)
ooo is McGrath accusing him of plagiarism? ('echoes the un-ciited Albert Hirschman)...
aid money isn't helping as it should.
each aid agency has its own ideas so pulling in diff directions
the countries left to pick up pieces. agencies moved on to another country to help there
Easterly argues that a major reason for aid’s failure is bad governance in the south, something that conditionalities have done little to change. Big development has always failed, he argues, so why should the MDGs be any different?
restating his belief that states cannot work in anyone’s interest but their own,
very few references & they tend to be N. American
Southern voices are rare, apart from in his device (part of the World Bank’s house style) of using text boxes to humanise his writing.
In conventional neoliberal style, he argues strongly for the innate superiority of the market over state intervention*
Stiglitz: Making globalisation work (2006)
more wary of economics
sees five major problems with globalisation:
1.the rules are biased
material values are all that matter
democracy is undermined
there are many losers, north and south
decontextualised and inappropriate policy imposition is taking place. (9)
argues that the current approach to the
liberalisation of services has been carefully controlled to work only at the top end
and needs reorienting
...of course it does.
need for a new, green accounting that would seek to calculate and reflect the full environmental cost of the production of goods and services.
‘development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies’ (50). It is for people in their own local contexts to decide what policies should be followed for the betterment of all, rather than for the enrichment of the few.
criticised for being a utopian thinker.. . more convincing in his undermining of the way things are than he is in explaining how the status quo can be overturned.
these economists’ accounts of education may imply for our field, given their higher profile than our own work.
2010
Collier: The bottom billion (2007)
economist can use statistics to answer important public policy questions
avoid the partisanship of Easterly and Sachs, whom he portrays as the poster boys of the right and left respectively
As it is easier to get those just below the poverty line above it, this is what planners will do.
believes they target the less poor and he focuses on the really poor
Collier ignores the abject poor in supposed wealthier countries
*civil wars
are not necessarily traps, but 73% of those living in the ‘countries of the bottom billion’ have recently had them or are currently experiencing them* (17 cited in?)
He shows statistically that civil war and low income are mutually reinforcing.
makes sense!
resource profits tend to encourage bad government. Many of the countries of the bottom billion are natural resources rich.
= dutch disease
.
Collier argues, too much aid goes to middle income countries. [plus] MDGs have led to a shift of aid resources to photogenic social projects (in which he includes schooling) rather than
‘necessary’ infrastructure
.*
cautious about
fair trade
, . . encourages non‐diversification and discourages individuals, enterprises and countries from seeking to move into higher value production and services.
statistical approach leads him to simplify many things.
tendency to present correlations rather than to explore more substantially possible causal explanations
Sachs: Common wealth (2008)
unswerving belief in the importance of the MDGs plus the Cairo (1994) and Rio (1992) targets.
most upbeat of the four authors about the prospects for change.
US$2.3 trillion is nothing compared to US military spending of US$17 trillion over the same 30‐year period.
For Sachs, the problem is a lack of aid, not one of poor governance.
Even within Economics, he is guilty of a highly skewed presentation of Hirschman,
position of Sachs lacks nuancing: in his model, poor countries need primary education; rich ones require higher education...(My thoughts: exactly- what about drs? do they just have a primary education??)
four authors can agree that there is too much poverty in the world, but not much else.
little mention on education
One success (in Africa) was the steady expansion of education, represented by the huge leap in adult literacy levels from 1970 to 2000. Another accomplishment has been in reaching girls for education, as the ratio of female‐to‐male literacy has climbed steadily over the last thirty years. The higher literacy of men and women has so far
not translated into increases in earnings
, but education is both a worthy end in itself and a contribution to many other good development outcomes. (Easterly 2006, 123–125)
Stiglitz& Sachs both call for a global education fund: but they presume that will solve things easily!!?
That the former Director of the UN’s Millennium Project has such an apparently simplistic understanding of one of the MDGs is staggering.
33% of perpetrators of child rapes were teachers (Jewkes et al. 2002).
As Dore (1976) powerfully argued through comparative work across rich and poor nations, the drive to succeed in the labour market leads to learners completing ever‐higher levels of education to such an extent that the supply of labour at any one qualification level tends to outweigh demand. This deflates the price of that qualification, sparking off a further race to higher qualifications. This leads inevitably to unhappiness that education does not appear to be fulfilling its promise. Moreover, as Dore was particularly at pains to point out, it leads to the qualification being all that matters, with learning being too often sacrificed.
everyone achieving more downgrades its value!!! (eg degrees)
evident that the two education MDGs will be missed and that this will not simply be because of lack of political will (as Sachs argues).
100% enrolment is misleading/incorrect yet Easterley claims this (McGrath, 2010)
Ian Eyres & Clare Woodward authors of Block 5