Critical Pedagogy and Global Literature

Worldly Teaching

Masood Ashraf Raja, Hillary Stringer, Zach VandeZande

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137319760
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

In one volume, this edited collection provides both a theoretical and praxis-driven engagement with teaching world literature, focusing on various aspects of critical pedagogy. Included are nine praxis-driven essays by instructors who have taught world literature courses at the university level.

Part I

Theory

1

Gender, Knowledge, and Economy: Greg Mortenson, Turning Schools into Stones

Robin Truth Goodman

In April, 2011, the news hit the wires that Greg Mortenson, the author of the celebrated Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, had not described his adventures building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan with full accuracy. Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools are both feel-good memoirs that chronicle Greg Mortenson’s heroic travel exploits in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment to bring learning to Muslim girls. In a number of TV exposés and other mainstream outlets, including a dialogue with Jon Krakauer on Sixty Minutes followed by a book devoted to the topic entitled Three Cups of Deceit, Mortenson’s credibility was interrogated along with the legitimacy of the charity he founded to collect money for the school-building projects that the book describes—Central Asia Institute or CAI. Evidence had surfaced that his stay in the village of Korphe, and his promise to build a school there, did not directly follow from his failed attempt to climb the Himalayan mountain K2 in 1993 and getting lost on the descent as he had written, and he was not really kidnapped by the Taliban. Krakauer is explicit about the questionable accounting practices that Mortenson practiced and later claimed as but instances of a naïve guy who suddenly and miraculously finds himself at the head of a large business enterprise. Not only did many of the members of the CAI charity’s Board of Trustees resign due to Mortenson’s inadequate reporting of expenses—for example, he was using expensive private jets to travel for speaking engagements—but also money that was collected from schoolchildren in the United States to pay for “teachers’ salaries, student scholarships, school supplies, basic operating expenses” (Krakauer, 41) was not spent in these designated ways. The total 2009 outlay for such school support amounted to “$612,000” (41). “Most teachers . . . have never received any training from CAI” and “a significant number of CAI schools only exist on paper” (48).

I am not so concerned here with the authenticity or veracity of the text but rather with questioning the desire for authenticity that the text elicits. Neither Three Cups of Tea nor Stones into Schools demands to be read as a reflection of the real. Mortenson’s self-aggrandizing anecdotes often verge on the comical. For example, in Stones into Schools, Mortenson, encouraged by his daughter who had recently read Where the Wild Things Are, dashes out to Gold’s Gym to buy playground equipment to provide to the schools. One day a Taliban fighter arrives, puts down his weapons, and along with his companions, “gleefully sampled the swings, the slide, and the seesaw” (201). The Taliban warrior then decides that he likes the idea of educating girls after all “but [the schools] absolutely must have playgrounds” (201). Immediately seduced upon first contact with US consumer products, the terrorist throws away local traditions, religious beliefs, and historical resentment for the sake of a friendly romp in the sandbox.

Given that Mortenson’s tale is so preposterous, what is surprising is precisely the surprise with which the pundits responded to the revelation that the stories are fiction. As Katha Pollitt asks, “How did Mortenson enchant so many, including knowledgeable people?” (9). Pollitt’s conjectured answer is that: “We’ve gotten used to a certain kind of NGO fairy tale . . . : Heifer International gives a family a farm animal, and in a dozen years, the profits send a daughter to college” (9). The idea of spreading education to girls promises the success of the imperialist dream while shadowing the nightmare of continued extremist attacks on girls and their schools, including insurgents throwing acid on the schoolgirls’ faces, high dropout and low attendance rates, and low quality of curriculum and instruction.¹ Though certainly imperialist clichés and promises saturate Mortenson’s prose, turning US military ventures in Afghanistan into miraculous acts of care, this paper argues that such girls’ school narratives, as Angela McRobbie has recognized, position girls as the carriers of new economic rationalities: “The girl who has benefitted from the equal opportunities now available to her, can be mobilized as the embodiment of the values of the new meritocracy” (721–722). For McRobbie, the girl under neoliberalism is “now a social category understood primarily as being endowed with capacity” (722); she demonstrates the success of the education system as a whole and, on the international plane, becomes the target of worthwhile investment aid in the form of educational aid for the production of “the ideal . . . subject of the new international division of labour” (729), in other words, “gender training to the long term benefit of the global corporations” (729).

Mortenson’s “feel good” narrative of girls’ emancipation through girls’ education builds on a prior positioning of girls’ schools as the crux of the struggle between colonizers and nationalist movements in other postcolonial renditions. For example, in his famous chapter on women revolutionaries, “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz Fanon interprets girls’ schools as methodologically destroying the indigenous national culture. Fanon’s description of girls’ schools have an uncanny similarity to many of the celebratory descriptions that Mortenson, too, constructs: “Much is made of the young student’s prodigious intelligence, her maturity; a picture is painted of the brilliant future that awaits those eager young creatures, and it is none too subtly hinted that it would be criminal if the child’s schooling were interrupted. The shortcomings of colonized society are conceded, and it is proposed that the young student be sent to boarding school in order to spare the parents the criticism of ‘narrow-minded neighbors’” (fn. 39). In keeping, Mortenson promotes the girls’ school as the crux of social change in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the culture that the schools are instituting is constantly extolled as a new economic culture, in this instance as the culture of the sweatshop: “In a disused room at the back of Hafi Ali’s home, Korphe’s women gathered each afternoon, learning to use the four new Singer hand-crank sewing machines Mortenson purchased, under the tutelage of Fida, a master Skardu tailor . . . ‘Balti already had a rich tradition of sewing and weaving,” Mortenson says. ‘They just needed some help to revive the dying practice’” (Mortenson amd Relin, 2006: 193). Mortenson uses the schools and the girls they are meant to benefit as praise-worthy examples of such overcoming of indigenous culture, traditions, and practices, imposing in their place technological rationality and the temporality of the machine. Mortenson’s girls’ schools also establish a transformation into neoliberal economic relations: public sphere destruction, military benevolence,² and private initiative. Every instance of public involvement, for Mortenson, ends in tragedy that Mortenson’s heroic construction of schools will alleviate: for example, “the few permanent government school buildings that had been reconstructed were inappropriate, having been raised directly over the footprints of the old schools, and with the same techniques that were responsible for the structural failures that had killed so many children” (Stones, 219). Girls in schools come to represent a naturalized relationality and cooperative ethic that exist outside of external state controls and systems’ regulations, or, as Krakauer cites Mortenson, outside of “government scrutiny into our operation” (57), as unmediated market potential.

This paper argues that Mortenson’s construction of girls’ education as the cornerstone of imperialist policy participates in a literary tradition of a girls’ school genre that develops an economic rationality through displaying a common sense about girls. In its early twentieth-century form, as Patricia Tilburg notes, girls’ school narratives “became . . . a kind of shorthand for feminine success” with the girls’ school depicted “as a powerfully modern and powerfully female public space” (77). I show here how imperialist culture has co-opted the figure of rebellion that girls’ school narratives have developed, to represent the problem of the marketability of women’s work. As imperialist narratives merge into the girls’ school trope, women’s work turns to being a display of women’s compliance with regimes of capitalization. This change in the literary role of women’s work for the imperialist context has migrated into the social scientific justification in policy debates over girls’ education, separate schooling, and “choice.”

Girls’ Schools in the Social Sciences

Though feminists have been critical of the move towards same-sex education because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes (American Association of University Women), public single-sex schooling and single-sex classroom options were incorporated in the school choice rhetoric of the “No Child Left Behind” era. Under the premise that public schools were failing, single-sex schools were championed as one option that might improve achievement levels for some children. However, the research routinely shows that single-sex classrooms have no proven or provable effect on educational “success.” “There remains no strong evidence,” Andrew McCreary, for example, states, and there is virtual consensus about this among researchers, “for the concurrent or long-term effects of these policies and no federal structure for uniformly studying those effects” (492). As the US Department of Education’s report from its “Policy and Program Studies Service” sums up, “Any positive effects of SS [single-sex] schooling on longer-term indicators of academic achievement are not readily apparent. No differences were found for postsecondary test scores, college graduation rates, or graduate school attendance rates” (xv). The research on the effectiveness and benefits of single-sex public education is inconclusive, anecdotal at best. Researchers note that single-sex schooling expanded at the same time as high-stakes testing and accountability regimes were also expanding, blending together the effects of each. “There are no guarantees,” Herr and Arms analyze in the existing empirical data, “that simply separating the sexes creates an equitable learning environment or one that interrupts stereotypical and racial arrangements” (548). Salomone pronounces that most of the disparities measured between girls’ and boys’ performance can be said to be due to race or economic disadvantage since “the data make clear that the convergence of race, culture, and class present a complex set of social factors that reach well beyond the conventional girl-boy argument” (113). Part of the problem in the social science perspectives is, throughout, a lack of clear articulation of the intentions of single-sex schooling and what would count as “success”: whether what is sought is higher “achievement,” graduation rates, indicators of future effect (such as income or employment), or equality. Because of this indistinctness in outcomes, what counts as inputs often also seems variable and arbitrary, apart from the fact that such inputs are to be isolated from other potential influences.

Though single-sex schooling has no discernable scientific evidence that it “succeeds” or analysis of what would count as its “success,” in the United States, 400 public schools have arisen in 37 states and the District of Columbia (McNeil)³ along with 445 sex-segregated classrooms for the purpose of solving “sagging test scores and behavioral problems” (Medina).⁴ Though Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act enacted in 1972 explicitly denies federal funding to institutions that discriminate on the basis of sex, the George W. Bush administration in 2006 loosened its provisions, allowing the expansion of single-sex classrooms and schools in order to create alternative possibilities for raising achievement and competition. Constantly trying to justify school segregation by evoking sexed bodies as evidence of different types of aptitude and, contingently, future employability, the debates about single-sex schooling produce gendered subjectivities in order to position the child’s body as the promise of a potential productivity, of differential market access. I show here how the debates over single-sex schooling serve to call upon and preserve the nature of the gendered body as underscoring the division of labor under neoliberalism, and to entrench the division of labor in the pledge of advancing prosperity.

In order to literalize these differences in the sexed body as grounded in fact, researchers often turn to the body. Rosemary C. Salomone, for example, declares, “Sex is irreducibly biological with an overlay of social considerations that define gender” (120). As Munira Moon Charania notes, anxiety about all-girls’ schooling resonates with a “public anxiety surrounding girls’ bodies” (306), situating girls’ bodies as “the symbols of both cultural continuity and cultural crisis” (307). This frequent recourse to the body in the social science literature most often passes through a reference to the writings of Leonard Sax, MD, PhD. Sax’s thesis is that “girls and boys behave differently” and learn differently “because their brains are wired differently” (28). In his book Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax supports his thesis by asserting that girls have better hearing than boys because of the configuration of their ears. Sax does not then recommend separating children on the basis of hearing ability but rather recommends a wholesale embrace of gendered classrooms on the basis that girls are more easily distracted by soft noises. Such hard-wiring makes girls better at reading and boys better at math and Grand Theft Auto while also explaining why men are interested in pornography when women are not. Furthermore, these brain-determined differences in hearing translate, for Dr. Sax, into irreparable differences in risk-taking, attention, self-esteem, aggression, and income. In response to the special configuration of their ears, girls process emotions through the cerebral cortex where the higher language functioning is located and therefore learn better through talking while boys learn better through doing. The gender differences that Dr. Sax spots in his learning bodies build toward a core understanding that boys move and girls do not, and girls relate while boys do not. Because of their hard-wiring, a girl learns through talking, relating, cooperating, collaborating, not acting. A 2011 study in Science has found Dr. Sax’s recommendations based on misinformation, debunked science, and stereotypes.

As McRobbie underscores, such visibility of the sexed body produces an understanding of sexed bodies and subjectivities as carriers of economic capacity in ways that suit the economic layout of the present. Such science that explains how girls learn differently often draws on feminist research—like the work of Carol Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow, and Nel Noddings—to illustrate that girls respond to situations by relating cooperatively to others rather than through abstract principles, even though these analyses are based in historicalized socialization processes rather than essential gender types. The (boy’s) m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   Theory
• Part II   Praxis
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index