Learning the Wrong Lesson: Local Challenges to Educational Reform

Abstract

There is little dispute that the school plays a major role in the narrative of the modern nation. It is one of the central institutions expected to service the state’s ambition to inculcate in its society a sense of citizenship, loyalty, and general obedience. It is also connected to the process of building a collective identity, both by disseminating a common narrative about historical claims and by codifying the national language. In this respect, scholars have assumed that the early efforts to expand education to previously “uneducated” communities is at the heart of the requisite modernization process and thus a logical source for much of what we today associate with ethnonational identity. Accompanying these associations is the logical assumption that such investments in education necessarily had the important socioeconomic, cultural, and, finally, political impact on targeted communities.¹