11 - Education as an Antidote to Underdevelopment, and the Epistemicide That It Has Entailed

Summary

Introduction

Many children's first year of schooling is a mixture of excitement, wonder, and a bit of apprehension at the novelty of being away from the comforts, reassurances, and familiarities of life at home. In most cases, however, the child quickly assimilates to their new surroundings, integrating seamlessly into the educational atmosphere. Despite the novelty of unfamiliar settings and new faces, the school environment is customarily similar to the homes and communities from where they have come.

Yet, for an indigenous Mayan child from rural Guatemala, that first school experience presumably leads to foreseeable distress at the substantial variances between the community/family life they have known and the school environment they perceive. The difference in language is, of course, the first palpably felt shock. Though there may be a bilingual teacher that helps the child ease into the new language, the majority of classes from the beginning are taught in Spanish. Thus, the first years of schooling serve as a compulsory introduction into a language that is not their own, a language that is a requisite for entry into the world of education. The child quickly learns to segregate and compartmentalize the two languages: their Mayan language for home use and Spanish as mandatory for their schooling.

The physical structure of the school environment is also different. In rural communities, where adobe and wood homes abound, the tidily painted cinder block walls of the school are yet another striking disparity that the child perceives. Tile floors that smell of bleach and disinfectant certainly do not resemble the earthen floors and walls permeated with the smell of smoke from the constant wood fire of their home kitchen.

As the school's central authority figure, the teacher is also unmistakably different from the parents, grandparents, and other elders within their community. Though the teacher is most likely of shared ethnic identity, she may not wear traditional dress and may only intermittently throw in a few words of the children's mother tongue while doing her best to look and speak like a Ladino.

After these initial, corporeal impressions begin to fade into a new and enforced normalcy, the educational content of the subsequent years of schooling also creates a sense of discord from the place and culture of the child's upbringing.