IN TANZANIA
U. S. MISSIONARIES’ VIEWS OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND CHOICE IN EDUCATION
To return to the side of the U.S. missionaries, and to a sociocultural analy- sis of the context within which the missionaries propose their English-lan- guage program to Tanzanians, it becomes necessary to step outside the immediate logic of the missionaries’ arguments and examine the assump- tions upon which they rest. The missionaries’ introduction of choice pro- gramming into Tanzania needs to be understood within the context of two assumptions that thread through American society: one, the idea that for- eign aid, particularly in the form of education (and specifically English- language instruction) can alleviate poverty and provide access to world mar- kets; and two, an assumption that parental involvement in choice options in education will result in expanded post-educational opportunity and changes within the government system. In this section, I will demonstrate how these assumptions manifest themselves in the missionaries’ work in eastern Africa, and I will discuss how they resonate with Tanzanians’ experiences.
It is perhaps easiest to illustrate a belief in the idea that foreign aid in the form of language instruction can alleviate poverty by repeating the mes- sage expressed in the missionary’s comments above about the value of the English-medium language program: that the English-language program has
the potential to give “parents the choice of educating their children in a world language” and to enable Tanzanian students to get “into business” and
“out of this poverty.” The missionary’s message evinces a belief in an updated version of human capital theory. As Patrick Fitzsimons (1994, 1999) dis- cusses, human capital theory is one of the most influential economic theo- ries of public education. It operates according to a belief that education maximizes an individual’s economic potential and that the economic health of a nation is the sum of its citizens’ productivity. In an updated version, human capital theory is reformulated to produce a new role for education (OECD 1997); education is now seen as having the potential for moving in- dividuals beyond the realm of the nation-state. This updated version stresses that education and training are “key to participation in the new global econ- omy” (Fitzsimons 1999) and emphasizes that investment in financial mar- kets and electronic skills take priority over skills that contribute to the manufacture of commodities.
The missionaries’ belief that English-language instruction can alleviate poverty also rests on an assumption that people always act on the basis of their own economic self-interest. This assumption informs human capital theory and is modeled around a particular notion that individuals act singly and with relatively few constraints put on them by others. The missionaries’
expectation is that parents will choose English instruction for their children for the reason that their children’s command of the language will further par- ents’ own interest, as well as that of their children. However, human capital theory has been criticized for dismissing the pull of social groups on indi- viduals’ decisions and for assuming that all decisions are made on the basis of maximizing economic self-interest (Block 1990). If the set of Tanzanian parents who were concerned that English would erode the symbolic value of Kiswahili is any indication, some parents are not always operating according to principles of maximizing self-interest but on principles that stress the maintenance of group ties.
The missionaries’ belief that parental involvement in choice options in education will result in expanded post-educational opportunities reflects an assumption that individuals operate freely within competitive markets and that competition maximizes individuals’ opportunities. In contemporary human capital theory, “human behaviour is based on the economic self- interest of individuals operating within freely competitive markets. Other forms of behaviour are excluded or treated as merely distortions of the model”
(Fitzsimons 1999; see also Fitzsimons 1994). State programs, such as publicly financed systems of education, are seen from this viewpoint as artificially con- trolled and noncompetitive. Human capital theorists—largely those who
contribute to today’s educational policymaking—regard centralized state ed- ucation systems as undesirable on the grounds that they are bureaucratically top-heavy and inefficient. Choice in education becomes desirable from within the human capital framework for creating more choices and generat- ing competition that, in turn, improves the main system of public education.
In the United States, such thinking lies behind a growing trend toward choice programs in education. The “economic fallacy” of the argument—the misconception that economics resides outside of culture (Marginson 1993:25 cited in Fitzsimons 1999)—is made all the more apparent in non-U.S. set- tings where markets, education, and the concept of choice have all been lay- ered onto historically and culturally non-Western understandings of transaction and personhood and imbued with alternative registers of mean- ing. The concept of choice and the logical machinations of markets in East Africa are complex sociocultural phenomena. They play into a dynamic of in- terpersonal relations that are sometimes expressed in terms that are very for- eign to Americans (see, for example, Ciekawy 1998, on sorcery and witchcraft), and they emerge within a historical context that sometimes asso- ciates education with Western power. The missionaries’ original thinking—
that the English-language program would attract a large group of Tanzanian parents looking to have a “say” in their children’s education and looking to implement an English-medium government primary school—took a turn in direction toward a more missionary-led enterprise when only a handful of parents spoke in support of an English medium primary school and only a very few viewed the program as a form of choice. Whereas many parents sent their children to the four-week program with the hopes that their children’s English-language skills would improve, none worked actively to support the program and none linked it to a wider English-language movement for school choice. The mother in the second set of parents above noted that
parents know a good thing even though they know it’s flawed. They’re not going to notenroll their children in the program when they know their children could get something out of it. But neither are they going to en- dorse it wholesale.
Parental involvement remained an ideal, but in reality, the program was mis- sionary led.
That some parents had questions about the language program may be an indication that the cultural calculus at play among some Tanzanians was not one of freely competitive markets but of markets differentially controlled by some groups and not by others. Such is certainly a consideration that the
second set of parents had in mind when they said that Tanzanian parents, not visiting missionaries, should set the parameters of language instruction.
For between the degree to which the missionaries took charge of the project and the context within which the Tanzanian parents interpreted and even re- jected the concept of parental involvement in education, the English- language program was hardly a replica of choice programming in the United States. It interfaced with a historically and culturally very different system in Tanzania and with a different history of parental involvement in education.
Yet on the surface, missionaries and local officials continued to call the pro- gram a “choice” and continued to encourage the teaching of the English lan- guage—two aspects that might suggest a convergence in form and a move toward an overarching world system of education. In the final section, I will consider the deeper question of the directionality of institutional forms in education. In particular, I will ask whether an emphasis on interpreting commonality of institutional forms is not itself a reflection of a core cultural dynamic—or, for that matter, if an emphasis on “difference” is not also a part of a larger cultural creation.
WORLD-CULTURAL AND
ANTHROPOLOGICAL VIEWS OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND CHOICE IN EDUCATION Since at least the mid-1950s, with the rise of studies in comparative educa- tion, an ongoing dichotomy of views has prevailed (Kazamias and Schwartz 1977): that of whether local practices influence institutional forms or whether institutional reforms reflect a universal goal and, in turn, shape local practices. Cultural anthropologists tend to weigh in with the former point of view; world-culture sociologists tend to support the latter. Yet, as Andrew Strathern argued several years ago, the two views logically entail one another:
Locally interpreted narratives give force to . . . universal categories, yet these same categories reenter the narratives as [a] means of interpreting them. The movement of thought is thus not simply linear, but also recur- sive or circular at certain points. (Strathern 1995:178)
Any consideration of transnational educational policies needs to account for this recursive dynamic (cf. Kinoshita 2002). The task is not one of identify- ing what is universal or converging, nor to label and minutely specify what is unique about each situation, but to address how locally interpreted narra- tives give force to universal categories andhow universal categories give force
to local narratives. In essence, universal categories are historical and
“transnational”; they do not exist uniformly everywhere nor do they operate under the same conditions. Categories of choice and parent involvement, for instance, are carried from one locale to another and are imbued with mean- ings that are sometimes incommensurate.
In Tanzania, the case of missionaries promoting parental choice in gov- ernment schools illustrates how transnational categories of choice and human capital theory catalyze local narratives about economy and parental involvement. Tanzanian parents’ views of history, of aid, and of Western im- perialism are tied to colonialism, to local registers of economy (Ciekawy 1998), and to particular positions and perspectives on a world system. Mis- sionaries’ views of “choice,” though introduced as a universal frame, are tied, in contrast, to American-historical ideals of freedom and autonomy and to beliefs about the rights of individuals to have a say in education—ideals and beliefs that play out differently in local settings in Tanzania and the United States. Missionary choice proposals lend support to Tanzanian arguments that Kiswahili isa choice. Missionary proposals to maximize student oppor- tunity by involving parents in education raises awareness among Tanzanians that Tanzanian parents have long been involved in education and that some aspects of life, such as social unity derived through the symbolic value of Kiswahili, are worth more than individuals’ outward, global mobility.
Examined from another direction, that of how Tanzanian narratives in- form and partly alter the missionaries’ ideas and programs, the local narra- tives of some Tanzanian parents reinscribe missionary categories of choice within a more contextualizing, less universalizing framework by showing that choices are not the same everywhere. If choice is truly an open con- struct, then choices will be variable. Instead of choosing to school their chil- dren in English-medium primary schools, some parents now choose to continue with Kiswahili. Others choose to enroll in the program but con- tend that parent involvement in educational programming is not new. In these ways, the choices the missionaries introduce reenter Tanzanian narra- tives as a means of making and interpreting educational policy differently.
The uneven reinscription of local beliefs and practices is key to under- standing why cultural forms appear to be isomorphic. The missionaries’ par- ticular registers of economy and ideals of freedom (which rest, as it were, on internationally dominant theories of human capital) are more likely than some Tanzanians’ to be taken up in institutionalized forms of schooling. Un- even access to and control of resources leads to some beliefs gaining stronger footing in the category termed “universal.” This is why similar forms appear;
but similar forms do not mean cultural uniformity.
For the present chapter, it is important to note that even from a world-cul- tural perspective in which institutional forms are seen as universal and con- verging, choice programming in Tanzanian education is a tenuous phenomenon. Within the limited scope of the English-language program I have described here, the program has all the characteristics that any typical choice program might have in the United States: a stated commitment to parental involvement and institutional flexibility, and an institutional structure that merges private organizations (the mission and its summer youth ministry program) with public institutions of education (the Tanzanian system of gov- ernment primary schools). Yet the program attracts parents who note that they already have a history of involvement in their children’s education and who are aware of larger cultural contradictions between the government system of pub- lic education and their cultural beliefs and practices. It is also implemented less as a choice that is parent driven than as an intervention that is mission led.
In view of the complexities of introducing choice programming into the system of education in Tanzania, it might be reasonable to answer one of this volume’s overarching questions—What is the significance of a global culture if it exists at all, even in the most superficial form?—by saying that to the U.S.
missionaries involved in this language project, the significance is very great: A global culture is what promises to move Tanzanians from poverty, and the free- dom and opportunity to choose English-language instruction is a precursor to that. To Tanzanian parents, the answer might be that a global culture threat- ens to erode something intangible they identify as “culture” and that they see is present in Kiswahili. The parents discussed here are not any more “particu- laristic” in their cultural views than the missionaries are “universalistic.” That is, even though the missionaries’ views are more likely to be taken up in the institutionalized forms of schooling, both missionaries and Tanzanians have localized visions of universal forms of schooling. In fact, as described, the transnational category of choice in education is itself tied to local understand- ings of economy and interpersonal relations. Both missionaries and Tanzani- ans express an understanding of local differences and universal categories. If anything might be noted as different between them, however, it would be that the missionaries work for an unquestioned view of the global, while the Tan- zanian parents clearly express an alternative to the missionaries’ belief in Eng- lish and in choice programming as a universal.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This chapter is based on fieldwork funded by the Spencer Foundation and the Uni- versity of Wisconsin–Madison. I am grateful to the Tanzania Commission for Sci-
ence and Technology (COSTECH) for granting me permission to conduct research in Tanzania and to Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Stacey J. Lee for their helpful sug- gestions in preparing this chapter for publication.
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