Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations

The Karen and the Gift of Education

Pia Jolliffe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137572189
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

Focusing on the Karen people in Burma, Thailand and the United Kingdom, this book analyses how global, regional and local developments affect patterns of learning. It combines historical and ethnographic research to explore the mutual shaping of intergenerational relations and children's practical and formal learning within a context of migration and socio-political change. In this endeavour, Pia Jolliffe discusses traditional patterns of socio-cultural learning within Karen communities as well as the role of Christian missionaries in introducing schooling to the Karen in Burma and in Thailand. This is followed by an analysis of children's migration for education in northern Thailand where state schools often encourage students' aspirations towards upward social mobility at the same time as schools reproduce social inequality between the rural Karen and urban Thai society. The author draws attention to international humanitarian agencies who deliver education to refugees and migrants at the Thai-Burma border, as well as the role of UK government schools in the process of resettling Karen refugees. In this way, the book analyses the connections between learning, migration and intergenerational relations in households, schools and other institutions at the local, regional and global level.

© The Author(s) 2016

Pia JolliffeLearning, Migration and Intergenerational RelationsPalgrave Studies on Children and Development10.1057/978-1-137-57218-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Pia Jolliffe¹

(1)

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

End Abstract

Around the world, schooling and other forms of education shape the lives of children and their communities. During her own school reunion, the Noble Peace Prize Laureate from Burma, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, addressed her former school friends from the Methodist English High School in Rangoon in a speech emphasizing the communal and intergenerational aspect of education: ‘Education is about to enable us to meet any challenge that life might throw at us, not just for ourselves but for those with whom we live. And those with whom we live are not just those in the family or town or country, but in this world today’ (Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, transcript from video tape Methodist English High School, Burma Reunion 4th& 5th January 2013). As a matter of fact, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals are committed to improving access to primary education as an important means to promote gender equality and empower women. Indeed, in 2015 the primary school net enrolment rate in poor countries has reached 91 % and the literacy rate among youth aged 15–24 years has increased globally to 91 %. The gap between educated women and men has also narrowed (United Nations 2015: 4–5). In spite of this progress, many children are still excluded from formal education systems and those who access school feel they are not learning the skills they need for their adult lives (Department for International Development 2013: 4). According to the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2015 worldwide there were around 58 million children who were not attending school and around 100 million children who dropped out of primary school. Out-of-school children often come from poor families and frequently live in conflict zones. As a consequence, many young people lack the formal skills they need for the white-collar jobs they aspire to have in the future. Therefore, within a global context of neo-liberal markets and economic restructuring, it is increasingly necessary that the learning needs of children and young people as well as adults are met through equal access to learning programmes that encourage sociocultural skills (Banerjee and Duflo 2011: 74; Pells and Woodhead 2014: 42–44; UNESCO 2015: 110–111). This is particularly relevant in settings where increased aspirations for schooling impact on intergenerational relations, as parents invest in the education of their children and expect them to become bearers of knowledge and skills (Wagner 2015: 14). This book develops the interplay between learning, migration and intergenerational relations through the experiences of Karen boys and girls at different historical times and different geographical locations. The Karen value education as a gift that cannot be immediately reciprocated. As one research participant put it: ‘I really believe in education. So, to give some education is a gift, priceless’ (Nant Bwa Bwa Phan, interview, 10 April 2015). Anthropological theory questions the gratuitousness of a gift (Hendry and Underdown 2012: 65). In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski described how the economic system of the Trobriand Islanders is based on a system of gift exchange. Gifts included very big long shells, curved tusks and fine long necklaces. The opening gift of the exchange always has to be reciprocated by a counter-gift. Yet, just so these gifts do not end up as barter, the gift exchange requires that gifts are of different nature and also the passage of time between giving and returning a gift is mandatory. If a person is for a longer while not able to return a gift equivalent in value to the gift given, he can meanwhile use intermediary gifts of inferior value to fill in the gap. As soon as a gift of equivalent value has been returned the transaction of giving and receiving is concluded by a clinching gift (Malinowski 1922: 352–358). According to Mauss (¹1925), the act of giving and receiving gifts tells about power relationships between two parties because ‘the bond established between donor and recipient is too strong for both of them (...) the recipient puts himself in a position of dependence vis-à-vis the donor’. Yet the power relations thus established differ from markets: ‘It is all a matter of etiquette, it is not like in the market where, objectively, and for a price, one takes something. Nothing is unimportant. Contracts, alliances, the passing of goods, the bonds created by these goods passing between those giving and receiving—this form of economic morality takes account of all this. The nature and intention of the contacting parties, the nature of the thing given, are all indivisible’ (Mauss 1990: 76–77). In this study I suggest considering education as a non-material gift, because similar to material gift exchanges, education always engages people in permanent commitments, therefore creating and sustaining relationships between educators and pupils of different ages. This intergenerational dimension is important to understanding processes of giving and receiving education. Like other gifts, education cannot in most instances be reciprocated immediately. Time is needed to return the intellectual and practical benefits of learning. While this is often a question of years, sometimes it may only take hours for children to bring new knowledge home and cause change in the economy of the household. Conversely, when young people miss the chance to return what they received, they remain indebted towards their elders. In this case, the value of education as a priceless gift is called into question. This is particularly relevant for humanitarian aid in refugee situations (Harrell-Bond 1999) and in modern economies where young people increasingly migrate for secondary and tertiary education, but are left without meaningful employment (Boyden and Crivello 2014; Kabeer 2000: 473). The book also relates to a conceptual framework that recognizes that education is about different learning processes and learning contexts ranging from formal and highly structured settings (for example schools with professional teachers) to informal highly structured processes (for example government sponsored or non-state forms of education, such as independent school projects for refugees), formal unstructured processes (for example when children learn informally from their peers at school) and informal settings where learning takes place informally (for example transmission of sociocultural learning at home). Recognizing how these areas operate in interdependence allows us to discern how children not only learn at school, but also learn at home from their parents and grandparents. Such a framework is also sensitive to social dissonance during childhood.

Childhood and Sociopolitical Change

The various stages of the life course are shaped by cultural and sociopolitical contexts (Giddens and Sutton 2015: 346). In his The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (¹1905), Max Weber describes the individual’s embeddedness into the structures of the capitalist economic order which ‘forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the “market”, the norms of its economic activity’ (Weber 2002: 13). Today’s sociopolitical context of globalization is about the expansion of neoliberal markets and modern institutions throughout the world. Since the 1970s the flow of capital has increasingly disengaged from governmental restrictions. In the following years, circulation of capital and ideas across borders created new interdependencies and inequalities between northern and southern world regions. The local lives of citizens in poorer regions of the world have increasingly been linked to international markets, institutions and political developments (Harvey 2007: 89). For example, the pollution of water, often affects the world’s poorest populations the most because they have no means to buy bottled water or move into areas safe from development-induced natural disaster (Francis 2015: 26). ‘Social media may serve to critique or to support dominant political system (...) world communicate with their political representations outside as well as inside their home countries through the use of mobile phones and the internet (Green and Lockley 2012).’ On the other hand, nation-states may use social media to nationalism. For example, Huijsmans and Lan (2015) evidence how young peoples’ everyday use of mobile phones is related to the forces of Vietnamese nationalism and the neoliberal market economy. Through the use of their mobile phones, young people willingly or unwillingly support these political economic power structures. Globalization therefore is not only about economic change, but also about the development of ideas, cultural and religious practices (Davie 2007: 206). Yet, Western theories of social change focus strongly on nation states, markets and modern institutions in a secularized world. They become problematic when engaging with the complexities of postcolonial settings or the ways in which global forces and culture are played out locally (Gaonkar 1999: 2; Ong 2006: 36). As a matter of fact, the formation of modern institutions outside Western Europe has not followed a similar dynamic, nor are modern institutions operating in a standard way around the world (Chakrabarty 2000: 14). Instead, everyday politics and the working of institutions may be shaped by archaic forms of culture or religion. For example, in her biography, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, describes how in the name of religion the Taliban undermined children and young peoples’ access to school education. By the end of 2008, as many as 400 schools had been destroyed in her native Swat valley, and the government seemed to care little about the situation (Yousafzai 2013: 120). Similar stories have been told from other countries thus highlighting development economists’ point that good politics need to be in place to guarantee good policies (Banerjee and Duflo 2011: 235–236).

The global and the local are therefore always relational. Accordingly, there is a ‘simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations at all geographical scales, from the intimacy of the household to the wide space of trans global connections’ (Massey 1994: 168). At the same time, cultural differences are increasingly deterritorialized because of increasing migration and exchanges between people, capital and ideas (Gupta and Ferguson 2001: 3). Therefore, global economic changes challenge the character of localities, as well as the identities and relationships between the different generations (Appadurai 1995: 41; Ong 2006: 5). Childhood transitions, in contexts of restructuring and globalization are often conceptualized as destabilizing processes. Many discussions on the impact of risk on children’s development of a self-identity draw on the work of the psychologists Erikson and Winnicott in order to highlight the importance of stability and harmony in children’s moral development. According to these theories, dissonance impacts negatively on identity formation causing low self-esteem, shame and other unpleasant feelings among children and youth (Beale-Spencer and Markstrom-Adams 1990: 301). This is particularly relevant for education in multi-ethnic classroom settings, such as in the Burmese migrant context in Thailand (Metro 2013). Also in my fieldwork settings, migration between institutional and geographic locations impacts on ‘ethnicity’. The sociological concept of ‘ethnicity refers to a type of social identity related to “decent and cultural differences” which become effective or active in certain social contexts’ (Giddens and Sutton 2015: 677). Ethnic differences are learned and give meaning to ethnic groups as ‘those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration’ (Weber 2013: 389). Common language, ritual regulation of life and sharing of religious belief may be important but not necessary for the formation of ethnic groups. As a matter of fact, ethnic groups may distinguish themselves through language and religion as well as through material differences (for example economic activities, clothes, food or housing) and associated values of good and proper conduct, honour and dignity (Weber 2013: 391). As outlined later in this chapter, the Karen ethnicity has different meanings at different places. In my own fieldwork, Karen children referred to their ‘Karen’-ethnicity differently depending on the geographic and institutional location. For example, they are proud to wear their ethnic clothes in their highland villages, but try to conceal their ethnicity when studying or working among mainstream Thai people in the lowlands. However, social dissonance and inability to keep ‘fixed identities’ does not necessarily affect children negatively. In fact, the modern emphasis on consonance often denies disagreement and minority opinions. As a consequence non-mainstream voices are frequently marginalized or silenced (Stone 1994: 51). Tan and...