Have you heard of development education?

Richard Casson explains how education can be used as a powerful force for building a fairer world, and how development issues can be brought into the classroom through development education.

Development Education brings global issues into formal education Oxfam's development education website resource 'Mapping our World' recently won a BAFTA Development education teaches us about the vast injustices in the world“

School. For the people in the world who are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go, it’s a place where you can learn many things – the ins and outs of Shakespearean sonnets, how to solve quadratic equations or how to play football with a flattened Pepsi can while using jumpers for goalposts. I for one am immensely grateful that I was able to go to school. But although formal education did me a lot of good, it didn’t really help me to think beyond what immediately affected me. It’s only since leaving school that I’ve been made aware of the massive injustices that there are in the world, and that I’ve realised that there’s something missing from formal education.

Many parts of our world are in crisis economically, politically and ecologically because of attitudes and values that are geared towards the acquisition of wealth and self-interest. Oxfam is well aware of the need to address this and encourage people to think about how co-operation and understanding are essential for everyone’s future.

So, how do we address these attitudes? There’s campaigning of course, but is campaigning enough when the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor continues to increase? How do we make sure that from the earliest possible age people develop attitudes and beliefs that will help us to build a better world? The answer (or at least part of it) is through school, of course.

School has such a huge impact on us. It’s at school that we learn so much of what we need for later life. A sense of obligation towards others; respect for the cultures and lifestyles of all people; a willingness to challenge inequality, injustice, racism, and bias - these are all values that should underpin much of our learning. Luckily, Oxfam and other organisations are well aware of this and work to promote development issues through formal education. This part of Oxfam’s work is called development education, and there’s actually a whole team dedicated to it.

Development education is about making children aware of the interdependent world we live in. It teaches about issues of justice and fairness, and promotes positive attitudes and values in relation to all of the world’s people. Ever been bored sitting in an English lesson, copying the teacher’s notes on spelling, punctuation and grammar? Well, development education takes a different approach with teaching methods too, and uses hands-on teaching that helps children to stand-up for issues they care about – after all, we’re only going to change the world if we feel empowered to do so.

Development education is something that I believe is vitally important to help children to think about their place in the world and the consequences of how they live their lives. I was recently reading through a development education teaching resource and came across the following letter from a Holocaust survivor to a teacher. I don’t think there could be a more powerful argument for Development Education than this:

“Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicists; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.
My request is: help your students to become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they are to make our children more human.”