education - americanization

A School of Their Own is a documentary about the Riverside School and its poor, low-caste children. Even though the film mainly portrays the children’s struggle to learn it alluded over and over again to Nepal’s struggle for democracy. My thoughts about the movie are two-sided. The white immigrant built a school based on progressive education that was born in the West. It promotes values such as equality and democracy. In Western eyes however, Nepal’s society and education is outdated and full of inequities, totally neglecting cultural relativism and hundreds of years of history. As a result, the white principle establishes certain rules (50% of the students have to be female and teachers in the school are not allowed to refer to a child’s caste) to enforce what is ‘right’ in eyes of an outsider from the West. Education becomes ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization. ’

So far, we discussed different pedagogies such as critical and progressive education in a Western context. But what is good for the American society is not necessarily good for very poor countries and the rest of the world, even in terms of education. Considering cultural relativism, is it even possible to find a universal pedagogy that can be implemented internationally?