Peripheral Visions

for the origins of twelve different tribes. More sibling rivalry leads to Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt, where he becomes a visionary and gains great influence. Famine follows, and with Joseph’s help all twelve households settle in Egypt, continuing to be so prolific that over time they are reduced to slavery, and then Pharaoh goes on to command the murder of all male infants. A story of conflict between brothers becomes a story of conflict between nations, but both conflicts grow from the conviction that behavior is driven by scarcity.

Learning as Coming Home
    I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED in one way or another in the educational system of each of the countries where I have lived. In Israel, at sixteen, I learned Hebrew in order to join a high school class and take the national matriculation examination, an outsider discovering myself through a process of accelerated learning. In the Philippines I taught at the Ateneo de Manila, the Jesuit university that runs right up from elementary school through the graduate faculties. In Iran, as a parent, I was trying to make intelligent decisions about schooling for Vanni in an unfamiliar environment, as well as teaching at two institutions and working on the planning of two others. Vanni as a child used to believe everyone had a school: Mommy’s school, Daddy’s school, Vanni’s school, but mine kept getting shifted. At one point, the government decided to build a university in Hamadan, emphasizing local crafts and industries, teacher training, and primary health care, a regional university that would not alienate its students from their traditions—but the plan became mixed up with a project to have a university conducted in each of several European languages, so it was decided grotesquely that this local learning should be transmitted in French.
    Because I am one of those people who felt at home in school and have gone on hanging around schools all my life, I keep catching myself drifting into an insidious equation of learning with education and, more narrowly still, with schooling. Setting out to talk about learning, which pervades all of life, I find myself talking about school, from which most people are happy to be liberated. Yet school casts a shadow on all subsequent learning. Trying to understand learning by studying schooling is rather like trying to understand sexuality by studying bordellos. Certainly schooling is part of the spectrum of learning in human lives, but it is not the model for all learning, only one of many byways. Learning and teaching are both fundamental for human adaptation, but not all human societies segregate them from the flow of life into institutional boxes.
    Once in the Philippines I was invited to give a commencement address at an institution on the southern island of Mindanao, Notre Dame de Jolo. This was for me a curious convergence, for although the faculty were mainly Catholic priests, a majority of the student body were Muslims (called Moros in the Philippines, echoing Spanish attitudes toward the Moors). The priest who arranged the invitation hoped I would bring from Manila an association with higher education elsewhere in the Philippines and at the same time evoke the wider Islamic world. Reaching into the past, I was able to open with a few words in Arabic, recognizable to the students but not intelligible. While I was there in Jolo, I met an Egyptian, trained at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the scholastic center of Islam, sent to elevate Islamic knowledge and practice at that remote frontier. “They are like animals,” he said. “They are so ignorant they hardly count as Muslims at all.” There have been in human history many forms of racism, many forms of imperialism, and many forms of paternalism. Since that time, propelled by oil revenues, out-reach to Muslim communities remote from Islamic scholarship has increased steadily, whether in the former Soviet Union or in the United States. No doubt increasing sophistication has led to increasing tact. The same kinds of views, with varying degrees of paternalism, were expressed by Spanish friars and by secular American administrators. Daniel Schirmer quotes Fred Atkinson, the first general superintendent of education in the U.S. administration of the Philippines: “The Filipino people, taken as a body, are children, and childlike, do not know what is best for them.”
    Subject peoples are often “treated like children,” in the worst sense; so, alas, are children.