Professional Self-Fashioning: Minority Students Educated in the Majority Schooling

• In Event: Hope for Communities in the Margins: Life-Long Learning

Proposal

This research revisits the discourse which dominated development studies in states that just came out of colonialism, the so-called “Third World,” in the 1960s and 70s, when education was viewed as an agent of social and economic change. Constructs such as ‘modern man’ and ‘human capital’ figured in the discourse that structured education. Phillip Foster’s Education and Social Change in Ghana and his chapter “The Vocational School Fallacy in Development Planning” (1966 &1965) are analyzed as representative texts exposing the discourse of the diffusion and impact of Western education patterns transferred to African societies in the name of eradicating so-called “underdevelopment.” Foster’s own field study examining the aspirations and expectations of fifth-form students in 1961 Ghana led him to describe the relationship of education to society and the economy like this:

Those who criticized the ‘irrational’ nature of African demand for ‘academic’ as
opposed to ‘vocational’ education fail to recognize that the strength of academic education has lain precisely in the fact that it is preeminently a vocational education. (1965 p.145).

We juxtapose what Foster influentially identified as a vocational fallacy with a contemporary case study, that of the education of Negev Bedouins, an involuntary minority within the larger minoritized Arab-Palestinian citizenry in a majority-Jewish state. Students left behind the local public Arabic-language system to join a rigorous academic program in the majority school system with a different (Jewish) ethnic, religion, political, and cultural milieu. The young Bedouin professionals who followed this educational route told us in interviews how they experienced their vocational self-fashioning, negotiating selves in the interstices between societies. The narratives we collected enabled us to highlight some constituent elements of minority resistance to the education these young Bedouins were compelled to pursue under internal colonialization. The reality of ‘separate but equal’ policies turned parents and their children into grassroots subversives who took the metaphor ‘education is a weapon’ literally.

These young Negev Bedouin resisted not only assimilation into the majority (Hebrew-speaking) culture, but also the clan-based leadership patterns of their own society, shifting their own sense of social worth and status from inherited prestige to education and professionalism.

In refusing to perform stereotypical traditional minority identities, our interviewees force us to re-frame their education as the best vocational training, showing that the sacrifice they have
undertaken enabled them to achieve the kind of lives they have reason to value. The recognition
of the power of a rigorous ‘academic’ program that opens the door of higher education and the
professions permeates their narratives. Introspection marks their descriptions of how they
differed from their peers in traditional upbringing, language, knowledge ecologies, and
vocational aspirations. “Far from being irrational, the preference for white-collar employment
was entirely rational: in effect, 'academic' education was essentially a form of 'vocational'
training” (Foster, 1992 p,150). What was true of the young Ghanians and their parents in Foster’s classic study also holds true for the young Bedouin professionals we interviewed.

Author

• Esther E. Gottlieb, The Ohio State University