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ABSTRACT.
The country of Cambodia,
located in Southeast Asia, had a long history of oppressive governments and a
deeply held Buddhist acceptance of oppression. Cambodian people believed very
strongly in a strict hierarchical social order where they did not question those
in power. Sadly, Cambodia was best
known throughout the world because the country suffered a terrible genocide from
1975-1979. Led by the notorious Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge regime executed nearly
all of its educated citizens and its teachers, severely crippling the country.
The Cambodian people were deeply traumatized from the experience.
Since 1993, at least $500 million
of foreign aid from Western countries has poured in annually to help Cambodians
rebuild their country. The general consensus among scholars was that the aid
failed to improve the lives of Cambodians. Reasons for this failure included
assumptions made by Western aid workers regarding the nature of Cambodians,
their government, their values, their ideas surrounding education, and their
meta-cognitive abilities.
This study attempted to generate
evidence that Westerners’ lack of understanding of Cambodian culture played a
part in preventing their efforts to help Cambodians. This thesis reported the
results of an online survey given to Westerners who lived and taught in
Cambodia. The purpose of the survey was to question Westerners on their
knowledge of the Cambodian mindset.
Although the number of responses
to the survey was small, some evidence suggested that Western efforts to educate
Cambodians might have failed because Westerns were unaware of aspects of
Cambodian cultural traits that stood in the way of true learning and
comprehension. Read:
Fourth Industrial Revolution 4.0
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By tradition, poverty is primarily a rural phenomenon and
ignorance is servitude.
Majorities are victims of social injustice. The level of
corruption is staggering.
The two most
important institutions like education, and justice systems are neglected, its
future mortgaged, but society is casually unconcerned.
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BACKGROUND.
The Khmer Rouge reign of terror, the
communist Vietnamese occupation, the decades of war and fighting, and a feared
dictatorship significantly shaped Cambodians’ national psyche. Cambodia
continued to be a traumatized nation, and many aspects of Cambodian culture
nearly 40 years after the Khmer Rouge period reflected the pain, trauma, and
lack of loyalty Cambodians feel (Ayers, 2000; Knowles, 2008, Brinkley, 2011).
This was the Cambodian mindset.
It was also well documented that
Cambodians were capable of extreme violence, and virtually incapable of
compromise. The two choices Cambodians felt they had when faced with conflict
was either complete passivity or violence (Brinkley, 2011, p.223). Cambodia was
a country of passive, mistrusting people who were primarily concerned with
appearing agreeable for the sake of personal survival or monetary gain.
Democracy as a concept was
completely foreign to Cambodians. Instead they believed very strongly in the
complex social hierarchy that was dictated by their deeply held, centuries old
Buddhists teachings. Ninety percent of Cambodians were practicing Buddhists, and
Buddhist concepts, such as learned helplessness and complete acceptance of
hardships, were deeply engrained in the culture.
Since the sixth century, the concept
of education for Cambodians had exclusively been the Buddhist ideal of learning
one’s place in the social hierarchy. No schools aside from Buddhist temples
existed in Cambodia until the 1940s, and even as late as the 1960s, a large
percentage of the rural population could neither read nor write.
Cognitive
skills and educational concepts that Westerners took for granted, such as asking
questions, developing critical thinking skills, conceptualizing, and evaluating
had simply never been part of Cambodian education or Cambodian life.
Why did countries around the world
with intentions to help Cambodians become more self-sufficient fail for so many
years?
One major reason for the failure of Western aid was the set of assumptions that Western foreign aid educators had about Cambodian people,
Cambodian culture, Cambodian educational concepts, and Cambodians’
meta-cognitive abilities. Westerners projected an assumed expectation of a
democratic mindset onto Cambodians that did not exist. Most Westerners also
greatly overestimated the meta-cognitive skills of Cambodians because Westerners
were unaware of Cambodian notions of “exclusively obedient education” and the
focus on the social hierarchy.
This thesis attempted to generate
evidence to examine one factor of the failure of foreign aid to improve the
lives of the Cambodian citizenry.
Well-meaning foreigners, who came to train,
teach, or help Cambodians arrived with huge assumptions about the culture. Most
foreign workers greatly underestimated the value Cambodians placed upon the
social hierarchy. Westerners did not understand that they themselves were placed
toward the top of the hierarchy by Cambodians, and therefore Cambodians
outwardly appeared extremely agreeable to them. Likewise, foreign educators
failed to understand the deep mistrust Cambodians felt.
They misinterpreted Cambodians’
passivity for acquiescence and comprehension of the concepts they came to teach.
Foreigners’ Western teaching methods assumed that Cambodians understood how to
manage their own learning in traditionally democratic, Western ways (evaluating,
questioning, analyzing) and that Cambodians asked questions and/or shared their
opinions in a classroom environment. Furthermore, Westerners greatly
overestimated the meta-cognitive capacity of Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge
murdered all of the educated people and left only illiterate, traumatized people
whose Buddhist traditions taught them only to obey and never to question.
DEFINITIONS OF TERMS.
Meta-cognitive skills – ability to exercise active control over the cognitive
processes engaged in learning. Activities such as planning an approach a given
learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluation of completion of a task
are examples of meta-cognitive skills. Assessment – the systematic basis for
making inferences about the learning and development of students. It is the
process of defining, selecting, designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting,
and using information to increase students’ learning and development.
THE CAMBODIAN MINDSET.
Cambodians referred to
themselves, their language, their music, and their culture as being Khmer. The
Khmer culture was ancient, and many Cambodians felt a strong attachment to the
way their society was before the first French explorers arrived there in the
1860s. Khmer people lived in the jungle and on their rice fields.
Their
primitive life of peasantry went unchanged from about the sixth century until
the nineteenth century when the French first appeared. Many rural Cambodians
continued to live a very primitive life that is virtually unchanged from life
1,000 years ago (Ayers, 2000; Brinkley, 2011).
Cambodians placed a high value
upon the ways of their ancient Khmer culture. The
culture was always ultra hierarchical. Highly valued behaviors included knowing one’s place, bowing down to authority, being quiet and agreeable, and accepting
hardships without question (Ayers, 2000; Brinkley, 2011).
Brinkley first explained the hierarchical power
dynamics of ancient Cambodia. He explained not only the lack of feeling of
obligation held by rulers to serve the people, but the peasantry’s complete
acceptance of it. Long before the fear, trauma, and passivity that characterized
modern Cambodian people, there was a dearly held core belief among them that
dates back to the sixth century in the hierarchy of a culture.
EDUCATION.
David Ayers (2000) authored a
book describing the relationship between the Cambodian government and what he
called the Cambodian educational crisis from the 1860s, when the French ruled
Cambodia, through the year 2000 when the book was published.
On page 6, Ayers
identified his book as “a chronicle of the continued development and educational
failures of every one of Cambodia’s post independence ruling regimes.” Ayers
argued that Western notions of modern development and the strict Cambodian
hierarchy did not mix well: “pursuing
development…is at odds with tradition and the cultural underpinnings of the
state” (p. 3).
On page 3, Ayers wrote, “Put
simply the [educational] crisis, was…a product of the
disparity between the educational system and the economic, political, and
cultural environments that it…intended to serve.”
Ayers believed that the
Cambodian government’s purpose for education in Cambodia had long been to
educate its citizens into passivity and acceptance of exploitation and abuse. He
maintained, “Traditional education reinforced the social hierarchy presided over
by the king and legitimized by the country’s Buddhist monastic order.…social
regulation was the embodiment of the hierarchical political culture and was
agreed to in principle, and in conduct, by those it exploited” (p. 17).
In other
words, quite unlike Western
education where power was respected yet questioned, Cambodian education served
to keep its citizenry helpless, servile, and exploited, and more importantly,
satisfied that this was the correct way for a society to function.
The gist of Ayers’ book was
that attempts at genuine Western education in Cambodia continued to fail because
it served the oppressive hierarchical government to keep its peasants
uneducated. It had been that way in Cambodia for centuries, and Cambodians
accepted it as correct.
Cambodians’ and Westerners’
notions of what constituted education were very different. From the Cambodian
perspective, the first concept of traditional education was little more than
learning one’s place in the social hierarchy. People learned intricate behaviors
to show respect to those who were above them on the hierarchy, and likewise
learned they could abuse or exploit whoever was below.
Cambodians
traditionally learned all that they needed to know by watching and imitating the
people around them. For centuries, they used their brains only to process what
was visually right in front of them, and this served them well in their simple
village life. Watching, learning, and imitating how everyone in the village
treated each other was of extreme importance, as was watching and learning the
household and farming skills required for contributing to the family.
Most of
the country remained not just illiterate, but wholly without any value attached
to asking questions. Acceptance of what was right in front of them, and seeking
nothing higher than what they had was encouraged and valued.
Repeating the Khmer folk tales
that reinforced knowing one’s place was the extent of the meta-cognitive skills
Cambodians utilized for thousands of years.
Nothing in their “education” history
required them to conceptualize, evaluate, or more importantly, question.
They
were directed from an early age never to question, only to be agreeable and
respect the hierarchy. Outside of the capital city Phnom Penh, Cambodia had no
schools at all until the 1940s (Brinkley, 2011, p. 4). Before the French came,
they had virtually no books, and until the 1960s few Cambodians could read or
write (Brinkley, 2011, p. 337). Ayers (2000) pointed out, “Cambodia’s
traditional educational system had always reinforced the concept of
helplessness,
the idea that a person was unable to determine their position within the social
strata” (p. 28).
Some effort was made by the
French to educate the elite Cambodians in Phnom Penh, but the goal was only to
educate them enough to serve the French agenda.
Interestingly, Ayers
(2000) also explained that when the French first appeared in Cambodia and began
providing a
chosen few with a Western education, it was the first inkling that Cambodians
had that education
from Westerners could provide them with upward social mobility. Ayers indicated
that the
concept “proved a significant factor in undermining the solidarity of the
traditional, cohesive
social system. The provision of modern education to Cambodian peasants was akin
to a subtle
social revolution” (p. 28).
By sharp contrast, Western education, beginning with TV shows such as Sesame
Street,
asked much more of children regarding meta-cognitive skills. Questions such as
“what do you
think will happen next?” and “why do you think she did that?” and “what would
you do?” were
commonly found in books, games, and early childhood lessons. Through the use of
guessing games, puzzles, and other educational toys, Western students were
taught to ask questions, and to
think and develop their reasoning and critical thinking skills, while Cambodian
students were
taught to simply obey without considering why.
These very different concepts of education were at odds when well-meaning Westerners
came to Cambodia to educate, train, and help Cambodians toward a better life.
Westerners
arrived with numerous assumptions and cultural biases, and they often greatly
overestimated the
meta-cognitive ability of Cambodians.
Power
and one’s place within the hierarchy dictated every daily interaction for
Cambodians. This understanding of power coupled with Cambodia’s extreme poverty
and its
long history of war and violence came together to create a culture of people who
naturally seized
any small amount of power they had and used it to exploit whomever they could.
This hierarchical ideology began at the very top of Cambodian society – with
both high-ranking government officials and Buddhist monks – and went all the way
down to the way
teachers treated their students.
It was natural and well-established in the
Cambodian mindset that
no one at the top of the hierarchy would even consider being anything but
exploitive to those at
the bottom.
Democratic concepts that were second nature to Westerners’ views were absolutely
foreign to Cambodians. For centuries, this culture functioned within this strict
hierarchical belief
system. Knowles (2008) identified the Cambodian mindset regarding their complete
nonparticipation in government:
Citizen participation is far from a historical reality or an intuitive principle
in the
minds of Cambodians. Since 1950, the Cambodian people have lived through two
monarchies; a series of military struggles for control of the national
government; a
secret bombing campaign by the United States; genocide and mass starvation at the hands of the Khmer Rouge; Communist Vietnamese occupation; a protracted
civil war; displacement of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians (both abroad
and internally); the destruction and rebuilding of the nation’s physical,
social,
educational, and political foundations; and in the past decade, a transition to
a
democratic system of governance. Each of these experiences has influenced Cambodian sense-making of citizen participation (p. 90).
It was important to note that this ancient belief system and the specific
cultural characteristics that resulted from it were established long before the intense
damage the Khmer
Rouge had on Cambodians’ psyche.
All of these concepts – the strict hierarchy,
the complete
void of experience of democratic concepts, the 100% lack of expectation that
government should do anything with its power but abuse it, the satisfaction in a
kind of slavery, the incorrectness of
speaking up or standing up for oneself, or reaching out to help your neighbor –
they were all in
place and had been part of the Khmer psyche for centuries.
Researchers often named the atrocities of the four year reign of terror that was
the Khmer
Rouge as the single explanation for the behavior of this culture, but the
Cambodian character was
well in place before 1975 (Ayers, 2000; Brinley, 2011).
Sophal Ear (2012)
indicated this on page
8 of his book about the problem of foreign aid in Cambodia: “Until recently, it
has been both fair
and convenient to attribute all the country’s woes to the Khmer Rouge and call
it a day.”
Berkvens (2009) agreed with this idea, and pointed out that many scholars
perceived the Khmer
Rouge regime as the source of all problems the country had, but saying this was
far too easy an
explanation. More and more people who studied Cambodia acknowledged that many of
the
country’s problems were much older than that (Ayres, 2000; Verkoren, 2005;
Berkvens, 2009).
Many spoke of Cambodia’s “golden era” - the time in the
1950s and 1960s
before the starvation and mass executions of the 1970s. Ayers (2000) debunked
this popular
myth, reported that Cambodia’s “prerevolutionary past is no more a golden era
than is its
present…both are characterized by political oppression, state sanctioned
violence, factionalism,
corruption, and absolute contempt by those with power for those over whom that
power is
exercised” (p. 6).
SOURCE:
Cambodian Cultural Elements in Western Aid Workers' Teaching Practices. by Karen
O’Grady. Spring 2017
http://csuchico-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.3/196386
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