By Alexander Horstmann, School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Supervisor
Access to a sound education is a fundamental human right, yet so many children are deprived from this right and from personal development. While the right to learn in your mother-tongue (native language) is a fundamental right, as anchored in the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people, many authoritarian governments do not recognize the languages spoken by minorities. This is also the case in the rural hamlet of Nam Lan, located in the beautiful, but desperately poor ethnic minority state of Shan state, in Myanmar:
For decades, and after the failure of a federalist system, the aggressive policies of the military junta in Myanmar regarded Shan language as a betrayal to the Myanmar nation and Shan language and Shan history were generally suppressed. But it was the brutal violence of the Myanmar army, targeting the civil population in the countryside that made schooling in the minority areas almost impossible, let alone, sustainable, as the government did hardly invest into education and welfare, but burned villages, schools and rice-barns. In a context of violent conflict and fear, the villagers were also taxed both by the Burma army and the secessionist movement, resulting in a food crisis, and migration of whole villages to Thailand. The culturally and linguistically similar Shan have a large community in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, where mothers work as maids and fathers as construction workers. Shan migrants in Chiang Mai have their own Theravada Buddhist temples that function as important community centers and donate generously to them. The temples also have schools adjacent to them, offering valuable opportunities for education of the migrant’s children. Largely uneducated, and illiterate, the children of the villages in the mountains around Nam Lan had no chance whatsoever to continue their education in the city and had to learn a livelihood as farm workers or as unskilled labor.
But even in the most difficult circumstances, live has to continue. All over Myanmar, people in the ethnically and religiously complex minority regions organized their education and healthcare in the absence of community welfare. Local human rights groups and activists emerged, documenting human rights violations, and providing emergency health care to the wounded and ill. Education in vernacular language and insights into Shan local history was the key of the emergent literacy movement. Sai Naw Kham, the leader of Mondo’s partner, the Center for Rural Education and Development, used to be a Buddhist monk, well-educated, holding large authority among the Shan people. He eventually disrobed, eager as he was to support secular education and criticizing the monks to spend too much of the donations into luxurious temples and pagodas. The schools were traditionally developing from the monasteries, with a heavy focus on Buddhist education and Buddhist verse. In 2013, Nawkham and the abbot of Warn Zeing Monastery built the first monastic community school in Nam Lan. From there, Naw Kham and his team built the lifelong learning and community center at Nam Lan, funded by the Child’s Dream Foundation.
The political opening after 2012 and after the national elections in 2015, however fragile, offered a window of opportunity for applying for crucial funding from international NGO’s and humanitarian organizations. It was here when Mondo came in, supporting children from disadvantaged families in the boarding school with stipends for boarding and for meals. Participating in the teacher training in early March 2018, I was so impressed with the quality of the teachers, their dedication and their attention to child psychology, personal development, traumata and learning problems, Shan history and Shan culture.
I decided to initiate the ELU education project in Myanmar after teaching at the University in Mandalay in the context of our ERASMUS+ partnership. I taught an extended ELU project on friendship across cultural boundaries. This ELU course zooms into the livelihood circumstances of villagers in a Shan village and the difficult efforts of a rural NGO (Center for Rural Education and Development) to provide villagers with schools, teachers and curriculum development in a very volatile setting.
The project is carried out in conjunction and close cooperation with Mondo, the most important development NGO in Estonia devoted to development cooperation, global education and humanitarian aid, and- among numerous other projects- supports rural education in Shan state, Myanmar. Mondo's main principle is to support and strengthen local capacities and local knowledge, while the decision over implementation solely lies with its local partner in Shan state and its local expertise. For the aim of understanding the specific conditions and political landscape of this unique project, the project explores mother-tongue based education, the literacy movement, political reform, promoting Mondo in Estonia and fundraising, global education and educational innovation, and aims at popularizing knowledge about a far-away place.
The aim of the project is to endorse and to create awareness for Mondo's efforts to provide education and boarding for children: The aim is also to instill values of solidarity for children growing up in volatile environments where schools cannot be taken for granted and human rights have to be protected. The project provides a unique opportunity to study the life-cycle of a sustainable development project in the making, to learn about the life circumstances of villagers in a politically sensitive environment, and to learn about the value of local knowledge and sustainability in development cooperation. We hope that in the future, CRED and its wonderful team can stand for themselves, attracting funds from the government and the Myanmar educational consortium for organizing multi-lingual education, bridging formal and informal education and for its community services to the youth and to the families. In this webpage, we invite you to take a closer look at education in this volatile, but beautiful setting and to share your dreams about a better world for the children with us.