Will Brehm 1:34
Chris Kirchgasler and Karishma Desai, welcome to FreshEd.

Chris Kirchgasler 1:37
Thank you, Will.

Karishma Desai 1:38
Thanks, Will. It’s great to be here.

Will Brehm 1:40
So, it’s quite popular today in education development to talk about a girl’s crisis in education. What does that actually mean?

Karishma Desai 1:49
So, over the last several decades, within international development, we see racialized girls circulating as this vector of development, facing the greatest crises yet bearing this immense potential for change. Development actors configure girls as being trapped in these vicious cycles of intergenerational poverty, sexual violence and oppressed by quote unquote backwards cultural barriers or perspectives. Investment in girls’ education then is offered as a panacea that’ll alleviate poverty, prevent terrorism, and curb gender-based violence, and girls into becoming seen as these exceptional subjects of development if they’re properly invested in. So, we see this correlation between investment in girls ed and economic growth proliferated by the 1990s World Bank research that illustrated how improved access and enrollment of girls in formal schooling led to increased GDP per capita, decreased infant mortality, and increased life expectancies. The girl then becomes a distinct demographic category and target for intervention at the fourth UN Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995. And in 2005, the UN launches a governing body situated under UNICEF, the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative. So, then this crisis is popularized several years later by the Nike Foundation’s launch of Girl Effect in 2008, and consolidated further in 2015, with the US government’s Let Girls Learn Initiative. So, over time, you have these institutional bodies creating the girl as this distinct demographic category. And then as we see, as Bridge, a range of developmental actors, corporations, UN agencies, INGOs, and local feminist organizations deploying this girl crisis discourse.

Will Brehm 3:44
And the girl is, like, also the panacea to so much of social ills that we might see.

Karishma Desai 3:51
Right. So, she’s seen as being in crisis, but also bearing and pregnant with potential that just needs to be untapped.

Will Brehm 3:58
It’s quite fascinating. And so, you brought up Bridge and you write about it in your article. So, Bridge International Academies is obviously this chain of low-fee private schools in different countries. And there’s quite a lot of controversy around Bridge and this podcast has actually talked a little bit about some of those controversies. But let’s sort of put that aside for a moment and actually just think about, you know, how does Bridge International as, you know, a provider of low-fee private schools support the education of girls? Like how does it see itself supporting girls’ education? How does it see itself sort of helping overcome this quote unquote girls’ crisis in education?

Chris Kirchgasler 4:37
Yeah, so I’ll just say at the outset that I’ve listened to those episodes Will, and I actually know the people that you interviewed, because in one case, I think Curtis Riep was in Uganda the same time I was in Kenya and we were corresponding, and Angelo was visiting Kenya. I actually met him and showed him around some of the schools I was working in. And so, I was immersed in that controversy around the issues of privatization that Bridge was seen as sort of spearheading, right, in sub-Saharan Africa. And at the same time, as you’re pointing out, though, what we’re talking about here is sort of a positioning angle that Bridge is taking that I think, in fact, related to that perception of being a sort of profiteer. And therefore, you know, having sort of naked capitalism, behind its ethos, and in everything Karishma is just saying about the girl crisis that seems the level of research policy and reform, Bridge is riffing on that, and is able to say, we’re not simply interlopers, we are a social enterprise. And they’ll talk about in terms of something they’ll call the double bottom line, which is that, yes, we have a responsibility to make a profit, we actually invest those profits back into expanding the enterprise. And the enterprise is fundamentally a social good, because we’re going to help meet developmental benchmarks, one of which is now improving girls’ outcomes through education. And so, the focus on girls’ education helps Bridge align with other development organizations, right? It now takes it out of the sphere of just profiteering and puts it in this space of serving a helpful, political or developmental end, right, in terms of aligning it with SDG goals and things like that. It wants to be understood as a development organization first, and as a profit-making enterprise second. So, forwarding its efforts to reach and empower the girl is really important to that end. I think there’s also an implicit messaging in how they position themselves as champions of the girl in relation to -they will make implicit contrast with the public schools that they are, in effect competing against, where they will depict the girl in their traditional school setting, as in different ways being oppressed, right. That the nation state is failing to uphold these universal human rights in some way. And so, they’re positioning themselves as unlike those native Kenyan institutions. They are socially and politically conscious. And this leads us into the historicizing of that narrative as itself a colonial trope that we can bring back to earlier colonial reform efforts.

Will Brehm 7:32
So, let’s do that. I mean, like, so how do the discourses of Bridge that you have witnessed sort of firsthand in Kenya, how does it reflect some of these past colonial discourses?

Chris Kirchgasler 7:45
Well, so we can go back to the 1920s, which is where, in my own dissertation research, I had done a sort of historicizing of development discourses related to education in Kenya. And it was through that research that I came into contact with the Jeanes School. The Jeanes School was originally a US philanthropic reform that was targeting rural black communities in the Jim Crow South but then became … was associated with philanthropic and missionary networks that were transnational in scope. And there’s a whole story of how that happened but the short of it is that basically this model of thinking about school reforms was brought into a number of British sub-Saharan African colonies. And in that model of schooling, the Jeanes School had, as one of its foundations, this idea of development, but development as including proper sexual differentiation. And what we explore in the paper is this idea that men and women had to sort of graduate to proper roles in who was going to occupy the public sphere and who was going to occupy the private sphere. Women were understood in this thesis of domesticity that we explore in the paper, as needing to tend to the family. That their fundamental responsibility was to child rearing and homemaking. And so, this became one of the ways in which education was enrolled as a theory of development because part of the effort was to understand that women were intimately related to goals of development, and they had a special role in that development and that that role had to be inculcated through a distinct form of education. A distinct set of responsibilities that was going to transform the colony -which was obviously like depicted in this backward state- as being able to sort of uplift itself, right. That this was essentially displacing the responsibility for development onto those who were to be, quote unquote, developed.

Will Brehm 10:05
And so how did some of those discourses of domesticity, child rearing, how do they then fit into Bridge International today, in a sense?

Karishma Desai 10:18
Part of what we want to highlight, I guess, I mean, we can kind of pick back up the Jeanes School, right? Because so, similar to the way in which Bridge wasn’t necessarily interested in girls’ education, initially, and it becomes this sort of girls are sort of sexy, they become this innocent project, right? So, they’re associated with these ideas of humanitarianism in a way that becomes really important for Bridge to become seen as legitimate, right? So, that also is happening in the Jeanes School and during sort of colonial times, thinking about saving women and girls ends up being really important as a part of the colonial project, right. And so, in terms of the Jeanes School, specifically, girls weren’t initially at the forefront of the schooling intervention but as thinking about sort of these model homes, right? So, hygiene and proper child rearing become some of the ways and Jeanes wives, so the teachers’ wives end up being the model educators for village women. And it’s through this very sort of embodied pedagogy of domesticity, that the wives are learning their proper sex roles, right. And so, part of our thesis around the civilizing thesis and sexual differentiation as being very clearly tied to racial differentiation or these two things dovetailing this differentiation of really clearly understanding your role as a sex body, as a requirement for civilizational progress is what we’re kind of seeing in our analysis of Jeanes and women’s education within the Jeanes School model.

Chris Kirchgasler 12:10
I just wanted to add to Karishma’s answer there that all of this is also predicated on a scientific discourse. This isn’t just like, oh, it’s an ideology, which I think sometimes it’s often treated as in the historiography. There’s a whole evolutionary thesis about how civilization is going to reach its sort of ultimate state that is derived from what is sort of been forgotten today, as we think of evolution, when it’s discussed as primarily genetic and hereditarian. But a lot of the social theories of the early 20th century were neo-Lamarckian, in orientation. And the key difference there is that it’s actually through what Karishma was explaining as this sort of embodied transformation, these like changes of sensitivity and habits and sensibilities, that racial progress is affected. So, then pedagogy becomes really, really key as a site for intervening in those who are racialized and made developmentally backwards through these discourses. And so, I just wanted to add that sort of undergirding idea behind the sort of scientific justification for these interventions.

Will Brehm 13:27
And so, what ended up changing in the Jeanes School, where the focus ended up being on girls and women. Was it focused on other parts of schooling or had different sort of justifications? And then I think, Karishma, you said it, it sort of shifted to a focus on girls? Is that?

Karishma Desai 13:45
I don’t think that we’re saying that there’s a shift, right. I think that we’re attending to what is focused on when teaching women and girls, right, the specific. So, there’s not necessarily a focus, but we’re attending to the pedagogical dimension of teaching domesticity in this form.

Will Brehm 14:07
Right. And so, in the Jeanes School, it’s always been like that, you’re saying? When teaching girls and women, that discourse of domesticity has always been there, more or less?

Karishma Desai 14:15
Yeah, the sexual differentiation and learning your proper role, right, is a part of a larger educational project that’s been enacted within the Jeanes School, I think, is sort of what we’re highlighting.

Will Brehm 14:27
Right.

Chris Kirchgasler 14:28
Yeah. And one key distinction between Jeanes and later reforms is and I think Karishma alluded to this in the beginning is that the turn to the girl isn’t until relatively recent, that you see that. In the Jeanes School, they’re talking about men and their wives. That’s how they distinguish sex. And they talk about it as sex not gender, obviously, it’s the 1920s. But it’s already assumed like a woman is a wife, right? I mean, you already have this idea that there is a proper heterosexual relationship that is like the fundament of civilization. And then it’s simply about learning how to embody the ideal forms of what it means to be a wife, what it means to be the husband, the husband is, as I was saying earlier, is this outward face of the reform. He’s the one who’s going into the schools, so the whole reform was devised to train missionary educated men and their wives at a centralized location in the capital, Nairobi. And then send those couples back oftentimes to where they had grown up. But now after having had two years of teacher education, or domestic education, and when the couple would arrive, it was a bit like the Peace Corps, to be honest with you. When they would come back to their village, they would build a house in the town that was built according to mathematical sort of notions of proper apportioning of the actual household, so that you’d have -but also with the idea that the house would be itself a classroom of sorts. Everything would be a little larger so that people could like line the walls and see how the kitchen is organized, how the living room is set up, what the bedroom looks like. And even just to have these distinct spaces within the house was itself like a model of development. And that was the wife’s responsibility. To both keep this proper house at home, and then demonstrate it. To radiate change in the community was how it was like communicated. While the man, the husband, was going into the schools, observing the teachers and giving them like on the job training, like in service training. And then they would report for like regular in-service trainings themselves, but basically, they would be based in that town for the indefinite future. And it was this idea that our development efforts are too top down. We need to find a bottom-up strategy that’s seen as legitimate, that seen as they’re on the people. They’re like us, but they’re living this like better life. And also, this whole thing in Kenya specifically, there was a great fear that there was urban migration that was going to cause like, there was fears of crime and the whatever, you know, like that people are going to come to the town and not find work. And then there’d be paupers and this classic like Victorian class fears that were projected onto the, quote, native population. And so, part of the reform was, let’s make the village a desirable place to stay. Also, because we need a labor surplus -we the whites, right- we need a labor surplus to work on the plantations basically. Kenya was a settler colony, so you had these massive farming operations that were being developed, and they needed cheap labor nearby on the native reserves. And that’s where all of these reforms were taking place. It was to keep people on the native reserves. And so, the Jeanes School was a piece of that larger colonial infrastructure.

Karishma Desai 18:16
That’s what ended up being really interesting for us, right, this model demonstration home. And to link this -so, it’s not that it was they’re going to focus on girls’ education, as I noted earlier, but, and then also, sort of historically, girls weren’t educated in formal school spaces at this time. But rather, it becomes a site of training around Victorian domesticity, right, which is this form of domesticity, which is traveling with these educational reforms. And so, seeing how this idea of it being a site where that form of sexual differentiation and learning your proper sex role ends up radiating as Chris kind of mentioned with that sort of the language we were seeing in the report that we were looking at.

Will Brehm 19:02
It’s quite interesting how a lot of those ideas, you know, the community engagement, and all of these ideas are so similar to what you hear in development discourse today. But before we connect this all back to today, you also bring up this anti-colonial uprising called the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya that happened a few decades after the Jeanes School was sort of established. Can you talk a little bit about this uprising, but then the more important part that you focus in on is sort of the educational programs that were implemented in the prison camps for those who were, you know, supposedly, anti-colonial uprising? So, you know, can you tell us a little bit about the Mau Mau Uprising and what some of these programs sort of taught in terms of domesticity. And how it’s connected to this Jeanes School and some of the ideas that you saw there?

Chris Kirchgasler 19:54
Yes, the Mau Mau Uprising is a crucial event in both the end of colonial empire in Kenya and also the creation of the post-colonial, independent Kenyan Republic. And it is still in historiography, a very contentious event in terms of trying to apprehend fully what it was. And I, in fact, don’t think it’s really possible to apprehend fully what any historical event was. And yet, it’s been such a rich site for reappraisal and really like fundamental reevaluation. So, I can’t really give you a very satisfactory synopsis except to say that between 1954 and 1960, the British illegally detained somewhere between 80,000 to 120,000 Kenyans in prison camps and subjected approximately 1 million to a program that was called “villagization” and that’s where I can talk more about what you were asking in terms of the educational programs. The important thing to understand about Mau Mau is that it wasn’t Kenyan wide, it was primarily located in the Mount Kenya area, and primarily with ethnicities that were Kikuyu or a Kikuyu-related family of language of speakers. And it was related back to what we were just talking about with Jeanes with this idea that land had been alienated from them at the turn of the 20th century. And there had been long standing decades now claims for the repatriation of that land, formulated in different ways at different times, and with different ends in mind. But that had gone continually unheard or unresponded to by the colonial powers and so this uprising began, at least in part as a response to that. So, there was this huge and really draconian reaction by the British in trying to tamp down the revolution. And also, this deep fear of we, the British, don’t even understand the nature of this revolution, or what’s going on and so better if we just cordon off every potentially dangerous element that could be seen as helping to foment this uprising. And you know, even better, if we can tamp it down before it even starts. And that’s where education then becomes really important. And where the Jeanes School sort of magically makes its return. Because the Jeanes School was one of the few educational reforms that was happening under colonial sort of auspices within the native reserves already. And so, you see, literally the former Jeanes’ principal appointed the chief of community development. And community development in this case is basically the person responsible for a lot of different kinds of programming -for what they call rehabilitation. And there’s different forms of rehabilitation. There’s that which occurs in the prison camps and that which occurs in the villages, but it’s all undergirded by the idea that there’s like degrees to which one can demonstrate their allegiance to Mau Mau. And the fear was that once one pledged allegiance to Mau Mau or oath, as the term was called, that they wouldn’t be recoverable. They would be sort of dedicated to the cause. And so, there was this whole sort of pathopsychology that was put on to Kenyans, those who were seen as like Mau Mau sympathetic, that it was all stemming from, according to these ethno-psychiatrists, which is a racist pseudoscience that studied, quote, the African mind, that this was all a cause, because of the breakdown of the family unit that was brought upon by colonialism itself. And so, the solution was, oh, the modernization and capitalism has corrupted the state of traditional relationships in the native reserves. And what we the colonizers need to do is enter into the picture and try to break these kinship ties that are seen as dangerous and that would begin essentially with doing what the Jeanes School had been doing, all the proposed reforms where we need to up the ante on domesticity. We need more domesticity. Women in particular are the glue of this movement. That’s what was being posited by the social scientists. So, we need to change the women’s attitudes and behaviors and sensibilities, getting them to understand their fundamental role as homemakers. And if we could do that, then the revolution would end before it would bring down the colony. That was the colonizers claims and hopes.

Karishma Desai 24:49
Right. And it ends up being sort of the mother, right? Motherhood and making sure that proper motherhood was recultivated within these women. That was sort of what the project of reeducation was around. And teaching the woman to be virtuous and therefore rekindling proper sort of efforts around the young people that were kind of getting off the trail and joining Mau Mau. So, that was sort of what was used to. The fact that training women who are going to then become mothers to be rightful and virtuous mothers so that their children wouldn’t be wrongfully engaged in the Mau Mau rebellion efforts.

Will Brehm 25:30
And I mean, did it work? Like did the logic that these colonizers have, did it create the effects that it intended? Like, what happened after this villagization process and education?

Chris Kirchgasler 25:45
You know, there’s really great literature. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o but he writes, his famous text is “Decolonizing the mind,” he grew up, he was a child during Mau Mau. He grew up in one of these villages when it was surrounded by barbed-wire fence. And he describes being like beaten by his teachers for speaking Kikuyu, because many of the colonizers didn’t speak Kikuyu that they feared what was being said, and that they’re trying to tamp down on that in the schools, right, as Karishma was alluding to, that revolution could happen at any age, right? Anyone could be a threat. And so, there’s this pervasive fear that was produced and an intense, I would say, at least in Ngũgĩ’s account a hatred of what was being done to them. They saw it as cultural genocide. I mean, I can’t speak obviously, for people. But there are searing accounts of what this represented. And I think you’re starting to see, it began, I think, with “Histories of the Hanged” and “Imperial Gulag”. These are some recent reconstructionist historiographies that are built a lot on testimonials of Kikuyu who were detained, who were tortured, who knew family and friends who were killed by the British, that there has been a real, finally, consideration by the British government of the horrors that were wrought during this time. And, in fact, there has been reparations that have been paid. So, in terms of its efficacy, how can you really account for that with the psychic toll?

Will Brehm 27:21
So, when it comes to these different discourses in Jeanes and Mau Mau, how do you see them today in organizations like Bridge International? What’s the connection in your mind?

Karishma Desai 27:33
Yeah, I mean I think that -so one of the things that we highlight in, we see these discourses as rearticulated right. So, one of the things that we highlight in Bridge is that the figure of the mother ends up being important within the Bridge sort of intervention as well, right. And it’s based on certain kinds of racial tropes, like the sort of African matriarch right, that are then rearticulated. And so, we see the civilizing thesis sort of continuing in those ways, right. So, motherhood is valorized but from Victorian domesticity, we see the sort of valorization of an entrepreneurial motherhood, within Bridge discourses. So, that’s sort of one of the ways. And then the other thing that you kind of mentioned earlier that I want to kind of pick back up, one of the things that we were highlighting it is sort of these ideas of community engagement, right, that was a part of sort of bottom-up efforts. We see sort of participatory efforts across the development sector. Within Bridge, we see that through using ethnographic accounts representing women and girls’ voices. So, these sort of articulations of representation and inclusivity as part of the development project are still having the same effects. And yes, I mean, that’s sort of one way that we see the continuity.

Chris Kirchgasler 29:01
Just to underline that I think there’s a sense oftentimes, there’s like a historical amnesia in a lot of education reform discourses. And there’s this idea then that like in the turn to the girl, that’s like, finally, we’re talking about who really matters in development. And part of what we’re looking at is to say wait a second, the perceived vulnerable subject, that has been at the heart of colonial interventions from the beginning. It’s always sort of moralizing justification to say it’s, in fact, the woman in the turn of the 20th century, and the girl today who is positioned as the most precarious subject and therefore requiring this magnificent intervention. And the techniques used to do that. The techniques of representation that seek to secure the authenticity of their voice, you can see that going back 100 years. It’s not quite the same, but there are as we explore, and as Karishma was just saying, like, these tropes that continue to circulate, and recirculate, even if some of the methods may shift.

Karishma Desai 30:08
Yeah, the other thing that we see, and we highlight in this paper is sort of, and that both of us kind of engaged in our own sort of separate projects, is this attention to shifting the interiority and that being the thing that needs to be fixed, right. So, in order to become more civilized, you need the right kinds of emotional sensibilities that are cultivated in you. And we actually see an uptake of those kinds of things within development, right, through things like life skills, and non-cognitive skills that both of us in our separate projects kind of engage with more, but that was something that we wanted to highlight in this paper, too, right. So, the civilizing -there are certain kinds of emotions that are the right kinds of emotions that a subject, and a female subject particularly, needs to embody. And so, it’s Victorian domesticity during Jeanes, and today it’s more of a sort of a assertive disposition, or a particular kind of confidence, or sort of an enterprising subject position that is the right kind of femininity, right. But all of that is sort of based on shifting the internal disposition, the affective orientation, the behavior is the embodied what you’re sort of presenting as a female subject, and then embodying and how that radiates outward. And that sort of was the thing that we wanted to look at and historicize specifically.

Chris Kirchgasler 31:34
And I want to just circle back to what everything that Karishma was saying, you can also link to what we had discussed at the very beginning of the conversation as a sort of neo-Lamarckian thesis of evolution. Of course, we look at Lamarck today and say what was that about and kind of throw up our hands and say that was pseudoscience. There’s a different developmental justification given today that we discuss briefly in the article that’s now framing these sort of justifications for this now gender difference in terms of anticipation and its probabilities. So, now it’s a correlational logic. It’s not about deducting from Lamarckian thesis of that has a progress already sort of mapped out, right, along a continuum. It’s not to say, well, we can be agnostic about where all this is headed but we can draw correlations about well, if a girl goes to school, then that increases her earning power more than twice of boys. If she graduates and gets a job, that correlates with higher gross domestic product. All these correlations come to justify the usefulness or the need for these interventions. And yet, and this is what we’re trying to point out. And yet they follow along a very familiar script.

Will Brehm 32:42
Hmm, just a different way to justify it.

Karishma Desai 32:44
I want to kind of add one thing that we’re not saying in this right. So, on one we’re showing how empowerment discourses, empowerment rhetoric today, these sort of colonial discourses are sort of depoliticizing certain things. Like we’ve kind of established that. But we’re not suggesting that all governing discourses have a uniform effect, right. There’s a vast body of feminist and anthropological literature about development and education that illustrates otherwise. There are unintended effects, errant ways in which girl empowerment rhetoric sort of unfolds. Some of which potentially produce certain kinds of political conscience. So, I don’t think that that’s what we’re highlighting. And then we also sort of want to note that within both historically and today, there are slippages, subversions, and refusals, right, to these projects and to thinking about the sort of idea of empowerment outside of what we understand of it with attached to a modern development discourse that’s sort of predicated on a particular kind of liberal subjectivity.

Will Brehm 33:53
Yeah, right. Right. So, Chris Kirchgasler and Karishma Desai, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today.

Chris Kirchgasler 34:00
Thank you, Will, for having us.

Karishma Desai 34:02
Thanks so much.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Author Publications

“Girl” in crisis: Colonial residues of domesticity in transnational school reforms

Teaching the Third World girl: Girl rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy

Haunted data: The colonial residues of transnational school reforms in Kenya

The limits of “knowledge for all”: Historicizing transnational school reforms in Kenya

Mentioned Resources

Education and development: Evidence for new priorities (World Bank Report)

1995 Beijing Platform for Action

UN Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI)

Girl Effect

The Legacy of Michelle Obama and the Let Girls Learn Initiative

Girls in crises – Orange the world

Bridge International Academies

The double bottom line: Profit and social benefit

Jeanes school model

The truth about the Mau Mau Movement: The most popular uprising in Kenya 

Mau Mau reparations, memorialization and Kenya’s future

Forced villagization during the Shifta conflict in Kenya (1963-1968) 

Decolonization of the mind: The politics of language in African literature

Lamarckian thesis of evolution

Related Resources

The discourse of development: Some implications for local power/knowledge in the Philippine Uplands

Forum: Buen vivir – Reimagining education and shifting paradigms

What do we really know about Bridge International Academies? A summary of research findings

Multimedia resources

Kenya’s Mau Mau: The last battle I witness

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com