Carol Black is an Emmy-Award-winning writer/director/producer of both entertainment and documentary television and film. She studied literature and education at Swarthmore College and UCLA, and after the birth of her children, left a successful career in the entertainment industry to become involved in the unschooling and alternative education movements and later to make independent nonprofit films. “Schooling the World” is the culmination of many years of independent research into cross-cultural perspectives on children and education.

Film Synopsis: SCHOOLING THE WORLD

All over the world, volunteers build schools in traditional societies, convinced that school is the only way to a 'better' life for indigenous children.

But is this true? What really happens when we replace a traditional culture's way of learning and understanding the world with our own? SCHOOLING THE WORLD takes a challenging, sometimes funny, ultimately deeply disturbing look at the effects of modern education on the world's last sustainable indigenous cultures.

Beautifully shot on location in the Buddhist culture of Ladakh in the northern Indian Himalayas, the film weaves the voices of Ladakhi people through a conversation between four carefully chosen original thinkers; anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; activists Vandana Shiva and Helena Norberg-Hodge, both recipients of the Right Livelihood Award for their work with traditional peoples in India; and Manish Jain, a former architect of education programs with UNESCO, USAID, and the World Bank.

It examines the hidden assumption of cultural superiority behind education 'aid' projects; looks at the failure of education to deliver on its promise of a way out of poverty; and, finally, calls for a “deeper dialogue” between cultures, suggesting that we have at least as much to learn as we have to teach from these ancient sustainable societies.