I went up to Stanford African Studies Center last Thursday for a talk by Matthew Jukes on a paper he is working on with data from The Gambia (where he taught in a school in the 1990s apparently, fun picture in his slide show). He and co-author are trying to measure and correlate (causality is hard here) what gets lost in schooling. There is a literature, for example, on decline in what is often called “indigenous technical knowledge” (i.e. plants and craft stuff) that one might expect. But less clear is “social responsibility” and “respect for parents.” The correlations Jukes presented (based on a neat method of asking adults to rate the relative respectfulness of groups of three kids) suggest that schooling is pretty strongly negatively associated with these values. And parents think these values are very important and should be learned and deepened in school. (i.e. parents apparently did not highly rank “getting smarter” as the thing that should be happening in school!).  Lots of food for thought!