“What is the Point of School Anyway?”: Refugee Youth, Educational Quality, and Resettlement Tunnel Vision

Abstract

Drawing from three years of ethnographic engagement at a refugee school in Egypt, this study explores how refugee youths' resettlement aspirations collide with the systemic barriers that define their displacement contexts. This study contributes to the field of anthropology and education by pointing to the limitations of quality learning environments in contexts where the future life chances of refugee students are already predetermined by structural barriers that texture their home, community, and host country environments. [anti-blackness, refugees, resettlement, school quality]

Shifting ground or moving furniture around: Youth participatory action research in Kakuma Refugee Camp

“…After so much time dedicated to contextualizing the structural inaccessibility of secondary and postsecondary education, both in their host country context and globally, I struggled to understand why youth continued to call for expanding individualized opportunities. Despite the global reach of meritocratic ideology, studies have shown that displaced young people are also highly aware of the structural constraints on their formal education (Bonet, 2021;Poole and Riggan, 2020). The idea that our collective resource might grant "even one" young person the opportunity to attend university with private sponsorship at the exclusion of the vast majority felt counter to all that we had established in recognizing that the advancement of a select few precisely depended on the exclusion of the rest.…”

“…Displaced youth experience protracted uncertainty, limited educational opportunities, and legal restrictions on work, yet education is routinely represented as a vehicle for socioeconomic and even spatial mobility, creating a potential path "up and out" of exile (Bellino, 2018. Under these conditions, anthropologists of education have critiqued schools as enforcing "cruel optimism" (Berlant, 2011), in which refugee and migrant students are expected to succeed in spite of systemic inequities and other oppressive forces constraining their opportunities inside and outside of schools (Bartlett, Oliveira, and Ungemah, 2018;Bonet, 2021;McWilliams and Bonet, 2016;Poole and Riggan, 2020).…”

Contesting educational imaginaries at the intersection of migration and transnational development in Guatemala

“…For other young people, physical mobility brings into question the purpose and usefulness of formal education. In her work with Sudanese refugee youth in Egypt, Sally Wesley Bonet (2021) demonstrates how young people perceived a lack of utility in their education that would not help them gain employment in Egypt or integrate them better into Egyptian society. Instead, youth focused on the possibility of resettlement, acknowledging education's inability to help them achieve their aspirations.…”

“…Previous research on the relationship between education and migration conducted in Mexico has revealed that those with higher levels of formal education forgo irregular transnational migration because their credentials are not recognized abroad; instead, they opt for internal migration to larger metropolitan areas where there are more employment opportunities (Mata‐Codesal, 2017; Meza & Pederzini, 2009). This understanding, in addition to the widespread belief propagated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals that more educational access globally is always a worthwhile goal, leads NGOs and international nongovernmental organizations to focus on education as a panacea for solving myriad development “problems.” In so doing, they often communicate to young people that the more time and effort they invest in their schooling, the greater their reward (Bonet, 2021) and, conversely, generate an anxiety of individualized failure for young people whose aspirations remain out of reach (Desai, 2022). This discourse of schooling as the key to future success is widespread in Guatemala and features prominently in migration‐prevention mass media campaigns such as Nuestra Patria and Nuestro Futuro (Our Homeland, Our Future), which position the good decisions of the “student” in opposition to the bad decisions of the “migrant.”…”