The anthropology of a people: why listening must shape every curriculum
Every nation is more than a geographic, political boundary or an economic indicator. It is a story told through its children, as they learn to look at the world. Yet too often, educational reforms arrive from elsewhere, confident in their universal models and unaware of the deep structures that define a people’s collective psychology. To design a curriculum without listening is to build a house without understanding the ground on which it stands.
A society is the result of centuries of sedimented experiences. Languages, mythologies, rituals, the places where families gather, even the fears parents hold for their sons and daughters: all of these form an anthropology that shapes how a people think and feel. Education becomes the transmission of this invisible heritage. And so, when we imagine a curriculum, we are not simply deciding what children should learn, but what a nation chooses to remember about itself.
The collective psyche does not change at the speed of reforms. It resists. It questions. It filters what is foreign through its own grammar. This resistance is not a barrier to modernisation. It is the identity of a country defending itself. When curriculum experts overlook this, their proposals remain sterile, unable to become part of the lived experience of teachers, families, and communities. They operate on imported logic, while children continue to learn through the habits and symbols of their ancestors.
Therefore, listening is not a poetic suggestion. It is a political necessity. To understand what a school should be, one must first understand where the school is. What is the place of the child in the local cosmology? How do communities conceive authority, creativity, the body, and the divine? What metaphors shape childhood dreams? The answers to these questions reveal the authentic architecture of learning.
A curriculum that emerges from listening becomes credible. It speaks the language of the people, not only in words but in values. It offers continuity rather than rupture. It respects what has existed while opening paths to what could be. It honours the confidence and dignity of those who will bring it to life: the teachers, who translate policy into daily gestures, and the children, who transform knowledge into citizenship.
The anthropology of a people is not a constraint; it is the fabric of possibility. When we listen, we are not romanticising tradition. We acknowledge that every innovation must take root in a specific place. Only then can education fulfil its highest task: helping a nation imagine its future without losing itself.