School twinning schemes with Third World countries creating neocolonialist children

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor Published: 8:00AM GMT 06 March 2010

Thousands of schools opposite Britain have struck up links with not prosperous primaries and secondaries in bad nations.

Teachers inspire pupils to write to young kids abroad and take piece in joint-projects and internet link-ups to lift recognition of alternative cultures.

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But investigate from Exeter University suggests the projects might leave young kids with "racist" and patronising impressions of unfamiliar countries.

Dr Fran Martin, comparison techer in education, insisted there was no idea that "all the partnerships are wrong".

But she said: "There needs to be a opposite approach of meditative to equivocate partnerships carrying these neocolonialist or extremist undertones, or being patronising about an additional idea system.

"Many teachers can usually see things from their own universe perspective and the tough for them to move afar from that. Only display misery or problems gives UK young kids a really inequitable impression, and it influences their views when they grow up."

The British Council now helps some-more than 7,700 primaries and secondaries to settle links with schools overseas, and it hopes numbers will stand in inside of dual years.

It insists the own programmes are focused on next to relations - that daunt activities formed around fundraising - and have deserted the ultimate conclusions.

Dr Martin"s �320,000 study, that is saved by the Economic and Social Research Council, will finish in 2012.

Some young kids were quizzed about their impressions of pupils in a Gambian school.

One first student said: "They dont wear most garments they wear straw."

Another said: "The boys wear skirts too. They wear straw skirts."

One kid pronounced they had "straw roofs" on their homes and an additional added: "They hang them together with mud."

A student told researchers that "gross things similar to flies go in their mouths". It stirred a crony to add: "Their mouths are brownish-red and the flies think their mouths are done of mud."

The halt commentary were quoted in the Times Educational Supplement.

Dr Martin told the TES that schools should work with their counterparts abroad as equals and equivocate fund-raising.

"It should be equal, but they mostly are not since the UK propagandize raises income for their partner." she said. "Its well intentioned but it doesnt emanate a loyal partnership.

"Its mostly the Western propagandize who goes abroad to revisit rather than the others, so the not a satisfactory exchange."

But Olga Stanojlovic, head of schools in preparation at the British Council, said: "Through the accumulation of propagandize joining programmes we deliver, the British Council provides await and precision to teachers to try these critical issues and assistance them rise honestly two-way relations with their partners.

"We know from the practice of the schools we work with that when schools put in the joining and time to plea such preconceptions, general partnerships can be one of the most appropriate ways to assistance pupils see over informative stereotypes and set up genuine bargain of the universe around them.

"The certain stroke partnerships can have on village congruity has been recognized in multiform schools Ofsted reports."