Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard-trained economist and self-proclaimed guru of “millennium” development and now “sustainable” development, has been peddling his wares from Columbia University for almost two decades. In his keynote address at the 2019 CIES (whose transcript I read), he proclaims that “Researchers, education policymakers and educators are too nice,” and wants to stir us up a little and make us mad about the lack of resources for education. I’m happy to heed that part of his remarks, though my postcolonial feminist rage and research were already fueled by the rather more formidable intellects of my mother and Gayatri Spivak (also at Columbia and thus a colleague of Sachs). It is through them that I learned to recognize and question the liberal pieties and uninformed generalizations that underlie many of Sachs’s claims about education and sustainable development. Sachs reminds us that we live in a wealthy but unequal world because our economy is motivated by greed. He suggests that we need the SDGs “Not really because they’re nice things to do, but because we are desperately in need of a different course of action.” While many of these goals including the need for “free, equitable and quality education for all boys and girls at the primary and secondary school level” (SDG 4.1) are laudable, the analysis and solutions that Sachs offers are not. According to him, a key reason why millions of “kids” in “typical poor countries” are not in school has to do with the absence of a rise in ODA (Overseas Development Assistance, or simply “aid” in common parlance) for education. He finds this “alarming” and claims that it (the lack of a rise in aid for education) is something beyond his comprehension. Had Sachs’s education included reading some basic primers of international development he would not suffer from such an “alarming” lack of understanding. In her short but excellent text The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development (now in its third edition), Maggie Black (2007) warns that simplistic equations such as “aid p development p poverty reduction” (40) do not tell us anything about the ways in which aid works. She explains that as the international arm of development, aid is problematic not just because the amount given is infinitesimal but also because it is driven by the donor’s agenda. Serving strategic and political purposes, aid is given in the form of technical

中文翻译：

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可持续发展教育无法承受常春藤盟校政策制定者的陈词滥调和虔诚

杰弗里·萨克斯 (Jeffrey Sachs) 是哈佛受训的经济学家，自称为“千年”发展和现在“可持续”发展的大师，近二十年来一直兜售他在哥伦比亚大学的产品。在 2019 年 CIES 的主题演讲中（我读过他的成绩单），他宣称“研究人员、教育政策制定者和教育工作者都太好了”，并想激起我们一点，让我们对缺乏教育资源感到愤怒。我很高兴听到他的那部分言论，尽管我的后殖民女权主义的愤怒和研究已经被我母亲和 Gayatri Spivak（也在哥伦比亚大学，因此是 Sachs 的同事）更强大的智慧所推动。正是通过他们，我学会了认识和质疑萨克斯关于教育和可持续发展的许多主张背后的自由主义虔诚和无知的概括。萨克斯提醒我们，我们生活在一个富裕但不平等的世界，因为我们的经济是由贪婪驱动的。他建议我们需要可持续发展目标“并不是因为它们是一件好事，而是因为我们迫切需要不同的行动方案。” 虽然其中许多目标，包括“在小学和中学阶段为所有男孩和女孩提供免费、公平和优质教育”（可持续发展目标 4.1）的需要值得称赞，但 Sachs 提供的分析和解决方案却并非如此。据他介绍，“典型贫困国家”中数百万“孩子”没有上学的一个关键原因与没有增加用于教育的 ODA（海外发展援助，或简称为“援助”）有关。他发现这“令人担忧”并声称它（教育援助没有增加）超出了他的理解范围。如果萨克斯的教育包括阅读一些国际发展的基本入门读物，他就不会遭受如此“令人担忧”的缺乏理解。Maggie Black（2007 年）在其简短而出色的《国际发展简明指南》（现在是第三版）中警告说，诸如“援助 p 发展 p 减贫”(40) 之类的简单方程式并不能告诉我们任何关于援助的运作方式。她解释说，作为发展的国际机构，援助是有问题的，不仅因为所提供的数额微乎其微，还因为它是由捐助者的议程驱动的。服务于战略和政治目的，以技术形式提供援助