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This review has been accessed times since March 28, 2009

Mortenson, Greg and Relin, David Oliver. (2007). Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One school at a Time. NY: Penguin Books Pp. 349         ISBN 978-0-14-303825-2

Reviewed by Paul Smyth
OISE/University of Toronto &
College of the North Atlantic, Doha, Qatar

March 28, 2009

The war in Afghanistan is in the news again, so the new trade paperback version of Three Cups of Tea is timely. It's the perfect time to release Penguin's new trade paperback edition. The original hardcover was released in March 1996, after Mortenson built his first village school in Pakistan, and was followed by a softcover from Viking Penguin. So twelve years after building his first school in the wilderness, Mortenson's story has hit the mainstream and the new edition is currently number four on the New York Times Best Seller List.

The new edition should speak volumes to educators. Mortenson's foundation, the Central Asia Institute, has flourished since 1996. His story reminds us that, as educators, we touch the lives of strangers, and that interaction can have spectacular results. It seems to confirm that references to "good" and "bad" schools are misguided (Cuban, 2000), and that we should just get on with the business of schooling.

Mortenson's success was born of failure. In 1993, he was a mountain climber attempting to scale K2, the world's second highest peak. He was supplying camps up the mountain in preparation for an ascent. He'd been on the mountain for seventy days. He'd been up and down eight times on supply missions. After a 72 hour supply mission, he returned to the base and got the message that one of his team, Etienne Fine, had attempted to ascend too rapidly. He was forced to ascend again for twenty-four hours, then spend forty-eight hours carrying Fine back to base camp. Fine was airlifted to a hospital, but Mortenson was beyond recovery or any further attempt on the summit.

He left the mountain, walking down to civilization on the Baltoro Glacier. He became separated from his gear, and worse, from Mouzafer, his guide from the Balti tribe. He spent the night in the open on the glacier. The rescuer was rescued the next day by Pakistani tribesmen, and taken to Korphe village, where the Balti tribesman nursed the nurse back to health for seven weeks. Wanting to repay the debt, and realizing the village had no school—when he asked to see the school, he was shown an empty lot, where children studied in the open—he left, but promised to return one day and build the village its first school.

Mortenson is thus presented to us as a flawed hero, a human being, a mountain climber who loses his way, but finds himself through building schools. Mortenson did return to Korphe, though it took him three years. And he did build a school for the village, though they insisted first on building a bridge across the river. Today, the foundation he founded has built 78 schools and educated 28,000 students (including 18,000 girls). How he climbed that mountain is the story of Three Cups of Tea. It's a personal journey, and the objective is to bring education to those who don't have it, mostly girls, in Pakistan's remote provinces.

Greg Mortenson

This book is an argument for the positive role of education in society—a strong argument that schools help maintain social integrity (Durkheim, 1972), even in rural Pakistan. This book is a reminder to every teacher of the good that they do every day. Mortenson is penniless, in one of the most conflicted regions of the world, and yet he succeeds. How is it that we, well educated, in peaceful countries, with funding and infrastructure, cannot be successful also? The book goads us to action, by telling the story of Greg Mortenson's extraordinary successes.

But Mortenson doesn't play the role of a rich American teaching down to the poor Pakistanis. When he made his promise to build his first school, Mortenson himself lived out of the trunk of his car. This is not the oppressed learning to labor (Willis, 1977) for the rich. With Mortenson, people in poor communities build schools for their own children with their own labor. There don't seem to be any conflicts between social classes in Mortenson's work, or more accurately, the conflicts that there are cross lines of class, culture, race, and religious. Poor people are in conflict with other poor people, and rich people are in conflict with each other, which seems to contradict Thrupp's (1999) dichotomy of the rich and poor in conflict.

If there were a genre for this type of writing, it would perhaps be called "adventure education." From Donald Rumsfield's nice shoes in his Pentagon office to Muzafer the Balti porter, co-author David Relin brings to life the colourful cast of characters that Mortenson meets in his mission to build schools in rural Afghanistan where there were none. Rarely, says Relin, has so much been achieved by "one of the most under-qualified and overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth" (p. 3).

Satisfied readers might be convinced to join that cast, and support Mortenson's work through his not-for-profit foundation, The Central Asia Institute (www.cai.org/). When elementary school students in River Falls, Wisconsin, spontaneously raised 63,240 pennies to build Mortenson's first school, they joined the cast too. Don't be surprised if you too are convinced to help Mortenson with his work. One reluctant participant was the village mullah in Korphe. At first, he wasn't sure that girls should have an education, but when the road was blocked and building supplies couldn't be trucked in, he led the villagers, literally carrying the school on their backs, with him in the lead. Teachers and students can start their own penny drive for schools at Pennies for Peace (www.penniesforpeace.org). The message for educators is that everyone can help, and every penny helps.

But there are difficulties. Because Greg's journey is presented in chronological order, the main idea didn't come shining through for me until I'd finished the entire book. What happens for readers, as they progress through the text, is that they realize that Mortenson is consistently working towards building another school.

There is a difficulty with the logic and complexity of the problem, too. Doing business in Pakistan is a messy soup of topics and themes: international politics, religion and Islam, War, the aftermath of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. There are difficulties and complications with Mortenson's family back in the US, because he is never there, and when he is, he feels drawn back to Pakistan. Somehow, for Mortenson, the focus remains on building schools, and these other things are all just sideshows.

Though readers are sure to come away by the end of the book with the impression that they too can achieve something positive, that idea is not explicitly stated. It comes through in the thousands of examples of people's lives that change as a result of meeting and working with Greg Mortenson. David Oliver Relin, the co-author, is the supreme example. Mortenson's wife is a second example. All of the individual students whose lives take shape in front of us on the page are examples. The village elder, Haji Ali, is an excellent example. The villagers who carry the building materials for their school on their backs up a mountain are a good example. Like life, it's messy. It doesn't happen in straightforward simple ways.

Another theme of the book is that education is a better way to fight terrorism than war is. This is moral leadership at its best (Leithwood & Duke, 1999). The values guiding Mortenson are key to his work, and they manage to help him steer through the complex political, social, and religious terrain. Terrorism, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are the backdrops for Mortenson's story. Mortenson visits Donald Rumsfield's office at the Pentagon in one chapter, and remembers mostly that he had "really nice shoes … a fancy-looking grey suit, and he smelled like cologne" (p. 293). An aide offers him $2.2 million in military funds to build schools, but Mortenson turns the offer down. His values don't allow him to accept the money. Somehow, Mortenson manages to avoid all of these traps, not getting sucked into the vortex of politics, and stays focused on building schools for children.

Mortenson didn't start with any qualifications in education. He was an emergency room nurse and a mountain climber. But that, I would argue, is the whole point. Academic theories of race and culture aren't even on the radar. Context, culture, and gender (Boleman & Deal, 1992) are just tools that people have in order to help Mortenson build schools. The point is that we don't need to have a doctorate in international developmental education in order to be helpful to students. If Greg Mortenson can build schools, so can the rest of us. If he can achieve huge results, without training or money, then so can we.

But is it true? That argument seems similar to the focus on successful outliers by the Heritage Foundation (Carter, 1999). Does Greg Mortenson's success at building schools in rural Pakistan mean that all schools are capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? The question misses the point. A better question might be: Being aware of the success that Mortenson has had, what can I do to make the world a better place?

Greg Mortenson argues further that he makes the world a better place because extremism and terrorism are best fought by providing education in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It's refreshing to see a white male addressing minority needs in such a straightforward manner: they need schools, let's help them build schools. The approach to race, culture, and ethnicity here is uncritical, matter of fact, and addresses a real problem. It is not distracted by critical race theory (Gilborn, 2005). Mortenson's actions are political, but they go beyond race, and refuse to accept or legitimate “the labels of race” (Darder & Torres, 2004). And the book has moral authority because it passes the litmus test: it works. The Central Asia Institute has now built 78 schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan and provided education for 28,000 students, including 18,000 girls. The book presents a picture of educational assistance and peacemaking on the scale of individuals, personalities and villages, in stark contrast to the peacemaking of governments, organizations, and institutions.

What is not stated is that there are other people doing similar work in the world. The Feinstein International Center, the Aga Khan Foundation, USAID, CIDA, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and even the U.S. military give humanitarian assistance to schools. If you were to read only Mortenson's book, you would be excused for believing that he is the only person, and his institute is the only institution, dedicated to helping to educate the poor in Asia. The truth is that the task of helping the poor in impoverished nations find education has a long pedigree. Mortenson's own father set up a teaching hospital in Zambia. There are many people and organizations helping to educate the world's poor.

Three Cups of Tea is not an academic retrospective biography. It's the story of ordinary people. If you are looking for an academic book like Frogs into Princes (Cuban, 2008), where the author displays the beautiful academic gems from his career in education, then this is not the book for you. Rather, this book is an intensely personal account of education at the individual level, under extremely difficult conditions.

Physically, the new trade paperback is a beautiful book. The cover photo, pregnant with meaning, shows three Afghani girls working on their homework, leaning against the white washed wall of their new school. It includes sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, an index, a handy map of the region, a table of contents, and suggestions to interested readers on how to get involved.

These are minor omissions. There is also some difficulty with the style. David Oliver Relin, the co-author is a journalist, and he brings a matter-of-fact style to the work. But some readers might not think Relin’s style is best for this moral journey, but it is the best style for the mass market that Mortenson's story has become.

References

Boleman, L., & Deal, T. (1992). Leading and managing: Effects of context, culture, and gender. Educational Administration Quarterly, 28(3), 314-329.

Carter, S. (1999). No excuses: Seven principals of low-income schools who set the standard for high achievement. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation.

Cuban, L. (2008). Frogs into princes: Writings on school reform. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cuban, L. (2000). Why is it so hard to get good schools? In L. Cuban, & D. Shipps (Eds.), Reconstructing the common good in education: Coping with intractable American dilemmas (pp. 148-169). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Darder, A., & Torres, R. (2004). After race: Racism after multiculturalism. New York: New York University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1972). The social bases of education. In A. Giddens (Ed.), Emile Durkheim: Selected writings (pp. 203-218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gilborn, D. (2005). Education policy as an act of white supremacy: Whiteness, critical race theory, and education reform. Journal of Education Policy , 20(4), 485-505.

Leithwood, K., & Duke, D. (1999). A century's quest to understand school leadership. In J. Murphy & K. Seashore-Louis (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational administration (2^nd ed.) (pp. 45-72). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mortenson, G., & Relin, D. (2007). Three cups of tea: One man's mission to promote peace ... one school at a time. New York: Penguin.

Thrupp, M. (1999). Introduction: the social limits of reform. In M. Thrupp, Schools making a difference: Let's be realistic. (pp. 3-12). New York: Open University Press.

Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Aldershot: Gower.

About the Reviewer

Paul Smyth is an instructor at the College of the North Atlantic in Doha, Qatar and a doctoral candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. He is interested in cross-cultural education, particularly school leadership that is transplanted from one country to another and the effect that it has on student outcomes.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Gustavo Fischman, Melissa Cast-Brede

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