What Easter Island’s colossal stone statues teach about the dangers of modern school reform
EASTER ISLAND, CHILE: A tourist walks behind a platform with seven huge statues (moais in Rapa Nui language), the only ones facing the sea, in Ahu Akivi in Easter Island, 3700 km off the coast of Chile, 12 February 2005. The Chilean island, located in the Polynesian archipielago, has many archeological sites and its Rapa Nui National Park is included on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list since 1995. AFP PHOTO/MARTIN BERNETTI (Photo credit should read MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images)
Eastern Island is a remote volcanic island in Polynesia that is a territory of Chile and known worldwide for its colossal statues — more than 800 — that were created by early inhabitants during the 10th – 16th Centuries. The carved statues, known as moia, humans with huge heads, sometimes sitting on platforms of rock called ahus. What, you might ask, does this have to do with education reform (given that this is an education blog)? Read on and Yong Zhao will explain. Yong Zhao is presidential chairman and director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. He is also a professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy and Leadership at the university. He is the author of several books, recently co-authoring “Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job: Correcting the Top 5 Edtech Mistakes.” This post was adapted from the introductory chapter of a recent book co-authored/edited by Yong Zhao, titled “Counting What Counts: Reframing Educational Outcomes,”published by Solution Tree.
By Yong Zhao
The stone statues on Easter Island (Diamond, 2005) have a lot to teach us about education. The hundreds of stone statues on Easter Island have been one of the greatest mysteries on earth. Located in the southern Pacific Ocean, Easter Island is over 2,000 miles away from the closest land, Chile, and 1,400 miles away from the nearest island, which is uninhabited. It is also a very small island, only 15 miles long and 10 miles wide. Yet, on this remote and small island are more than 800 giant statues carved out of stone. They are large and heavy—ranging from 15 feet to 70 feet and from 10 to 270 tons. The largest ever erected weighed over 80 tons. Some of them have a separate headpiece, a cylinder of red scoria that weighs up to 12 tons. When the first European explorers discovered it in 1722, the island was almost uninhabited, with just a few thousand people living in poor conditions without any advanced technology. The explorers did not find any large animals or trees that could be used to help move and lift the statues.
How could the islanders have carved, transported, and erected the statues because “organizing the carving, transport, and erection of the statues required a complex populous society living in an environment rich enough to support it” (Diamond, 2005, p. 81) and such a society was apparently nonexistent when Easter Island was discovered?
Early Europeans did not believe that the “Polynesians, ‘mere savages,’ could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms” (Diamond, 2005, p. 82). They attributed these grand works to other civilizations and even intelligent space aliens. Unless you believe in aliens, Pulitzer Prize–winning scientist Jared Diamond (2005), a professor of geography and physiology at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), provides a compelling and sobering account of how a civilization destroyed itself by diligently pursuing the wrong outcome in his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” The giant statues were created by the Polynesians who began to occupy Easter Island about one thousand years ago, when it was covered with forests of big and tall trees, some of which reached to about one hundred feet in height and seven feet in diameter. These trees were used to make seafaring canoes that enabled more productive fishing. Coupled with a rather sophisticated agriculture, Easter Islanders developed a civilization that once had an estimated What Easter Island’s colossal stone statues teach about the dangers of modern school reform - The Washington Post:
