Last week, i was witness to a great event which could change the face of higher education in India. For a teacher, this is a remarkable milestone. Last week, my institute, IIITMK, situated in Trivandrum, the south west-tip of india was connected through a "virtual private network" to Nagaland University in Dimapur, Nagaland. Dimapur is on the north east tip of India, some 3800 kilometres away. The idea of this link is to teach students in Dimapur by conducting lecture sessions in Trivandrum. We will use material provided by the National Programme for technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). NPTEL is a joint programme of all the Indian Instt. of Technology and the Indian Instt. of Science (these are the best and the most advanced schools of engineering in india). Thus, students in Nagaland will get to learn from the best teachers in India, without having to leave their homes.

This technologically profound project, the brainchild of Prof. Srivathsan, the Director of IIITMK, is the first of its kind in India. It has the potential of bringing education to everyone in India, at an affordable cost. It will help us to avoid all the corruption, mismanagement and apathy with which the current University system in India is suffering. And, like Prof. Srivathsan says, it will transform the current examination oriented system to a learning oriented system. If that happens, ours will soon become a great country. It will in fact be the first time when Rabindranath Tagore's dream will come true -- "Where knowledge is free and the head is held high"

There is hope for the education system in India.

partha

DASDOI, UTTAR PRADESH, India — At first glance nothing about these eight people would tell you that they are founders of schools.

They come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds. One was a high-school dropout, another a TV mechanic, yet another a village “doctor.”

Nor is it always easy to guess – at first sight anyway – that what they are running are schools. For example, Ram Vilas Pal, the TV mechanic, shares a property with his brother – part of the land is home to a cowshed, the other part home to the school.

What is common to all eight is their passion for social transformation and their conviction that school is the place for this to happen. Indeed, as the soft-spoken Mr. Pal says, in India people often expect this from a school.

“The community and the family depend on the school to create a responsible citizen out of the child,” he said. “When a child is found misbehaving, people ask him, ‘Is this what your teacher teaches you in school?’”

At a time when many young people leave their villages in search of jobs in the cities, these eight – all but two are in their 20s – have chosen to stay back and help mold the next generation. And they are doing it without large investment and without making tall promises to parents.

Most of them set up their community schools by seeking the help of the villagers for land and basic furniture and by employing educated but unemployed rural youth as teachers. In return, they promise to provide good overall education for very modest fee (for a high school student, for example, it might be 50 rupees, or US$1.25, a month).

For the villagers, this is a welcome alternative to the existing state-run schools which charge no fees but where standards are so dismal that, as one parent put it, “you will find eighth-standard children who cannot count from one to 10.”

Today there are eight of these community schools spread out in villages in the Kakori, Banthra, and Kharagpur blocks of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. They are not far from Lucknow, the state capital.

Some of the schools, like Vinod Kumar Yadav’s Glory Public School with 160 students, are doing well. Others, like Mr. Pal’s Nine Star School in Dasdoi with 73 children, are barely breaking even. Still others, like Brajesh Kumar’s Covenant Public School, are in urgent need of help. (For next year, Mr. Kumar plans to move his school to a different location.)

Assistance from FAS

Helping all of them chart their course and stay afloat is the Foundation for the Advancement of Science (FAS), a nongovernmental organization based in Lucknow.

FAS assists the schools by training their teachers, guiding them through difficult times, and even providing salaries for one or two teachers when the going gets tough. It is also preparing a new, innovative curriculum for use in the schools.

It was this foundation – after years of experimentation with setting up rural educational initiatives that were self-sustaining and self-sufficient – that spearheaded the establishment of the community schools.

“We had worked with many tutorial schools in Uttar Pradesh that were externally funded and that eventually failed. This made us realize that the solution had to come from within the village, with the villagers using mainly their own resources,” explains an officer of FAS.

For the community schools, he said, FAS started out by looking for individuals with the motivation, the vision and the willingness to struggle and persevere. Itself an NGO inspired by Baha’i ideals, it did not take the foundation long to find these individuals among the educated but unemployed Baha’i youth in the villages surrounding Lucknow.

The people working at the foundation knew that the young people were going to face an uphill task in setting up the schools, but they also knew from past experience that such a struggle brings with it a sense of ownership. As one of them put it: “Setting up a school in a village is a difficult job that requires both commitment and great effort. When these youth suffer for the school, their resolve is strengthened and their attachment to the school is intensified.”

Parents’ point of view

A man named Sunderlal, sitting outside his hut, is asked why he sends his son – who is beside him playing with a bicycle tire – to Brajesh Kumar’s school. His answer is immediate: “Because children of his school are good and respectful.”

This becomes a common refrain among parents and villagers when asked about the community schools.

Mr. Kumar explains why: “Our whole reason for starting these schools was not just to provide better quality of the same thing that is available everywhere but also to give something new and much-needed in the form of moral education.”

To CONTINUE reading the article please go to:

http://news.bahai.org/story/639

Revolutionary splendor and dismissal: Trials of negotiating authenticity as a revolutionary “Rida”

 

I have found a language that has allowed me to understand myself and my actions in more articulated and refined thought.  While this language has allowed me such fortunate definition in articulating myself as an educator and person it has not come without consequences.  There is a burden to having language and more so to have language established in deep education and reading of the world.  Such issue has left me wondering what, where, and how do I proceed.  It has become very difficult as of late but perhaps the most challenging time will provide the most fruitful reward.  Then again what if it doesn't and this is all an illusion trapped in the ego and existential understanding of the individual.  Perhaps the collective was never really meant to have meaning other than an abstract idealism.  In contrast, the individual is the supreme centerfold and subject of man's own objectification.  We are at ends and in a struggle whether we know it or not that we stand alone, but together.  It is a struggle that has pitted one against the other and one against the many.  We wage war in the name of a subjective idealism called "good."  Our righteous intentions still leave someone suffering.  It has become an inevitable, or so it seems, cyclical perpetuation of one and the other.  No equilibrium seems possible and at this point my pessimism starts to infect my will to move forward in a liberal progressive understanding of what social justice, equality, and man should be and act like.  It is not up to me to decide this for anyone, but to decide for myself and thus myself becomes important to me and to me only.  This existential reflection is not within my desire, but rather it has become symptomatic of something else.  I wonder if I am weakening.  Am I wanting to become comfortable because comfort and easiness are far more enjoyable than the struggle of progressive ideals?  So I struggle daily with negotiating myself, the world, and what connection I serve in both.  I find that my education, intellect, and understanding are at times an affliction.  They are not something to be revered, but something to be understood as powerfully endemic.  They are illuminating, enlightening, and yet, restrictive, reductive, and possibly destructive.  It is at times far greater to have the least amount of understanding of the world than to understand in such depth that it occupies your soul.  The old saying of “ignorance is bliss” becomes more than a common cliché, but a sound reminder of what we don’t know sometimes saves us from all that we know.  Is it possible to ever have such an understanding, or at least of feeling, of the world and things that it consumes you and controls you.  Education breaks certain innocence and eliminates return to such state, at least in the prior state that it was known.  Innocence and naïveté are the lustful accommodations of man that hold us in a state of blissful ignorance.  The ill man is often the educated who is conflicted and struggles with himself and the world, himself and himself, and himself as a relational, subjective, and objective of the world.  The fine line of genius and sanity is negotiated by one’s will and ability to maintain understanding while trying to find innocence. 

 

I am not enough because in the eyes of another I have not done what he has done which is in his eyes the way.  We all walk and understand the world in reference to our own way of what is.  Even our state of being is not without recourse of one’s own view of his/her way.  Thus, we see that the arguments and understanding, i.e., ideologies, become the undertaking of the individual against the collective.  The individual cannot survive against the collective.  Even if the collective is understood as every other individual existing independently, all those outside of the individual are formulated as “other” in relation to the individual.  “Every man for himself” is such an egoistic expression, but it is not fully explained.  Everyman is in and of himself in pursuit of himself.  This is not to say that he cannot exist or be a part of the collective in his pursuit.  What6 becomes problematic is that his pursuit will always be prioritized over the collective.  Even in the most sacrifice acts of an individual claiming an anti-thesis to vanity and individualism there still exist the individual ultimate fate in and of himself.  The individual cannot morph physically with the collective and it can be pondered and proposed through metaphysical and spiritual argumentation if a morphing, or melding, of the soul or composite energy can perform such metamorphoses.  The ideal of the revolutionary spirit must understand that to be a revolutionary “Rida” one must strive to be infused in my mind with the collective, but understand the physiological restrictions of the fusion with the collective.

 

The physiological can be represented in many ways.  Race, or the construction known as, is one way the revolutionary can be separated from the collective.  He can act as an individual in the collective, but the idea of ever being a fully incorporated melting of the collective is not possible.  With the most benevolent intentions of teachers, religious figures, and others there is still a malevolent ego that forms a barrier to ever being able to morph successfully with the collective.  What must be understood is that the revolutionary Rida is first and foremost a revolutionary of his inner self and egotistical conflict.  His first revolution is the revolution of himself.  The revolution of one’s self brings about the necessary elements of the psyche to begin revolutionary individualism as a collective effort and effort for the collective.  To know extent, and certainly reasonable, can the revolutionary ever be revolutionary with an internal battle still inflicted his inner judgment and egotistical dualistic desire of wanting to revolutionize himself and the collective.

 

Such philosophical pursuits in understanding revolution as an ideal must first be understood as a revolution of the psyche.  For myself, this revolution was one that lasted several years and was defined by further revolution.  Even as I start and attempt to bridge my revolutionary “Ridaship” to the collective, I must understand and keep in reason my continuous revolution of myself.  To negotiate the self and the collective is to be in conflict while in revolution, yet never be complete in either one.    

 

Some references of terms:

1) “Rida” See Jeff Andrade-Duncan’s article “Gangsta Wangsta Rida Paradigm.”

2) Existentialism has a number of people associated with it. See Sartre or Camus.

3) Conflict of the individual and collective: This maybe be seen through Marx’s philosophy, some possible influences of Michel Foucault, Derrick Jensen in Eco-activism, and Rousseau.

 

If more clarity is sought please email me.

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

agarciaj@indiana.edu

 

 

 

Don't say I didn't warn you when some of you and friends of mine said they wanted to see more.....

 

I'll add more as requested on certain topics or by general inquiry. Don't be afraid to ask!

 

As you can probably tell my focus is on multicultural education, Latino education, and pop culture in education.  I'm currently working on the pedagogy of humanity, issues of privlege as a manifestation of power, rap to reggaeton: representations of identity.

 

Please remember it is not enough to read if you're not willing to bleed.  Thoughts without action are the fantasies we comfort ourselves with in a world taking advantage of our sedated will to be a voice for change and revolution.

My mind hurts and my body aches. The energy I have exerted in thought has left me fatigued and with a dizziness of sight. I pose again with reiterating thoughts if it’s meaningful, is there purpose, and now is it worth it? Have I allowed myself to be trapped in a world of abstractness and candy cane fantasies of what should be? This where I begin to become consumed with thoughts of escapism. Could I leave all this behind and be content with new directions in life or thought? Do I need new context or some basis on which to judge my work and goals? If it comes to light that all this has been or becomes a matter of vanity and egoistic fulfillment I will retire myself and my thoughts as well as destroy any material that I feel to be inauthentic or done in vain. My wrestling with these ideas has come from a teetering and pursuit of finding activist and conscious individuals who understand the world in a deeper context outside of themselves. As I sit in University classes listening to other peers and professors, I realize that the worlds they live in are the same physical areas as everyone, but the realities are far more disparate (in some abstractness) than probably realized. The propositions of having the thought of the non-scholarly person (in this sense I mean someone with out the collegiate certificate) enter into consideration with regards to the issues and topics seems confounded to most. Why do we leave out those that we are working to help or understand? We cannot be caged mice and look through the glass walls of our cage with a safeness and abstinence from the others outside. We rest in comfort without risks. We fear consequences and participate in a menial comatose life of conformity and comfort. What happens if we only do one great thing to change the world? Is that not enough? If we never let the world, not academic world, change us how will we ever change the world. We must experience, not always vicariously through publications, but experience the things we fear the most. We must experience the negative consequences to experience the positive consequences. When we become awakened and conscious then we become enlightened. This need not be with academic facts or knowledge, but the truth of knowing ourselves. Once we know ourselves then we know the world in a very different light as almost if for the first time. When we reach a small moment of consciousness it is at first unsettling, but then it settles in with a calmness and feeling true to the essential being or self. No orgasmic flow will match the intensity of an enlightened moment of consciousness of the world and of the self. This can be sought during a time of relation with another. Enlightenment comes in a sense of calmness in looking at the person as if for the first time. When we are able to become enlightened and sustain such enlightenment then we begin to see and appreciate the things around us and the people we come in contact with. That first moment will be sustained and repeated each time you gaze up your significant other, taste a piece of fruit, or smell the morning air. Perhaps my thoughts are just thoughts. Take what you will if you read them, but take the most valuable piece that influences you or strokes a particular thought. The world is what it seems and is elusive in what it is. Find in your world a purpose and meaning of what you do with some consciousness of how you are