Moment of Silence -- Emmanuel Ortiz Part 2

A beautiful poem. Again, sans comments....

The wikipedia entry has the following to say...

Moment of Silence is a controversial poem by Emmanuel Ortiz published on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The poem links the history of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, the War on Terror, environmental racism, and structural violence to the attacks.

The poem goes on to critique the notion of a moment of silence, perhaps best summed up by the lines: "From somewhere within the pillars of power, you open your mouth to invoke a moment of our silence and we are all left speechless" and "This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written." The majority of the poem serves as a list of historical crimes by the West against indigenous peoples or the Third World and how the structures which perpetuate those crimes slip through the cracks whenever people take a "moment of silence". Essentially, Ortiz believes a moment of silence "cut[s] in line" by failing to acknowledge previous and ongoing forms of structural violence.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

Here's a link to an mp3 rendering of this poem!

I Wanted to Write an Anti-war Poem -- Emmanuel Ortiz Part 1

Emmanuel Ortiz is a Chicano (native born Mexican), a Puerto Rican, an Irish American.. but foremost an activist and a spoken-word poet. He works with the Minnesota Alliance for the indigenous Zapatistas. I've been reading his poems lately and I'm putting up two of his poems here, sans comments. They are to be read in entirety and given subsequent introspection.

I Wanted to Write an Anti-war Poem, But...

Ever since the war started,
One year ago today,
I have wanted to write an anti-war poem.
For each of the last 365 days
I have been trying to write
To voice my opinion
In opposition to this war.

But nothing has come out.

After five days of watching
And not watching
Bombs fall on Iraq
I thought I had it
When some white boy
During a soccer game
Told me to "go back to Baghdad"
And as my fists found his temples
In retaliation for the bombs that were obliterating theirs
I remember thinking to myself
Amidst the slow-motion home-movie haze
"This will make a great poem"
A poem about
How he mistook
Mesoamerica for Mesopotamia
Borinken for Babylon.
And why Baghdad
Instead of Brasilia, Beijing, Beirut, Bogotá, Bombay,
Even Bi-racialville U.S.A.

I swear I was gonna write a poem about that white boy
About how his words were acts of errorism
Misguided missiles
Missing their marks
Leaving brown bodies burning
Turning soccer fields into battlefields
Turning mosques and marketplaces into burial grounds
I wanted to write that poem
Testimony to our bodies
How they have always been battlefields
And burial grounds.

I wanted to tell that white boy off
In a poem
That said
Go back to Nazi Germany
Go back to Imperialist Britain
Go back to Hollywood
Go back to the Oval Office
Go back across the Mason-Dixie line
Go back to Oklahoma City
Go back to Jasper, Texas
Go back to the suburbs
Go back into every red-white and blue-blooded American home
Crawl back inside the weapon of mass distraction
That is the centerpiece of your living room
Back into the studios of CNN
You can go anywhere you want to, Mr. All-American White Boy
As long as you go
Back
Because where else do you go
When you've reached the top of the world?

Damn, I wanted to write that poem.

But I never did.

Instead
I traveled
Crisscrossing the country
Wrote and read other poems.
I think I wrote a poem for my brother
Who has never seen the island that gave birth to our grandmother
Wrote one for a lover
Who I lost to another
But no poems against war.
I played soccer
And video games
Watched the Super Bowl
Skipped the halftime show
But wrote no poems against the war

But I swear to you
I wanted to
Been meaning to
Write that anti-war poem
Even had deadlines
But then Haiti made headlines
And that war hit close to my ancestral home again
My heart was a hurricane
And I felt a need to start over again
Searching for the right words to say
As a grandchild of Borinken
To the people of neighboring Ayiti
To the heirs of Caonabo and Anacaona
Children of Toussaint L'Overture.

Wanted to write that poem
But there were rallies and meetings to attend
And I needed a new job
One where I wasn't plagued by white liberals
Asking where I come from
And trying to speak Spanish

Wanted to write my anti-war poem
Standing on firm ground
But I'm looking for a place to live
Can't tell you where I will call 'home' in a month
Been questioning where I call home even now

I wanted to write a poem
That meant something
That made a difference
That could stop bullets
Topple empires
A poem that would rebuild marketplaces
Breathe life back into burnt brown bodies
A poem that could cross rivers
With two names
Rio Grande y Bravo
Tigris and Dijla
Euphrates and Furat,
Traversing Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia

I swear
If these wars ever end
The one that rages always over there somewhere
And the one right here in my heart
If these wars ever end
If my brother ever makes it to Puerto Rico
If my lost lover ever comes back to me
If I ever find home
Work with meaning If the war that just wants peace and love
If that war over there
This war right here
If these wars
Ever end
If I can ever find a moment's quiet
Peace of mind
Then maybe
Just maybe
I'll write that poem.

Education culminating in Employment -- an analysis by Dr. Vinod Raina

An extremely well-researched analysis on the National Curriculum Framework proposition to integrating work and education, by Dr. Vinod Raina. Dr. Raina runs the Bharatiya Gyan Vigyan Samiti and is very involved in the national CABE committee as well as in efforts to bring about changes in legislation to ensure Right to Education. This article analyzes the history of liberal and vocational education with a critical eye. Read the whole thing, its well worth many a dekko.

As an after read, check out this essay by Amartya Sen on Tagore, titled Tagore and his India, contrasting and bringing out the philosophical differences in Tagore's and Gandhi's thinking.

Integrating Work and Education

Interest in linking and integrating work with education appears to have been rekindled by the National Curriculum Framework 2005 since it not only contains a whole section devoted to it, but also had a focus group that prepared a separate report on the subject (called FGR hereafter).

One says rekindled because active interest in this area has dwindled over the years, but for stray references to Gandhi’s views on the subject and his nai talim. There could be various reasons for that, but the major one seems to be the misplaced but growing fascination of curriculum framers in the past decade or two to address the question of ‘knowledge explosion’, demanding an increasing addition of fairly meaningless and disjointed facts from ‘thrust areas’ in the curriculum, mostly tested through memory-based examination systems. Though never clearly stated, such mindless approach to curriculum framing has operated with an inherent bias as to what constitutes legitimate knowledge. What is ignored in curriculum frameworks and resulting syllabi must therefore not be worth teaching, would be the obvious conclusion of persons who finally get down to writing textbooks. Work related knowledge of the majority of Indian population has therefore been continuously delegitimised, notwithstanding Gandhian exhortations to the contrary.

Though the attempt of the NCF2005 to regenerate interest in this critical area needs to be welcomed, it would appear that the subject has not been analysed in the kind of depth and range that would be necessary if the objective was to ensure implementation, rather than one more academic essay for future researchers to comment upon. The FGR and its summary in the main part of NCF2005 rightly attempts to distinguish between vocational education and work-centered education but in my opinion, one needs to examine the issue in a much more multi-dimensional manner in order to arrive at strategies that may facilitate implementation. These other dimensions would include, in addition to the pedagogic issue, the historical debate between liberal and work based education, links between labour and education, locating within dominant political ideologies, and the human and institutional requirements to implement a work-based mass education system.

Liberal and Vocational education

The familiar conflict between liberal and vocational education stems from the concept of streaming, whereby liberal education is seen as a vehicle for mobility into ‘high culture’ and prestige, and vocational education as a means that assigns working class, dalit and minority youth to a narrowly “practical school experience, limiting their educational access to mobility, and stigmatizing them as incapable of learning anything worthwhile, ‘academic’ subjects and skills”[1]. Many educationists and philosophers have, in recent times, however questioned the apparent dichotomy between liberal and vocational education[2]. Richard Pring, for example has argued for a broadening and reformulating of the liberal ideal so as to embrace the idea of vocational relevance, along with practical intelligence, personal development and social and community relevance[3]. Similarly, Christopher Winch has developed a detailed and rich conception of vocational education, embracing concerns about ‘moral and spiritual well-being’ alongside notions of economic and political goods[4].

Pring’s approach could be called more pedagogic since he disbelieves the perceived diametrical opposition between liberal and vocational education. In particular, he questions that:

“the vocational, properly taught, cannot itself be liberating –a way into those forms of knowledge through which a person is freed from ignorance, and opened to new imaginings, new possibilities: the craftsman who finds aesthetic delight in the objects of his craft, the technician who sees the science behind the artifact, the reflective teacher making theoretical sense of practice”. (Pring, 1995)

The concern to reconcile vocation with education is however old, and runs across various ideological streams, though for differing reasons, as we shall presently discuss. Going with Proudhon that “the work a man did was something to be proud of, it was what gave interest, value and dignity to his life’, Smith extended the idea thus:

“An education that was divorced from the world of work, that is, an education that was bookish and grammar-schoolish in conception, was valueless from the point of view of ordinary working class children. Of course, an education that went too far in the other direction, which brought up children merely to be the fodder for factories, was equally unacceptable. What was required was an education which could equip a child for the work-place but would also give him a degree of independence in the labour market.”[5]

It is customary, and rightly so, to invoke Gandhi when vocation and work are prefixed to education in India. Henry Fagg [6] in his slim volume has tried to locate Gandhi’s ideas of nai talim within the politics and issues that prevailed in 1937 when Gandhi, at the ripe age of 67, made his radical proposals for mass education that he thought were appropriate for India. It has remained a matter of debate whether Gandhi advocated work-based education as a means of self-support in order to circumvent his disappointment regarding the inability of the state to fund universal education, or as a pedagogic necessity, or both. His plea for adequate finances for universal education was met with a response that if at all, the way out was to utilize revenues from liquor sales. That meant he had to either give up his stand on prohibition, or his plea for universal education with state support, which he expressed quite plainly: “the cruellest irony of the new reforms lies in the fact that we are left with nothing but liquor revenue to fall back upon, in order to give our children education”[7].This seems to have led Gandhi to propose a national system of education that would be self-sufficient, rather than solely dependent on state funding thus:

“but as a nation we are so backward in education that we cannot hope to fulfill our obligations to the nation in this respect in a given time during this generation, if the programme is to depend on money. I have therefore made bold, even at the risk of losing all reputation for constructive ability, to suggest that education should be self-supporting …. I would therefore begin the child’s education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins training. Thus every school can be made self-supporting, the condition being that the State take over the manufacture of these schools”[8].

His enthusiasm for self-support was expressed more forcefully after Narhari Parikh, a teacher at the Harijan Ashram at Sabarmati provided figures in defense of self-supported education from his school. This led Gandhi to assert that:

“Public schools must be frauds and teachers idiots, if they cannot become self-supporting” and, “corporate labour should be, say after the first year of the course, worth one anna per hour. Thus for twenty-six working days of four hours per day, each child will have earned Rs. 6-8 per month….We should be intellectual bankrupts, if we cannot direct the energy of our children so as to get from them, after a year’s training, one anna worth of marketable labour per hour”.

That he clearly saw links between education and vocation in terms of alleviating unemployment is clear from his answer to a questioner: “you impart education and simultaneously cut at the roots of unemployment”[9].

The self-sufficiency argument of Gandhi strongly suggests that he was professing an income generating vocational education. It is well known that one of his dissenters to this approach was none other than Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore considered the emphasis on vocation and training in Gandhi’s formulations deeply reductionist, asserting that the purpose of education was liberative rather than merely vocational. He in particular took exception to Gandhi’s emphasis on weaving education around the Charkha. The two engaged in a fascinating public debate on these issues.[10]

Gandhi of course did stress on the pedagogic importance of linking work to education, pleading for a system that considered work as a starting point to delve into history, geography, technology and science, exemplified by his famous passage about the use of takli to learn not only about spinning, but the history and geography of cotton, history and technology of the spinning wheel and so on, thus anticipating the ideas of Pring, Winch etc. many years earlier. He also stressed on the nurturing of the ‘cooperative’ and ‘peaceful’ values in children, when work was the basis of learning, rather than mindless rote learning. Above all, he pleaded for an education that would integrate the head, heart and the hand.

In an article written in May 1937 entitled ‘Intellectual Development or Dissipation?’, Gandhi developed the central premise that ‘Man is neither mere intellect nor the gross animal body, nor the heart and soul alone. A proper and harmonious combination of all the three is required for the making of the whole man and constitutes the true economics of education’. He then gave the outline of his vision of an alternative pedagogy:

“As against this, take the case of a child in whom the education of the heart is attended from the very beginning. Supposing he is set to some useful occupation like spinning, carpentry, agriculture etc., for his education and in that connection is given a thorough and comprehensive knowledge relating to the theory of the various operations that he is to perform and the use and construction of tools that he would be wielding. He would not only develop a fine, healthy body but also a sound, vigorous intellect that is not merely academic but is firmly rooted in and is tested from day to day by experience. His intellectual education would include knowledge of mathematics and the various sciences that are useful for an intelligent and efficient exercise of his avocation. If to this is added literature by way of recreation, it would give him a perfect well-balanced, all round education in which the intellect, the body and the spirit have all full play and develop together into a natural, harmonious whole”[11].

It would appear that Gandhi was trying to do many things through his radical suggestions linking work with education. Along with deeply philosophical perceptions regarding the purpose of education, he seems to have been trying to solve practical problems like funding for education and unemployment. It does become somewhat difficult to separate the philosophical and the instrumentalist in his formulations. The Tagore-Gandhi exchange aptly highlights the contested nature of the subject (missing in the NCF2005 and the FGR), since it provides insights to the resistance to the concept of work-based education even at the time of an emotionally charged atmosphere, conducive to do something new, during India’s independence. The intellectual and practical resistance to his views must have been considerable that in spite of his unquestionable stature, nai talim did not find favour for incorporation into mainstream education and was experimented as a non-state alternative. Identifying such resistances would seem to be vitally important in forging an implementational strategy sixty years later, in an India that is radically less conducive to Gandhi’s thinking. It is important to point out that the repeated reference in the FGR to the ‘Brahamanical mindset’ as the single most dominant resistance to Gandhian ideas may in fact be quite wrong. Because it would imply as if the dalits and low-castes saw merit in Gandhian ideas, and were opposed by the ruling high-castes. The situation in fact is quite the opposite.

Ideology and work-based education

Where as pedagogical considerations constitute issues internal to the educational discourse, mass education never is independent of external factors; political ideology being the most prominent. The NCF2005 states up front that it has deliberately side-stepped such issues in order not to indulge in ‘blame game’. Where as the merit of such a stance has been debated in relation to the history textbooks controversy, the absence of such an engagement in relation to work and education is very surprising, since work and labour are deeply political categories, and an absence of such engagement can lead to fairly erroneous conclusions.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in the FGR that the deprived, marginalized, dalit and toiling masses have a common enemy that is resisting vocationalised education, namely the Brahaminical elites. This evades the issue that one of the strongest opposition to vocational/ised education has in fact come from the dalits. This has to do with the very notion of the ‘worker’, and the historical social formations around work. Without reference to that, statements regarding the political left can also become misleading, as they have in the FGR, when it universlises Gandhi’s approach by stating that ‘similar experiments have been done in erstwhile U.S.S.R and other socialist countries’.

Let us consider vocationalisation in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries first. Gandhi’s vision of education was intrinsically located in the realities of rural India, as was his system of governance and essential production. At the forefront therefore to him was the carpenter, the blacksmith, the potter, the artisan, the handicraft maker, the agricultural labourer and so on. When he talked of vocationalising, he clearly had work related to such professions in mind. For the emerging Soviet Union of the 1920’s, education was intrinsically related to the creation of a massive industrial workforce. The rural artisan and peasant, very dear to Tolstoy (who greatly influenced Gandhi’s views in many ways)), was seen as a transitory phenomenon by the end of 1920’s (Anatoli Lunacharsky, who was charged by Lenin to put into place the Soviet education system stated around 1925 that Tolstoy’s artisan-based education might be allowed to continue for sometime, till it was replaced by industrial worker-based education). The development paradigm was rooted in massive industrialisation and collective farming, to replace household production and feudal agriculture. Work-based education, either through labour schools or polytechnics was therefore not related to handicraft but big industry. More importantly, the motivation was not merely pedagogic, it was deeply political. Class struggle being intrinsic to the Marxist thesis, creating class consciousness amongst the workers was integral to the Soviet education, and was simply called propaganda education. Treating such work-based education in the same manner as nai-talim can therefore be quite misleading, the political visions and developmental outcomes being very different.

It might be pertinent to refer to the US around the beginning of the 20th century here. Philanthropists worried about the problems of poor youth started small vocational programs outside the public schools around 1880’s. Between 1890 and 1910, vocational education in the narrow sense of job preparation attracted the support of a diverse range of social and economic interests. The National Association of Manufacturers was a strong advocate, pushing for schooling that would prepare workers for factories and workshops. After initial hesitation, labour unions supported and participated in these efforts. As is evident, the nature of vocational/ised education is deeply entrenched within the political ideology that promotes it, in particular the development paradigm under which it operates. For a class struggle-based industrial workforce of the erstwhile Soviet Union, work-based education is deeply ideological; for the capitalist US industry of the early 20th century, it is mostly vocational education to prepare a disciplined workforce; and for Gandhi it was deeply linked to his ideal of India that would live mostly in villages, and produce locally in a manner that was harmonious with nature.

To put it simply, the nation was clearly divided, rightly or wrongly, regarding such a future at the time of independence. As protagonists of the modern industrial India, the Governments that came in right after independence embarked on an industrial paradigm to which Gandhi’s nai talim seemed irrelevant. Rightly or wrongly again, it has to be conceded that that was the dominant political consensus of the times. Amongst the major dissenters of the Gandhian paradigm, then and now, are people for whom, perhaps, Gandhi was most concerned about, the dalits. Not only did they have his term for them, harijans, removed from the political lexicon, they have been vociferous in opposing any dilution of the liberating nature of Enlightenment values, in particular in the area of education. Spearheaded by the Columbia and London School of Economics trained economist, and barrister of law, Grey’s Inn, London decorated lawyer, the ‘untouchable’ Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the dalit vision of development, education and human rights are firmly entrenched in the modernization paradigm, far removed from that of Gandhi.

The dalit aversion to anything based on traditional vocation should hardly be surprising. Given that the caste system is entrenched in the hierarchy of vocations, most of the artisanal castes being at the bottom of the hierarchy, relating them to education is viewed as a means of maintaining caste distinctions rather than obliterating them through liberal education. Vocation based education is tantamount to caste based education from this viewpoint.

I firmly believe that the major challenge to bring in work-based education in India would not be so much pedagogic, or formulation of policies. It is a political challenge; a negotiation with the liberal, left and the dalit points of view, in order to establish that work-based education can be progressive and emancipatory, both in a class and caste sense. The strong reaction of a section of left intellectuals and academics to the inclusion of local knowledge (artisanal or agricultural work would by definition derive from local knowledge systems) in the teaching-learning process, as proposed by the NCF2005 clearly indicates that the sites of resistance to work-based education are deeply ideological, and are not confined merely to the self-interests of the middle-class that views the dominant liberal system of education as conducive to their vocations.

The case for work-based education: Labour and Education

Sixty years onwards from the time of independence, we have the advantage of looking back how the system of education has proceeded, which formulations have been validated, and which have turned out to be flawed. To do so we could pose the question sharply: Has the predominantly liberal mode of education that the state opted for at the time of independence acted favourably to reduce inequalities amongst class, caste, gender and minorities; and has it transformed a majority of country’s population to creative, productive and secure citizens? The answer has to be a resounding no[12].

A few figures should help to support the answer. Even though the literacy rate has increased from around 21% at the time of independence, from a total population of around three hundred millions, to around 68% in 2001, out of a total population of around a billion, the absolute number of illiterates is greater than the population at the time of independence. This is of course related to the gross inadequacy of the school system. Where as it was constitutionally mandated that all children up to fourteen years of age should have received eight years of education by 1960, the situation in 2004 was that out of 21 crore children in the age-group 6-14, more than half, around 12 crore were never enrolled or dropped off by class eight, making a mockery of the constitutional mandates, which now includes the Right to Education for the 6-14 year olds guaranteed by the 86th amendment of 2002.

The progression beyond class 8 has been dismal. Only around 2.2 crore children are in classes 10 and 12, which reduces to half, 1.1 crores, in classes 11 and 12. Those in higher education number around a crore, most of them pursuing an utterly aimless undergraduate ‘liberal’ education degree in colleges that have been reduced to mediocre haunts. The degree of exclusion by class eight is staggering, particularly the drop off rate of 52%. Where as the non-enrolment of over three crore children could be attributable to lack of access, the non-retention of around nine crore children, and the lack of adequate achievement of those who do remain in schools must surely have to do with the education that is transacted. Two attributes suggest themselves, that the education is uninteresting for children and it is irrelevant to their lives.

Creating interest is clearly a question of pedagogy; how to make teaching-learning more fun and less drudgery. Relevance is deeply developmental; requiring weaving education around the social, cultural and productive realities of a child, while empowering her to ‘liberate’ herself from the exigencies of her birth, experiences and social/economic constraints. Quite clearly, livelihood considerations are related to education. An ‘educated’ unemployed is a serious problem, in as much it underscores the fact that the nation has invested in a person, without making him/her a productive citizen. The normal undergraduate and even post-graduate program would seem to be producing a large number of such unemployable youth. But the question could be asked: is that because jobs are not available or ‘suitably’ educated persons are not available for specific jobs?

That requires a scan of the labour profile of the country. In spite of the emphasis on industrialization in the initial five-year plans after independence, that could have created a large industrial proletariat, the labour force in the formal sector in India has remained abysmally low. In the decade and a half since the liberalization and privatization phase of the Indian economy, beginning 1991, where as the growth rate might is touching 8% per anum, it is accompanied by a decrease in formal employment, from 282.45 million in 1997 to 269.83 in 2003[13]. The decrease is most prominent in the public sector, from 195.59 millions to 184.49 millions, but evident too in the much hyped private sector, from 86.86millions to 85.34 millions in the said period. Unorganized labour however increased from 354 million to 390 million in the corresponding period, demonstrating clearly where the employment growth potential has been.

There is however a significant factor crucially linked to education within this employment scenario, which is the phenomenal growth of the service sector. The net decrease in formal employment is largely due to the decline in employment in the manufacturing/industrial sector, compensated by the increase in the service sector. This is also reflected in the disaggregated economic growth rates in the 10th plan period (2002-2006): the total growth rate was 7%, agriculture increased by a dismal 1.8%, industry by 8% and services by 8.9%.

The skewed nature of such development is evident from the fact that the sector that employs the largest labour namely agriculture is least productive economically, and the one that employs the least number of people, namely services, is the most productive.

What are the implications of this for vocational/ised education? It should remain undisputed that as far as integrating knowledge from non-organised areas of production, be that agriculture, artisanship, medicinal plants, forestry, construction, local water systems etc., are concerned, teaching-learning materials up to class 8 or 10 ought to be prepared in such a manner that they relate to the social, economic and cultural lives of the children, a majority of whom come from families of such backgrounds. The consequent relevance and identity of the school to the lives of the children, along with pedagogic methods that are interesting to the child might go a long way in arresting the massive drop-out rates, 52%, up to class 8.

The major question would be about purposeful streaming after class 10 and 12. It is evident that the existing undergraduate degree, in terms of quality, is neither a tonic for the mind, nor suitable for learning productive skills. The question is, if the vocational stream is to be enlarged at the 10+ and 12+ stages, along with improving the quality of the under and post graduate degrees, which directions should it take? The decline in the agricultural and industrial sectors and an increase in the service sector requires that we address this issue, in educational terms, with a fresh mind. The growth of the IT related service sector – call centers, outsourcing; and management related service sector require vocational programmes quite different from those pursued at existing ITI’s. Unfortunately, most of the educational needs in these areas are met today through the mushrooming of unregulated commercial fly-by-night shops, masquerading as private educational institutions; even as ‘universities’ as happened in Chattisgarh, where 52 such set-ups were granted university status, till the Supreme Court intervened. That is because the state has not responded to such vocational needs.

This of course doesn’t imply that vocational courses related to artisanship and agriculture are not required. One might in fact argue that if school education reflected the knowledge base of these sectors, that might provide an additional input to make these areas of production, where maximum labour is involved, more robust and active. However, one can also not overlook the over all constraints imposed by the developmental path the country unfortunately seems to be pursuing, which is higher growth rates with less employment.

Two things seem to be clear from these arguments. One that the hope that a very large part of the rural population would be proletarised as industrial workforce has remained a myth sixty years after independence, confirming Gandhi’s prophecy that India is essentially a nation of rural dwellers. Second, that instead of strengthening the rural economy, or creating manufacturing potential, hence employment, close to rural areas (as township manufacture in China has), India has stumbled on to the service sector, including IT related, as a major source of economy. Educational planning has however remained mute to such changes, and continues to blunder on with drop outs at lower stages and redundant degrees at higher stages, in a completely haphazard manner, benefiting dubious commercial education by default.

It has also to be recognized that the expansion of the service sector has given rise to aspirations, imposing educational demands that can be at complete variance with pedagogic principles. Take for example language. Crucial to the national system of education, as envisioned by Gandhi, elaborated by the Kothari Commission, and substantiated by researches all over the World, the use of local languages, if not mother tongue, in the formative years of formal education is critical to the creative growth of a child. Aspirations of parents and society at large for children, particularly in order to get a foothold in the IT related service sector is however pushing for increasing use of English as medium of instruction from the pre-primary level. Dalit organisations too favour learning in English as emancipatory, leading to dignity within the society. Can vocational/ised education remain immune to such demands? Learning English would in fact appear to be a major form of vocational education today!

Implementing work-based education

It is not as if NCF2005 is the first policy document favouring vocational/ised education. The Kothari Commission report and the National Policy on Education 1986, and its revised version of 1992 have already stated much of what NCF2005 contains. The question one may ask is: what have been the constraints on implementation?

Firstly, it is perhaps conceptual. Work-based education has mostly been interpreted as vocational education; a policy to create a separate vocational stream. Accordingly, we have seen the opening up of vocational education schools, or the addition of vocational education facilities in existing higher secondary schools. An overarching National Council for Vocational Education has also been set up, at Bhopal. Open schooling has also embraced the vocational stream, with the National Institute for Open Schooling (NIOS) and some state open schools offering a variety of courses.

It would appear that the National Knowledge Commission set up by the current UPA government in June 2005 has also been examining the question of production and work related knowledge in some detail. At a recent consultation on school education and literacy organized by the Commission, the Vice-Chairman of the Commission informed that their survey revealed that existing vocational institutions all together provide courses related to 80 vocations, most of them related to the formal sector. However, the Commission was reported to have compiled an exhaustive list of vocations covering both the formal and informal sectors, identifying 3000 vocations! So even at the level of streamed vocational education, a massive task awaits, in preparing courses in areas encompassing handicrafts, artisanship and other rural work.

This is quite different from integrating knowledge from areas of production, particularly from unorganized areas, into the mainstream liberal education. Evidently, such a task remains unattended. Will the publication of NCF2005 spur it on? Not unless attention is paid to the constraining factors. School books are made by the NCERT and state bodies like the SCERT’s/SIE’s/Boards. The faculties at these institutions and other textbook writers have mostly subject backgrounds, including from the Education discipline. It is obvious that they normally have no background, experience, knowledge, ability and hence inclination, to look beyond their subject areas (most of them also have no experience of having worked with school children, particularly rural). So in spite of what the policies might say, there are no matching institutional and human capacities to translate them into action; this has happened in the past and is likely to happen after the NCF2005.

In the first year after the NCF2005 when the NCERT has begun to write fresh books, I have formally participated in the effort as a member of a committee that is monitoring the new drafts. As a consequence, one gets an opportunity to read all the book drafts and interact with the writing groups. However one sees a great deal of resistance and throwing up of hands when it is pointed out to the writer groups how ‘knowledge from below’ could be incorporated, or generated from the children and teachers. The common responses are: ‘we don’t know how to do so; it is dangerous since the information is not validated; it will dilute the subject matter; that is not science/mathematics/history, or whatever’!

A mindset that considers codified liberal education as the only valid knowledge is unlikely to create teaching-learning material that incorporates knowledge from work. In contrast, while we were making textbooks in Eklavya for use in the government schools of Madhya Pradesh, not only were the rural school teachers (most of them also being farmers and artisans) participating in the process, but we would involve a carpenter, mason, farmer or other artisans wherever required. That is how chapters on leather tanning, bidi making, folk forms of mathematics, panchayat functioning, land, soil, and crops and so forth were written. Unless a similar process is initiated within the state owned textbook writing institutions, or people with such experience and understanding are involved in large numbers, rather than only cut and dry subject experts, implementation will not take place. The most evident example from the recent NCERT books is the class 3 mathematics book that has attempted to incorporate algorithms of folk mathematics, made possible because people behind it had worked in that area before, and believe in such integration. The class 6 mathematics book is however devoid of any such effort, possibly because its writers do not believe in the policy, no matter whether it is the NCF2005 or the Kothari Commission, or do not have the capacity to do so. The resulting approach, across the classes is therefore very uneven. But if that can be ironed out over the years, particularly in state level textbooks covering nearly 97% children is schools, it would be stupendous. That however would require a massive overhaul of the institutions responsible for textbook writing, teacher trainings and examinations. That, and not just writing policy, is the major challenge!

[1] Allen Graubard; Could Vocational Education be Progressive, Radical Teacher, Spring 2004, Center for Critical Education Inc.
[2] Judith Suissa; Vocational Education: a social anarchist perspective, Policy Futures in Education, Vol 2, No. 1, 2004
[3] Richad Pring; Closing the Gap: liberal education and vocational preparation, Hodder and Stoughton, 1995, (in Judith Suissa, ibid)
[4] C. Winch; Education, Work and Social Capital; Towards a new conception of vocational education, Routledge, London, 2000
[5] M.Smith: The Libertarians and Education, George Allen and Unwin, 1983
[6] Henry Fagg; A Study of Gandhi’s Basic Education, National Book Trust, 2002
[7] Harijan 5:222, in Fagg, ibid
[8] Harijan 5:197, in Fagg, ibid
[9] Harijan 5:261, in Fagg, ibid
[10] Sabysachi Bhattacharya; The Poet and the Mahatma, National Book Trust
[11] Harijan; 5:104, in Fagg ibid
[12] Vinod Raina; Where do children go after class eight?, Seminar, July 2006
[13] Vinod Raina, ibid

National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is one of the few well-intentioned schemes to come out of the current UPA government. The NREGS guarantees 100days of unskilled work per family for every family that is below the poverty line. Now, lets not even go into how BPL classifications are calculated or the absurdity and lack of context to the BPL surveys. There are many points about this scheme which are at a macro level wrong --

1. As one of the recipients of this scheme famously said "Are our tummies on vacation the remaining 265 days?" What is the rationale behind 100 days per one member of family?
2. Providing work that required unskilled labor is essentially a welfare scheme. It is not promoting the skill sets of that targeted population. Its the classic case of "give them fish, rather than teach them to fish". Potentially the same money can be spent at every Panchayat level to provide training in skills that will lead the population towards economic independence and dignity.
3. As many social audits across the districts where the scheme is being implemented show, the muster rolls are largely fudged, corruption accounts for a huge drain on this money, and a very small percentage of the money actually trickles down to the intended recipient. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was the Prime Minister, famously admitted that only 15% of government spending manages to reach the recipient. The rest is wastage. A similar Employment Guarantee Scheme tried out in Maharashtra in 1976 had already fallen victim to this atrocious Public Distribution System. In fact, the Indian government does not have any evidence of being capable of properly implementing any social welfare scheme.

Given all these obvious issues, the question then is if not NREGS, then what? The problem is not restricted to unskilled work, and then neither is the solution. Clearly the solution needs to be autonomous, small, and needs to come from the bottom, from the folks who need the money. The government needs to stop dictating lives and stop interfering. The policies that restrict our manufacturing sector from matching the growth in the services sector need to go. Agriculture has to be supported, or the farmers transitioning from agriculture into manufacturing or services need to be provided the skills to do that (again, allow private enterprise, and it will come about organically, instead of some governmental masterminding). National budgets need to spend less on defence and instead pour some funds into Education (at all levels). And in the middle of all this, the right folks will get the right skills and will be able to get their right to livelihood.

A possible counter-argument of course is that while all this is happening, people are starving. Maybe a combination of some scheme with a larger solution in tow is probably what is recommended. However, the government seems intent on earning hearsay goodwill (read votes, and support of left-parties) by implementing only the welfare schemes, and the bureaucracy is happy to implement the scheme with its 85% drain on many crores of rupees!

The Agrarian Crisis of India Shining

India is rapidly developing. Services sector is booming. Our GDP is increasing at 9%. We are cutting nuclear deals with USA. Our youth have the credit to buy German and Japanese cars and motorcycles. Our farmers do not have the credit to buy seeds. We are cutting deals with Monsanto and undercutting our farmers. Over 60% of our economy is reliant on agriculture. Agriculture sector is in a serious crisis. India is ready for a massive collapse.

Thats the story of two different Indias. If you really think about it, everything about India is pluralistic. Agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable. Like education, the country needs to subsidize and support its agrarian sector. Particularly a country who's excess of 50% economy is agrarian and excess of 70% of the population are farmers. However, as the policies of the past decade unfold, we are seeing a continued spread of farmer suicides across the country.

P. Sainath has written extensively on this crisis. Click here to follow the link to indiatogether.org and scroll down along the right column to read Sainath's reports on the crisis in

• Andhra Pradesh (Anantpur and other nearby areas)
• Kerala (Wyanad)
• Maharashtra (Vidarbha)

I'll add more details to this post when I have more time.

Right to Education

Education as a fundamental right cannot be denied in any democratic society. It is the duty of the Government to provide for and guarantee this fundamental right. The Right to Education Bill (RTE) provides a unified framework for enacting the 86th amendment of the Indian constitution, which guarantees this right to all it’s citizens. In 2006, the Indian Government decided to drop the long pending RTE Bill and pass it on to the State Governments as a model bill.

Many NGOs and people's movements are actively working towards pushing the government to table the bill once more in the parliament. Here are a few links and a reading list:

• A detailed site chronicling all the activities
  
• The Right to Education Bill (PDF link)
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Note on the Common School System (PDF link)
  
• Further details and more documents available here
  

Bhopal Gas Disaster Survivors Struggle

Shortly after midnight poison gas leaked from a factory in Bhopal, India, owned by Union Carbide Corporation. There was no warning, none of the plant's safety systems were working. In the city people were sleeping. They woke in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases burning their eyes, noses and mouths. They began retching and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Whole neighbourhoods fled in panic, some were trampled, others convulsed and fell dead. People lost control of their bowels and bladders as they ran. Within hours thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. Read a survivor's account of "that night". More background here.

All that was back in 1984. The government let the miscreants get away, and also made a deal with Union Carbide as compensation for those who died that night. The survivors today have a fight of a different nature altogether, as they fight the contamination, the water borne handicapping diseases, physical malformations, societal stigma, hunger, poverty -- it never ends. I visited Bhopal in January of 2007 and met with the survivors and visited the contaminated factory site. It was a surreal experience. Folks are obviously in a bad state for resources. The ground water is badly contaminated and there is no other water available except once a week. The governmental promises about pipelines from nearby Kolar river have not been kept. The factory site is dilapidated and lot of chemicals still lie around, and with every rainy season, further deeply get entrenched into the water table of the area.

• Click here for a full picture story of that visit.
• A lot of background details and up-to-date information is available from bhopal.net
  

Despite all this, the Bhopalis will first smile, and then offer you a cup of chai and then ask you "Ab boliyen, kaise aana hua?" I'll add more details and links and stories here when I get more time.

Mehdiganj Water Struggle

Mehdiganj is a village in Uttar Pradesh, around 20 Km from Varanasi. The communities in this village and in the surrounding areas have been facing a server water crisis and are fighting against the unjust practices of the local Coca Cola plant, which is the chief offender in their current water scenario. A few key points which are at the root of this issue are:

1. The ground water level in the area has gone down due to the excessive mining of water by the local Coca Cola plant.

2. The chemical waste let out by the plant into the nearby farms resulted large scale destruction of crops and soil has been damaged as well.

3. The plant has also occupied the local panchayat land and has been found guilty of tax theft.

A detailed website cataloging this struggle is available here.
More links:
Frequently Asked Questions (provides a lot of details and background)
Some documents (legal) relevant to the struggle
Demands of the local community in Mehdiganj

What price, our education system?

Today, Sep 5th, on Teacher's Day, spare a thought to the education of the children of India. For one fancy moment, imagine that we are not mired in the morass of an antediluvian British education system. If today, we were to invent an education system from scratch, unburdened of history, what would be its primary features? What does education truly mean? Is graduating from high school a measure of the quality of the education received? Or should a good education guarantee a successful life in a socio-economic sense?

Our current education system is often critiqued as one that "dims the diamonds and polishes the pebbles". Citizens, 'educated' ones, accept as a fact of life, that some kids are smarter than others. Is that really true, or is it just a reflection of a poor system which judges not too wisely? Forget examples of Gandhi and Einstein, each one of us are acquainted with at least one person who did not do well in school, but later was a success in life.

Our education system demands too much from the kids. First up, children need to be judged and judged well - read smart - to find opportunities to success in life. What can you say of a system which starts with the premise that one half will necessarily be judged unsuccessful compared to the other half? The system expects children to be good at everything in school to be judged smart. A child who isnt matching up to other kids in subjects on offer at school, but is excelling in painting and running, is deemed unsuccessful. You only need to talk to the child in question and you will hear, in marked diffident tones, "weak in math". How strong is a system which can make a child feel weak?

Which brings us to the essential question, "in the name of education, should we build on the strengths of a child, or as we do now, minimize his/her weaknesses"? Shouldn't the goal of our education system be, to create a body of strong citizens for the future, rather than a body of not-so-weak individuals? How can one uniform system be the solution to educate the children of a nation of billion individuals, with innumerable cultural, language, social, economic, and geographical differences? It appears to be a case of supreme ego (or 'fatal conceit', as Hayek would put it) to mandate one system of education upon the entire nation.

This is not to say that we do not need an education system. However, maybe it is time to revisit what should be the basis of that system. Quite likely that all the intellectual infrastructure the education system needs is the three Rs -- an abbreviation used from the 1800s, for 'reading', 'riting' (writing), and 'rithmetic' (arithmetic). The rest of the education system could then provide the atmosphere to foster the strengths of each child.

This Teacher's day, as we honor that important body of our people, who mould the minds of our future generations, let us give a thought to the how and why behind the moulding. Let us not condemn our children to mistaken notions of a vestigial system because we chose to turn a blind eye to its deep rooted ills.

Where then the promised freedom? 60 years and counting...

Sixty years to our independence today, as India awakes to a new president who, when running a bank, took money from the women depositors, distributed most of that money amongst her relatives as loans and, according to RBI, did nothing to recover that money, thereby causing that bank to shut down. A president who can talk to spirits. A president who, during emergency envisioned an India where people with hereditary diseases were to be forcibly sterilized. And yet, a president who is a woman too. In any other mature democracy, our president would be in jail for fraud, not in Rashtrapathi Bhavan. Today, India celebrates its sixty years of independence and its first woman president! The two represent the cornerstones of the evils in our social, economic, and political systems -- a resting on the laurels of past actions (we are an ancient civilization), and an apathetic acceptance of our curtailed personal freedom.

The story of our freedom struggle, was not the story of a Gandhi here and a Nehru there -- it was about millions of people who wanted to be master of their own destiny. The British empire was a natural target, and the relief is palpable in the speeches made on that historical day, three score years ago. The tragedy is that for most Indians, political freedom was enough. An oppressive regime gave way to an oppressive state, and we did not protest. Lack of economic freedom continued to keep India poor, and we did not protest. Corruption was rife, and we accepted it as a way of life, and did not protest. Personal freedom was routinely denied to us, and we did not protest. In parts of our country today, people are treated worse than the British treated us, and we do not protest. We have come to accept mediocrity, and we do not protest. As a nation, we stopped caring for freedom once we gained independence.

Take economic freedom, for instance. At the time of our independence, the Indian economy was very different - it was much poorer and less industrialized, and government was less important - revenue was just 5 per cent of the gross domestic product. But our governments introduced industrial licensing, and later used it to create government monopolies in a series of industries, including heavy machinery, fertilizer, coal, shipping and aircraft, and prevent new private entry into industries such as steel. Traditional, liberal (in the traditional sense of supporting freedom) Congress-party workers protested, some even left the Congress and started their own political parties, but as a nation we allowed our freedom to be curtailed, little realising the fact that in this lay the seeds of gross economic inequality we were to see sixty years later.

Take trade, for example. When two people make a transaction, they only do so because both are better off. Prosperity is the result of a chain of such win-win transactions between people profiting by fulfilling each other's needs. But Jawaharlal Nehru once described profit as a "dirty word" and gave in to the fatal conceit, to use Friedrich Hayek's phrase, of imagining that the economy, and the lives of people, could be planned.

The benefits of economic freedom are largely unintuitive, and rarely has lack of that freedom been protested by the masses in any society. But what about personal freedom? The Indian Penal Code, drafted by our imperial overlords in the 19th century to keep us natives in place, and tailored on Victorian morality, is filled with archaic laws that should have been repealed 60 years ago. Section 377 effectively outlaws homosexuality. Section 295(a), that makes it illegal to "outrage religious feelings", routinely used by bigots, from all religions, to stifle free expression. It is filled with laws that criminalise the act of giving offence, outlaw victimless crimes and treat women as the property of men.

What about our education system? The British empire set up an education system which guaranteed to generate a body of clerks to serve the Queen. Not once did we think about reviewing the system. Nor did we think about spending money to guarantee education to all our children. When Gandhiji asked for compulsory eight years of education for all children of free India, he was silenced by saying there is no money to do that other than by supporting the sale of liquor. Till date, despite the 86th amendment of the constitution which makes primary education a fundamental right of every child, the government drops the Right to Education bill on false excuses of lack of funds. We, the citizens of India, all these years, accepted this lack of freedom, not just for ourselves, we let this visit our children and the future generation of a nation.

Milton Friedman, a prime proponent of local governance, once said -- "There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that is a government."

Dr. Ambedkar, deified today as the demigod of Dalit politics, rejected the word socialist in the preamble of our constitution and remarked thus -- "What should be the policy of the State, how the society should be organized in a social and economic sense are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and local circumstances. It cannot be laid down in the constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether".

Freedom for a country should mean every person being free to live their lives as they please, as long as they do not interfere with the similar freedoms of others. These past sixty years, India's democracy has not matured into a participatory republic but has only remained symbolic by allowing an orderly transfer of power through the ballot box. Instead of participating in the governance and demanding our freedoms, for long we have allowed our mai-baap sarkar to treat us as subjects, not citizens, and continue to deny us our freedoms.

In the Hindu culture, the 60th anniversary is an important milestone, amongst other things an occasion to renew marriage vows. Sixty years ago, our nation married democracy, and this anniversary is an opportunity to renew those vows. Today is an opportunity to think about the freedoms we dont have; the freedoms that have been denied to us; the freedoms that we so easily didnt care for. There is an age old political adage that we get the leaders we deserve. Today, as India celebrates its sixty years of independence, let us be the leaders we
deserve to have.