# OpenEd: Week 1


[![](http://lh6.google.com/shaklev/RVLKx5QcABI/AAAAAAAAAUc/c1LBHsNOH1U/s288/DSC02174.JPG)](http://picasaweb.google.com/shaklev/PositiveDevianceTrainingCARE/photo#4995277895239467026)**QUESTIONS:
In your opinion, is the “right to education” a basic human right? Why or
why not? In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality
educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate*
education through a certain age or level?**

I was excited to enter this course, because in addition to being very
passionate about the topic, I was also interested in the method of
teaching/taking the class. If I want to understand what different
methods of distance/open education work, I cannot just read about other
people’s experience, I need to try it out myself. And this first week of
the course has been very interesting - while the readings themselves
were rather dull, they did provide a good background and “common base”,
but it was the comments from my fellow students that sent me off
reading, and made me both remember old ideas I’ve had myself, and made
me explore new thoughts. In a way, I actually feel closer to my students
in this class, than most of the ones sitting next to me in a
hundred-person lecture theatre at University of Toronto, because there
all we do is listen to the same lecturer drone on, and then we go home
and study for the exam. Here we share our reflections, based on our own
ideas and previous experiences, which makes the learning experience much
more interesting and personal.

It also makes it much harder for me to answer this week’s questions.
After reading the allotted readings, I was going to give quite standard
answers, however after reading other people’s answers and thinking, it
became much more complex. The two Tomasevski readings stated three
things very clearly, that primary education should be free of charge,
compulsory and not exclude anyone. It then went on to discuss the legal
and economical obstacles, spending very time problematizing what was
meant by primary education. Many problems were touched upon in a summary
matter, but not explored further - I think they are very much worth
exploring however.

![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Hindi_Mahastotra.jpg/250px-Hindi_Mahastotra.jpg)**Language
of education/local content**\
 If we first accept the idea that for children to attend an institution
that is a “primary school” is generally a good thing, then there are
still a number of things I wanted to comment. First of all, the matter
of language of education is essential, and it is only briefly touched
upon in Tomasevski. [Birgit Brock-Utne](http://folk.uio.no/bbrock/) has
dealt extensively with this topic in her great book [Whose Education for
All, the recolonisation of the African
mind](http://www.franklin.com/estore/dictionary/BBT020390365XDLDA/), and
in numerous articles. She is very sceptical to many of the thoughts
propounded in Tomasevski’s article, and contained in the [Jomtien
agreement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_For_All). Education is
far from neutral, and when it is conducted in a foreign language, and
with a curriculum that has no relation to the local people’s situation,
it can be downright damaging. She gives the example of a little girl who
has a multiple choice test (I hate multiple choice!) being asked which
of these four French guys first discovered a given waterfall. She
answered E, none of the above, because her family had lived by that
waterfall for several hundred years. She got an F.

Brock-Utne’s argument is that you cannot just start by funding only
primary schools, and then later switch to universities, because who will
teach in the primary schools? Who will develop the text books in local
languages, highlighting local knowledge, understandings of history,
society and politics? Without all these, the primary education is not
much worth. (She also comments that many of the literacy surveys of
international organizations actually only measure literacy in the
colonial language, whereas the rate in the local languages might be much
higher). (Talking about languages, I have to share [this link to what an
elementary school in multicultural Minnesauga, Canada is
doing](http://thornwood.peelschools.org/Dual/about.htm) - it’s a
wonderful approach, making all the students feel really welcome - like
assets and not burdens - and enrichening all the other students. I wish
I could be a student/teacher at that school!)

![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/id/thumb/1/15/Denias_Senandung_Di_Atas_Awan.jpg/200px-Denias_Senandung_Di_Atas_Awan.jpg)**The
right to refuse?**\
 [Greg
Francom](http://gregfrancom.blogspot.com/2007/08/right-to-education.html)
makes an interesting point about “the right to refuse” for for example
indigenous people. I think this is a very interesting point, and I have
two examples. When I was in Laos, I joined an organized walking tour
into an indigenous community. They lived a day’s walk from the nearest
road, only a few people spoke Lao, and they had nothing modern in the
entire village. There was no clocks, no school, no hospital, no
institutions. They all worked together, played together and took care of
the children together. Perhaps it is these children’s right to receive
an education, but then you would have to construct roads into this
community, and by doing that you would destroy them - the children would
grow up in a completely different culture from what their parents had,
and this would tear the society apart. (Because of incredible corruption
and greed in Laos, this happened - many indigenous communities were
forcefully moved down from the hills to the valleys, because the
government wants to exploit rubber plantations and power plans. They
will probably end up with many of the same problems that indigenous
people face around the world - alcoholism, family violence…)

I also wanted to mention [an interesting movie that I watched in
Indonesia, called Denias](http://www.deniasmovie.com/trailer_eng.html).
It was very beautifully filmed, about a boy in an isolated village in
Papua (the Indonesian part - also called Irian Jaya) who went to a tiny
school taught by a teacher from Jawa who came by helicopter to live in
their village. It portrays the teacher and also the resident military
officer as heroes, and the father who is reluctant to have his son
attend class, and rather wants him to help in the fields as at worst
egoistical and at best ignorant and backwards. The school children beg
the teacher to provide them with uniforms, and finally they get
airlifted in some uniforms donated from Jawa. Then the teacher has to
leave, and to pursue further education, Denias leaves his village and
family and goes to the big mining town, where he finally manages to beg
himself to a space at the fancy school for elite children, taught by
fair skinned Jawanese.

[AFeministBlog](http://afeministblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/denias-senandung-di-atas-awan.html)
refers to the following conversation, and uses it as an example of how
the indigenous don’t realize “what is good for them” *\
 \
 Maleo: I need your help to make Denias able to study again.\
 Samuel: Don’t interfere my affair. That is not your duty.\
 Maleo: I know this is not my duty but your duty.\
 Samuel: This is not Java. All sons have to help their parents. You
don’t understand that.\
 Maleo: I understand that. That’s why Denias has to study. If he
studies, he will be able to help you a lot later.\
 Samuel: That’s it. You only can say later later and later. What I need
is now now and now.\
*\
 However, in the film’s “postscript” it is revealed that Denias later
gained a full scholarship from the mining corporation to go study in
Australia, and that he is now living in Australia. So - what benefit has
his schooling brought to his parents, to his village?

These were a few comments based on the idea that primary schooling as it
is realized today is mainly good - with some important changes (it
should be accessible in the local language, teaching a relevant local
curriculum, maybe it’s not appropriate for indigenous people etc).
However, what if we change tack, and state that schooling is actually
negative?

![](http://lh3.google.com/shaklev/RtipRbiqB9E/AAAAAAAABG8/rXG7RZ7qKb8/s160-c/Blog.jpg)**An
alternative to schooling?**\
 When I was younger, I often discussed education at length with my
friends, and the system we came up with was strikingly similar to Ivan
Illich’s thoughts, which I was only to read many years later in
[Deschooling Society (whole text available
online)](http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html).
He is very sceptical to institutions which tell you how you should learn
and stifles creativity and curiosity in children - instead of a
compulsory number of years of education that is separate from everything
else and conducted by professionals, he proposes a much more flexible
system where pupils learn what they want to, from each others and from
elders in society who want to teach, while at the same time contributing
to society. I always thought that there was nothing intrinsically wrong
with children working - I loved coming to my father’s work when I was
young, and helping him with different things, it taught me much about
society and made me feel valuable. It is forcing children to do
demeaning and dangerous work that is wrong.

[Andreas
Formiconi](http://iamarf.blogspot.com/2007/08/open-ed-week-1.html)
brought me a link to the Indian organization [Shikshantar - The People’s
Institute for Rethinking Education and
Development](http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/), that had quite a few
writings very critical to the culture of schooling. Here is an excerpt
from [their list of critiques of “the Culture of
Schooling”](http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/cultureofschooling.html):\
 *\
 1) Labels, ranks and sorts human beings. It creates a rigid social
hierarchy consisting of a small elite class of ‘highly educated’ and a
large lower class of ‘failures’ and ‘illiterates’, based on levels of
school achievement.\
 5) Confines the motivation for learning to examinations, certificates
and jobs. It suppresses all non-school motivations to learn and kills
all desire to engage in critical self-evaluation. It centralizes control
over the human learning process into the State-Market nexus, taking
power away from individuals and communities.\
 7) Fragments and compartmentalizes knowledge, human beings and the
natural world. It de-links knowledge from wisdom, practical experiences
and specific contexts.\
 9) Privileges literacy (in a few elite languages) over all other forms
of human expression and creation. It drives people to distrust their
local languages. It prioritizes newspapers, textbooks, television as the
only reliable sources of information. These forms of State-Market
controlled media cannot be questioned by the general public.\
 10) Reduces the spaces and opportunities for ‘valid’ human learning by
demanding that they all be funneled through a centrally-controlled
institution. It creates artificial divisions between learning and home,
work, play, spirituality.\
 12) Breaks intergenerational bonds of family and community and
increases people’s dependency on the Nation-State and Government, on
Science and Technology, and on the Market for livelihood and identity.\
 \
*In their different documents, Shikshantar echo many earlier writers who
have criticized institutional and state-run education.

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/37/81425899_ff6abae8a2_m.jpg)**Credentials
are wrong?**\
 Shikshantar also started a movement to [stop using diplomas to assess
people’s
value](http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/healingdiplomadisease.pdf), and
encourage people and organizations to worry less about credentials and
grades, and use more holistic means of assessment. While this sounds
great, it does remind me of the [history of College admissions in the
US](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge)
which tells us that enrollment based on pure academic merit led to
enrolment of Jews at Harvard in the 1920’s reaching 20%. Pure
antisemitism then led the College administration to come up with new
ways of keeping Jews out of their school, and they ended up with an
“all-rounded” evaluation, where you would write application essays,
submit references etc. Now they could turn away the students that had
scored the best (and were Jews) because of non-measurable factors. I
cannot help but think that today’s equivalent is the middle class kid
who has spent a gap-year in India, and worked for a whole summer as an
unpaid intern with the UN in New York, versus the working class kid who
has worked equally hard and gotten equally good grades, but couldn’t
afford to do an unpaid internship, and had to work at McDonald’s
instead. Who do you think will get the job?

These are important readings, because it is so easy to take schooling
for an unequivalent good thing. Indeed, I remember reading an article
saying that when literacy activists went into an area to teach literacy,
they produced illiterates. Before, there were no illiterates, only
people. With skills, stories, social roles. Then suddenly, they were
“made” illiterate by these external forces, which defined them as
lacking. This is not to say that literacy (in your mother tongue) cannot
be a huge bonus, but we need to be **far more** sensitive to the
possible negative consequences of schooling. *I believe that some
readings that highlighted these ideas should be included in the reading
list to balance off the overly positive view of schooling expoused by
Tomasevski.*

**Conclusion?**\
 I have muddied the waters enough, and I need to answer the questions.
The first one is easy, yes I do believe that the right to education is a
human right - it is what enables to to realize what it is to be human,
and it is what enables us to realize many other human rights, like
political participation. However I do not think that education and
schools are synonymous. I do believe that ideally a child can receive a
perfectly good education outside of the standard school system -
learning from her elders, from her peers, exploring the world around her
and creating meaning. That is an idealized picture, and it might be that
a number of years of decent quality institutional elementary school is
all we can hope for in some countries. But we should never leave that
uncontested as the final ideal.

Stian\
 (Diploma photo (cc) [blue\_j @
flickr.com](http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124455441@N01/81425899/))