Monday 26 February 2018

Distance Education is Deficient Education






(With due apologies to all the exponents of distance education)

Distance education or distance learning is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school. Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via post. Today it involves online education. Courses that are conducted are either hybrid, blended or 100% distance learning. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent developments in distance education. A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, online learning, etc.) are used roughly synonymously with distance education.

Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind; it is a social and moral development too. Education is about the cultivation of the inner life, that is, of the human soul, the human mind and the human person; or, to be more precise, the person’s humanity. Education is about information and knowledge as much as it is about ‘self-formation.’ Education is not just delivery of ‘content’ but is equally about the process of ‘delivery.’

E-Learning has stripped the personal from student-teacher relationships, rendering them almost anonymous, even when cordial. Students too have been stripped of singularity, often no longer conducting themselves as students but as customers or clients, and education as shopping. For teachers and students, anonymity may be requested, even required, but to preclude the formation of relationship – especially when requested or advised – seems, well, unprofessional. Despite conceptions of professionalism that strip specificity from teacher- student relationships, it would be easy to assemble anecdotal evidence for the significance of teachers in students’ lives. Regarding the relationship, all that our ethical institutions rely on individual responsibility in different ways, they further contain an expressive dimension – one that touches on courage, generosity, solidarity, among other qualities – inseparable from commitment to public context.

Character is no template to be installed; it is to be threaded through the specificities of relationship, study, and circumstance, including the affective as well as material conditions that prevail at home, school, and society. For youngsters, character becomes constituted within the accumulation of experience; lived and embodied, one that is not virtualised, as while staring at screens.

There is a relationship between character formation, being able to learn from experience, and being open to political and moral argument. Experience becomes educational only when we manage to learn from it. Self-knowledge and self-study become forms of self-management and self-governance within an overall biotechnological framework concerned with optimization of life-resources. Social interactions with the fellow learners and teachers on the school campuses and off campuses create personal and professional associations. Ups and downs in such associations help the formation of ‘self’ through meeting the upheavals in relationships, coping with the trauma of gender and caste and acquisition of dominant social conventions.

Today there is much emphasis on relationalism or relationality. It is irreducible. To appreciate the specificity of relationality just attempt to study the history of your own relationships with school, subjects, ideas and teachers and with your own selves. All of us, you and me, individually are a public on to ourselves, from womb to tomb.

“The classroom is a space in which the personal is magnified, not diminished” said Bryant Keith Alexander in 2005.
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Friday 23 February 2018

Parrhesia




Having followed some very interesting debates initiated by some of my very good friends on Face Book and LinkedIn that did get intense and heated at times; I was reminded of the concept of Parrhesia.
In rhetoric, Parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: "to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking". Simply, Parrhesia is frank speech irreducible to power or interest.
While a form of truth telling, such speech is not necessarily equivalent to truth, nor is it independent of time, place, and relationship. Parrhesia is communication that could reconstruct the circumstances in which it occurs - complicated conversation in service to subjective and social reconstruction.
Parrhesia encompasses a broader set of personalized ethical practices that finish by constructing relationships to oneself, to authority, and to truth. Parrhesia aims at truthfulness rather than at persuasion or entertainment. Parrhesia cannot be compelled.
The ethical obligation of Parrhesia draws on the speaker’s capacities to bear alone the burden of speaking truthfully. It is truth, constantly uncovered, critiqued, and reasserted, truth, underwritten by relations of care, care for others and oneself through care for truthfulness.
While relations of care can structure comments on social-media and with colleagues, including figures of authority, it also inspires engagement with persons no longer present, with ideas past as well as present, and with oneself. Practices of Parrhesia enable us to rethink conceptions of “free speech,” “democratic contestation, and “rhetorical persuasion,”
Freedom of speech is exercised rather than attained or conferred. Such exercise is less in the service of getting it right as much as it is the “shakiness” accompanying efforts to “orient” and “steady oneself” within relationships with “oneself, to others, and to truth-telling.”
For Parrhesia to inspire “ethical self- governance,” its practices must contribute to the formation of “coherent subjects,” without “objectifying the individual into a ‘body of knowledge’ or a “role-defined” professional.
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Inspiration from ‘Rethinking Authority in Educational Leadership’ by William F. Pinar appearing in 2017 edited work of Michael Uljens and RoseM. Ylimaki titled “Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik” is humbly acknowledged.

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Tuesday 20 February 2018

Thinking Critically


Thinking Critically


In layperson's terms, critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth.

The ability to engage in careful, reflective thought has been viewed in various ways: as an employability skill for an increasingly wide range of jobs, as a fundamental characteristic of an educated person, and as a requirement for responsible citizenship in a democratic society.

Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically. This is where our education fails in delivery – be it school or even the college.

Diversity and divergence in thought is not encouraged in school or college. Every student must learn to reproduce as truly as possible what is in the book or what the teacher states or espouses inside the classroom. More the efficiency in making a true reproduction of such contents exhibited during exams and higher are the marks and rewards received. Deviation or difference from such content begets penalties and punishments.

It is amazing to see the concept of MODEL ANSWERS being advocated and propagated by teachers, academics, examiners, evaluators and even the Education Boards and Universities. The entire system appears to be working towards convergence of learning and education to a uniform benchmark of a single idea or thought expressed in only one format and style. The message given to the learner is that there is only one gospel truth and that single truth can take only one form of presentation and expression. Conformity to such truth is reinforced through rewards. The learner is punished for moving away from such singularity thereby killing any nascent streaks of innovation and thinking, if one ever existed in them.

"Good" learners, keen, efficient and motivated to exhibit and prove that they have been successful learners start chasing 'MARKS' rather than learning because 'marks obtained' has become the only specific and acceptable measure of a learner's success. And it is to the credit of these learners that they are able to demonstrate near 100 % learning by scoring near 100% marks in their board-exams.

Learners have successfully been learning what the system taught them rather that what the system ought to have taught them. They have successfully learnt there is a premium on getting high marks, they have learnt how to get more marks but they did not learn - Critical thinking; Creative thinking and Higher-order thinking.

Our schools and colleges don't educate people to "think," presumably they may not even know that there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter; that's what we mean when we refer to "thinking like a scientist" or "thinking like a philosopher" or "thinking like a historian."

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Thursday 15 February 2018

Paradigm




‘Paradigm’ is set of accepted fundamental laws, assumptions, and standard ways of working (instrumentation and techniques).

A new and original social paradigm is recognizable only if it accedes to the world stage of the global scientific system constituted and structured by networks of scientific scholars, scientific contributions published in scientific journals, books, internet sites, etc., fueled by a vast array of international meetings, seminars, conferences, and so on. It is only at this global level that we can decide if a new paradigm is gaining a global stage or not. Put in other words: are we really witnessing a new and emergent sociological ‘school’, or are we observing only a sort of ‘esprit du temp’ which is able to catalyse similar intuitions and sociological insights? (As in Prandini, R. Relational sociology: A well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology? International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie, 25(1), 2015, 1–14.)


The term ‘Paradigm’ was first used by Thomas S. Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (First Published in 1962). Manny Rayner (a famous and popular Goodreads Author) on 24 January 2013, reviewing the 50th anniversary edition of the book wrote:

Scientists are so passionate about their work, and even if you're a scientist yourself it can sometimes take you by surprise to see just how passionate they are. A few years ago, when I was working at NASA, we made up a game called If Research Were Romance. Here, let me show you how to play.

In real life, Thomas Kuhn wrote a book about paradigm changes in science. But if research were romance, he might have written a book about relationships instead. It might have been quite similar in many ways. Scientists care so much about their theories that you won't go far wrong if you think about the feelings they have for those theories as being similar to the feelings that normal people have for their significant others.

If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have said that, when you're in a committed relationship, that relationship colors all your life. A lot of what you do and think only makes sense in terms of the relationship. And everyone over, say, 20, knows that relationships are not always easy. You're continually having problems, some of them little, some of them not so little. But if you're prepared to work on them, you can usually solve those problems, and when you've done so you usually feel that the relationship is stronger, not weaker. The fact that you've surmounted the problem gives you more faith in the relationship.

If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have gone on to say that sometimes you get another feeling. The problems won't disappear, or they go away in one form and immediately return in another. You start to feel that the relationship is undergoing a real crisis. But you'll probably still continue to work on it, unless you meet another person who offers you a chance of something different. If you've been in your relationship a long time, it will feel difficult to consider seriously the idea of abandoning it and starting a new one. Sometimes, though, people do this. They won't really know why they're taking this drastic step, and they won't be able to justify it clearly in their minds. It will just seem like the right thing to do.

If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have added that, after the old relationship has ended and the new one has started, it will be hard to see your old life in the same terms. Your view of it will now be colored by your new relationship. Now, you will probably only be able to see the old relationship as containing faults which you never noticed at the time. You will not really be able to remember what it was like.

If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn might have said that some people believe that they have a true soulmate out there, and it's just a question of finding that special person they are fated to be with. But he wouldn't have believed that. He'd have said that people sometimes change their partner, and often they may do it for a good reason. But there is no absolute sense in which the new partner is better suited to them than the old one. They are better in some ways and worse in others.

If research were romance, Thomas Kuhn would have been a rock star. Security staff would have been needed to stop groupies getting into his hotel room and he'd have been unsure about how many children he'd fathered. He'd have played it down in interviews, but everyone would have known what the deal was.

If you also work in science, I encourage you to experiment with this game. You'll be amazed how much insight it gives you into what's really going on. 



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Friday 2 February 2018

Who am I - an Indian-Hindu or a Hindu-Indian?




The word secular implies three things: freedom of religion, equal citizenship to each citizen regardless of his or her religion, and the separation of religion and state. One of the core principles in the constitution of Western democracies has been this separation, with the state asserting its political authority in matters of law, while accepting every individual’s right to pursue his or her own religion and the right of religion to shape its own concepts of spirituality. In the West, everyone is equal under law, and subject to the same laws irrespective of his or her religion.

In contrast, in India, the word secular does not imply separation of religion and state. Religion in India continues to assert its political authority in matters of personal law. The applicable personal law differ if an individual’s religion is Christianity, or Hindu. Indian concept of secularism, where religious laws supersede state laws and the state is expected to evenhandedly involve itself in religion, is a controversial subject.

Indian religions are known to have co-existed and evolved together for many centuries before the arrival of Islam in the 12th century, followed by Mughal and colonial era. Ashoka about 2200 years ago and Harsha about 1400 years ago accepted and patronised different religions. The people in ancient South Asia had freedom of religion, and the state granted citizenship to each individual regardless of whether someone’s religion was Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or any other. Ellora cave temples built next to each other between 5th and 10th centuries, for example, shows a coexistence of religions and a spirit of acceptance of different faiths.

This approach to interfaith relations changed with the arrival of Islam and establishment of Delhi Sultanate in North India by the 12th century, followed by Deccan Sultanate in Central India. The political doctrines of Islam, as well as its religious views were at odds with doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism and other Indian religions. New temples and monasteries were not allowed. As with Levant, Southeast Europe and Spain, Islamic rulers in India treated Hindus as 'dhimmis' in exchange of annual payment of 'jizya' taxes, in a sharia-based state jurisprudence. With the arrival of Mughal era, Sharia was imposed with continued zeal, with Akbar - the Mughal Emperor - as the first significant exception. However, the descendants of Akbar, particularly Aurangzeb, reverted to treating Islam as the primary state religion, destruction of temples, and reimposed religion-based discriminatory 'jizya' taxes.

After Aurangzeb, India came into control of East India Company and the British Raj. By the mid-19th century, the British Raj administered India, in matters related to marriage, inheritance of property and divorces, according to personal laws based on each Indian subject’s religion, according to interpretations of respective religious documents by Islamic jurists, Hindu pundits and other religious scholars. In 1864, the Raj eliminated all religious jurists, pandits and scholars because the interpretations of the same verse or religious document varied, the scholars and jurists disagreed with each other and the process of justice had become inconsistent and suspiciously corrupt. The late 19th century marked the arrival of Anglo-Hindu and Anglo-Muslim personal laws, where the governance did not separate the state and religion, but continued to differentiate and administer people based on their personal religion. The British Raj provided the Indian Christians, Indian Zoroastrians and others with their own personal laws, such as the Indian Succession Act of 1850, Special Marriage Act of 1872 and other laws that were similar to Common Laws in Europe.

In the first half of 20th century, the British Raj faced increasing amounts of social activism for self-rule by disparate groups such as those led by Hindu Gandhi and Muslim Jinnah; the colonial administration, under pressure, enacted a number of laws before India’s independence in 1947, which continue to be the laws of India in 2018. One such law enacted during the colonial era was the 1937 Indian Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, which instead of separating state and religion for Western secularism, did the reverse.

It, along with additional laws such as Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939 that followed, established the principle that religious laws of Indian Muslims can be their personal laws. It also set the precedent that religious law, such as sharia, can overlap and supersede common and civil laws, that elected legislators may not revise or enact laws that supersede religious laws, that people of one nation need not live under the same laws, and that law enforcement process for different individuals shall depend on their religion. The Indian Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 continues to be the law of land of modern India for Indian Muslims, while parliament-based, non-religious uniform civil code passed in mid-1950s applies to Indians who are Hindus (which includes Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Parsees), as well as to Indian Christians and Jews.

Supporters of the Indian concept of secularism claim it respects a Muslim person's religious rights and recognises that they are culturally different from Indians of other religions. Supporters of this form of secularism claim that any attempt to introduce a uniform civil code, that is equal laws for every citizen irrespective of his or her religion, would impose Hindu sensibilities and ideals, something that is unacceptable to Muslim Indians. Any attempts and demand by Indian Hindus to a uniform civil code is considered a threat to their right to religious personal laws by Indian Muslims.

Opponents argue that India's acceptance of Sharia and religious laws violates the principle of equal human rights, discriminates against Muslim women, allows unelected religious personalities to interpret religious laws, and creates plurality of unequal citizenship; they suggest India should move towards separating religion and state. These differences have led a number of scholars to declare that India is not a secular state, as the word secularism is widely understood in the West and elsewhere; rather it is a strategy for political goals in a nation with a complex history, and one that achieves the opposite of its stated intentions.

Author Taslima Nasreen sees Indian secularists as pseudo secularist, accusing them of being biased towards Muslims saying, "Most secular people are pro-Muslims and anti-Hindu. They protest against the acts of Hindu fundamentalists and defend the heinous acts of Muslim fundamentalists". She also said that most Indian politicians appease Muslims which leads to anger among Hindus.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Sadanand Dhume criticises Indian "Secularism" as a fraud and a failure, since it isn't really "secularism" as it is understood in the western world (as separation of religion and state) but more along the lines of religious appeasement. He writes that the flawed understanding of secularism among India's left wing intelligentsia has led Indian politicians to pander to religious leaders and preachers, and has led India to take a soft stand against Islamic terrorism, religious militancy and communal disharmony in general.

Does India have some Muslims who are Indians or does India have some Indians who are Muslims? Interestingly the weight of this ‘some’ is nearly 10% of all the Muslims in the world and about 15% of the total Indians in the world.

Secularism is a divisive and a politically charged topic in India. Indian secularism is an idea that I fail to comprehend, in spite of my sustained efforts. A question about my own identity intrigues me – who am I - an INDIAN-HINDU or a HINDU-INDIAN?

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