Sunday Posts

Islamic Terrorism has made news and focused minds in the recent weeks. It did not help that a section of the Turkish Military tried a coup against its Government - perhaps in the Secular cause against the Islamic politics of Mr Erdoğan - and it counted as another instance of Islam being violent. The Egyptian government is intent on putting to death more than a hundred Muslim Brotherhood leaders and members - the Government is tacitly backed by the Americans - but it also is counted as Islam being violent. As someone told me recently, "All Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims", as if that proves Islam is a violent religion. I did tell him, after the religious scholar Reza Aslan, that taking one example and generalising it to a whole community is indeed bigotry, but this is unlikely to stop him in the future. Using a term which is now very popular in India, he called me 'psuedo-liberal'. I am fascinated by this term, not least because I g...

As I work on implementing project-based learning in different countries in Asia, one objection, that this 'idea' is not Asian, comes up all too frequently. Citing anecdotal evidence, my correspondents tell me that the Asian students are taught not to challenge and to ask, and that this approach to learning, built around a passive and respectful learner-teacher relationship, is too Asian to be swept away anytime soon. Correctly, they point out that the Asian students often behave the same way when they study abroad, at least initially, attending the lectures and displaying unquestioning respect for the teacher, trying to photograph every slide, note down every word.  The usual argument is that the same students will start learning differently, if exposed to a different system of learning, should be investigated in the background of these observations. Because, this discussion is not just about teaching methods, but learning: A Different approach to inquiry may lead to a di...

I wrote a note on Western Education yesterday. The immediate context was this film - Schooling The World - which puts many of the issues to the fore. While I mentioned two distinct objections to Western Education, its association with decline of the traditional societies and ways of life and the recognition of the imposition of a power structure implicit in such education, the film's argument is essentially that it is not one or the other, and the destruction of the ways of life is indeed because of the imposition of the power structures. In a way, I do what the film is against - try spreading Western education. However, I don't think if I stop taking Western university courses to India and elsewhere, and choose to take courses from the universities in India instead, anyone will be better off. Because the 'Western' is no longer just where the system of education comes from, but a way of thinking, deeply embedded in universities in India as well. The points made b...

The modern Higher Education system in India was built on the promise of Government Jobs and Social Prestige. A very colonial construct, this was sustained even after independence, and to this day, the students and their parents often approach Higher Education similarly. On the other hand, Indian economy is changing rapidly, with the expansion of the inner market, a result of a deliberate fiscal shift over the last decade towards the creation of rural demand: The Indian Higher Education, as it stands today, may not be fit for purpose in context of these rapid changes. The discussions about ‘demographic dividend’, and the millions that must enter Higher Education, are omnipresent in policy-making. However, any serious discussion about Indian Higher Education must go beyond the headline numbers and take into account the complex realities of regional variations. The fact that Indian states are very different from one another, demographically, socially, economically, a...

This is a bit of Washington-speak I picked up from watching the news: It basically means that the American strategy for world dominion, shall we say world peace, have changed its focus to Asia. The Cold War is well and truly over, and despite its vast nuclear arsenal and apparent ambitions, Russia is no longer considered a threat. The American military personnel and arsenal would now shift to Asia, particularly East Asia, where the Chinese presents the biggest threat to the current world order, one of American hegemony. Or, at least that's the plan.  Indeed, despite the professed Asian pivot, very little has actually happened on the ground. The United States has started withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Europe, but they have mostly gone home. The American military may have the biggest budget in the world, but they may have been over-reaching, not in terms of technology or military prowess, but in terms of willingness to engage all over the world and to b...

I have written about University model changing significantly and morphing into an User Network model, more akin to a library, where learners learn from each other. The reason behind imagining such transformation has obviously been the availability of technological options, and the social trends and imperatives of Lifelong Learning. One criticism I have received of such a visualization is that it pushes the teacher out of the equation, making her extinct and letting Learning Technologist take her place, or at least de -professionalizing teaching into some kind of technology assistant. First of all, I accept the criticism as valid. In my enthusiasm in writing about the universities as user networks, I almost forgot about teaching, not mentioning this at all. This, however, came from my own background and bias, because my engagement with education was mostly from the administrative and business perspective, rather than teaching itself. Being largely self-taught, it was rather obvious for...

My thinking is focused on the idea of the state and the role it plays in our life and thinking. I am now onto an interesting book - the Social Construction of Reality - which I have just started reading. The essential thesis of the book is that the 'reality' as we know it is socially constructed, and there is no universal 'reality' as the underlying construct of reality imply. It is actually a no- brainer in a way, and we have already heard the slogan - perception is reality. But, even that slogan, assumes a fixed reality, something that exists as given, and only claim that an alternative proposition can be found through perception. Besides, the proposition also assumes the existence of ONE reality, so that perception can replace the same. The social construction of reality, however, examines the existence of multiple realities, constructed from various vantage points of horizontal and vertical social positions, which then overlap and pass-off as one universal construc...