Education: October 2004 Archives

By Garda Ghista

Our sister Amina was freed from death by stoning on the last day of September, 2003. Many of us did not know Amina Lawal was a divorced woman from Katsina State in Nigeria, sentenced to death by stoning for adultery on the grounds of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Many of us did not even know that our sister was in danger – we did not even know that we had a sister. We live in an age that is called post-human - an age wherein humanity is posthumous. For many of us, Amina was a flickering figure that appeared on a news sound byte. This is what post-human means. People are reduced to disposable, ephemeral images manipulated by a remote. These images describe her in the traditional modernistic labels of “Nigerian,” “Muslim,” and “woman.” What these labels do is to create a feeling that she is “alien,” and hence we have no responsibility to even care. Essentially the nationalism of the modern era of humanism is, as former UN General Romeo Dallaire said, just another kind of racism.

by Garda Ghista

Introduction
The ‘paradox’ of Bengal, or Bangladesh, is that on the one hand it has immense geographical, geological, agricultural resources and hence potentiality for development into a (so-called) first world nation. However, despite these abundant resources, it has remained in abject poverty, or to use the term of Paul Farmer, ‘dire affliction.’ Bangladesh has a population of 133 million people, but the plight of the majority is heart-rending. Ten percent of the people own more than 60 percent of the land. Sixty percent of the people own less than ten percent of the land. Illiteracy is nearly 40 percent. Infant mortality is 80/1000. More than 50 percent of the people are landless. These landless people survive as sharecroppers or worse, as daily wage laborers, with men earning 33 cents daily and women 20 cents. Hence for the majority, at least one of the five necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter, health care and education) are missing. In macro-economics, this is defined as absolute poverty.

by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

Parents often allege that teachers do not teach anything worthwhile nowadays, but I do not feel that this is a very well-considered remark. In actual fact they are only making excuses in order to avoid their responsibilities. At the same time, however, I should add that most teachers demonstrate, through their mental outlook or their actions, far less awareness of their social responsibilities than concern for their own interests. They do not devote even a fraction of the time and energy to building society that they spend making money by any means possible, such as by writing "made easies" [course summaries] or study guides.