Date:25/01/2009
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2009/01/25/stories/2009012550090300.htm Back Magazine
The war against begging
BY HARSH MANDER
Being destitute in our country has been made a crime. And the punishment is often inhumane…
The criminalising of begging is a relatively recent colonial construction. Traditional societies have been much more tolerant of people who live by begging…
From time to time, governments declare war on beggars. These despised and dispensable individuals, who live customarily by alms, can never hope to win a battle against such a powerful adversary as the State. Instead, they deploy their own time-tested weapons: a stubborn, if fatalist, resolve to survive, as they have against so many other odds, and a capacity to absorb every humiliation. They just lie low, bide out their time and return eventually to their shamed vocation. No other paths are open to them.
The war on beggars is engined by enormous middle class hostility to the begrimed men, women and children in rags, often with matted hair, disabilities and sores, who stretch out their palms peremptorily demanding our charity. The middle class resent the way these illegitimate denizens crowd decent public spaces like cinemas, traffic light intersections, shopping arcades and places of worship, wheedling them annoyingly for alms. They are embarrassed by their “in-the-face” poverty, and convinced that they are lazy, unwilling to earn an honest day’s work, and members of dangerous gangs which kidnap and maim children. They are the “undeserving poor”, who must be driven away or locked up for the larger benefit of decent, law-abiding citizens. In these beliefs, they are supported by the law, police, courts, welfare departments and the media.
Mere impediments?
The most recent skirmish in this sporadic warfare is a recent notification by the Delhi Traffic Police under the Motor Vehicles Act, which slaps fines of Rs. 1,000 on those who give alms to people begging at traffic lights. Beggars are therefore seen not as a spectacular human tragedy but an impediment to traffic. This view is endorsed by courts. In response to what was claimed to be a “public interest” litigation filed by a group of advocates — which characterised beggars as “the ugly face of the nation’s capital” which cause, among other sinister things, “road rage” — the learned judges of the Delhi High Court agreed that beggars should be removed from Delhi as they “obstruct the smooth flow of traffic”. The Delhi Social Welfare Department holds those who give money to beggars guilty of even more than delaying traffic. In an advertisement blitz last year in many national newspapers, it claimed dramatically that those who give beggars “alms may cause traffic jams, accidents, illiteracy, inconvenience, unemployment, biri, cigarette, alcohol, bhang, ganja, charas, heroin… mandrax, robbery, rape, sex, theft, murder, prostitution, handicapped, assault, hooliganism” and then even more darkly “slums, poverty, debt, ignorance, aggression, encroachment, molestation, mugging…”
Prejudiced perceptions
Hostility against beggars derives from the conviction that there are dangerous beggar mafias and gangs, which abduct children, cut off their limbs and blind them, and then use them for begging. These beliefs are deemed to be self-evident truths, requiring no evidence or verification. The Delhi Police was asked by the High Court to investigate allegations of such mafias, and it finally reported on oath to the court that the Delhi Crime Branch has found no evidence of such mafias. In my own extensive engagement with homeless populations for many years, including those who are in begging, I too have not encountered such mafias. This does not mean there is no coercion on children to beg. Children often beg because their parents and guardians send them out to beg, or simply because they do not feed them. They may do this because they are destitute, such as single homeless mothers, or when parents are addicted to substances, very ill and disabled, or when children have no responsible adult protection.
Coercion by adult guardians to beg must be dealt with in the same way as other forms of child labour are best combated, not by criminalising the parents or children, but by enforcing the fundamental right to education, which for homeless street children requires a network of hundreds of open residential schools in all cities. And if begging mafias do indeed exist in any city, it does not require any special law. Section 363A of the Indian Penal Code, for instance, specifically deals with the kidnapping and maiming of children for begging.
The notion that begging is a crime derives not just from fears of begging mafias, but also from the conviction that begging is the first resort of the lazy poor. It assumes that most homeless people beg as a matter of choice. But as a recent study by PUCL-CSDS in Delhi found, only nine per cent homeless adults beg. Remarkably, we have found this ratio to apply even to street children, who prefer work — picking rags, serving tea in eateries or even vocations on the dark side of the law — to begging, except the very small, rarely more than 10 per cent of the total. The PUCL-CSDS study, however, found that nearly 23 per cent homeless people are able to find work only in Delhi for barely 15 days a month, while another 33 per cent get work for anything between 16 to 25 days. These are the rare able-bodied people who beg, although the large majority of adult beggars are disabled, infirm, or with stigmatised ailments like leprosy and mental illness which debar them from work. My own experience has consistently been that when people who beg are offered dignified alternative work, the overwhelming majority welcome this.
The criminalising of begging is a relatively recent colonial construction. Traditional societies have been much more tolerant of people who live by begging, and some traditions like Buddhism in fact valorise begging by holy men because it is believed to teach them humility, and enables them to break away from all forms of material bondage. It was in the 1920s that begging was first declared a crime in British India, and the law was updated as the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act in 1959, and extended to 18 States including Delhi. This law provides for the jailing up to three years in special “beggars’ courts” of all people caught begging, which can be extended to 10 years in case of second and repeated “offences”. The definition under this law of beggars includes not just seeking of alms, but also traditional artists, as “singing, dancing, fortune-telling, performing or offering any article for sale”, all of which are deemed as offences under this Act. The definition of begging even includes simply “having no visible means of subsistence”. In other words, it makes destitution a crime, punishable by incarceration. Since many beggars suffer from leprosy and mental illness, it implicitly criminalises these ailments as well.
The operation of this patently anti-poor law is even more merciless and problematic. Teams of policemen and women with lay aides and armed with sticks, conduct periodic drives against homeless populations, rounding up men, women and children, not those who are actually found begging, but mostly those whose only crime is that they are manifestly penniless and unwashed. They are beaten into waiting vehicles, and it is usually only the most nimble street urchins who manage to escape. They are then presented before specially designated magistrates of beggars’ courts, who summarily enquire whether those rounded up, are people who live by begging. We have observed the functioning of these courts for several years, and found that it is very rare for elementary procedures of law to be applied in these courts. A person should be deemed innocent unless proved otherwise, and the duty lies with the State to produce evidence of guilt. However, for those charged with the “crime” of begging, usually little or no evidence is produced or even sought, and large numbers are sentenced by judges on whimsical considerations such as of their obviously extremely impoverished appearance.
The litigation in the Delhi High Court seeks not reform but more extensive application of this law. The court has therefore directed the establishment of mobile beggars’ courts to facilitate larger application of this law. The Director of Social Welfare complained to the court that beggars’ court magistrates were too lenient in applying the law against offenders. Humane voices of dissent are rare, such as of Justice Sarin, who maintained that detaining beggars was “nothing short of dehumanising them and they should be let of after an admonition.”
Sub-human conditions
People who are so deemed to be guilty of begging are then sentenced to incarceration in certified beggars’ homes. I have visited these in many cities, and found them typically to be in far worse conditions of disrepair and sanitation than ordinary jails which house others charged with more mainstream crimes. Jails in India have been documented to be sub-human habitations, therefore the state of beggars’ homes which house the most powerless, destitute and stigmatised people can well be imagined. Residents of beggars’ homes are rarely allowed even to move out of almost bare dimly lit dormitories, which reek of excreta, stale air and unwashed bodies. Some die during incarceration, of cholera and malnourishment. In theory, the incarcerated “beggars” are to be prepared for alternative vocations, but I have rarely found these in practice in any beggars’ homes I have visited.
The poor in our cities are more than mere impediments to traffic and embarrassments. The Delhi government is worried about the adverse image of India which overseas visitors will take away in the 2010 Commonwealth Games if they find beggars on the streets of a city which aspires to be what it describes as “world class”. Is this aspirational city one which criminalises its most destitute citizens, drives them away or locks them up? Or is it a city which truly cares?
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Struggling to learn
Date:18/02/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/02/18/stories/2009021855921000.htm Back
Struggling to learn
A. De, J. Drèze, M. Samson, and A.K. Shiva Kumar
There have been changes for the better in the schooling system over the last decade. But the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children and we must stop tolerating this.
How would you feel if half of the buses and trains that are supposed to be running on a particular day were cancelled at random — every day of the year? Quite upset, surely (unless you can afford to fly). Yet a similar disruption in the daily lives of children has been quietly happening for years on end, without any fuss: in rural north India, on an average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the primary schools.
Positive changes
In 1996-1997, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) team surveyed primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In 2006, we revisited the same areas to find out whether and how the schooling situation had changed over ten years. There were many signs of positive change.
First, school enrolment rates have risen sharply, for example, from 80 to 95 per cent in the age group of 6-12 years. For the first time, the goal of universal school participation is within reach.
Secondly, social disparities in school enrolment have considerably narrowed. For instance, the gap between boys and girls has virtually disappeared at the primary level. Enrolment rates among Scheduled Caste and Muslim children are very close to the sample average – about 95 per cent in each case. Enrolment among Scheduled Tribe children, however, is lower at 89 per cent.
Thirdly, the schooling infrastructure has improved. For instance, the proportion of schools with at least two pucca rooms went up from 26 to 84 per cent between 1996 and 2006. Nearly three-fourths of all primary schools now have drinking water facilities. Toilets have been constructed in over 60 per cent of all schools.
Fourthly, school incentives are reaching many more. To illustrate, free uniforms were provided in barely 10 per cent of primary schools in 1996, but this went up to more than half in 2006. Similarly, the proportion of schools where free textbooks are distributed was less than half in 1996, but close to 100 per cent in 2006.
Fifthly, cooked mid-day meals have been introduced in primary schools – they were in place in 84 per cent of the sample schools. The bulk of the gap was in Bihar, where mid-day meals were still in the process of being initiated at the time of the survey.
Economic growth, rising parental literacy, and the rapid expansion of rural infrastructure and connectivity have certainly facilitated these achievements. But public initiatives such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Supreme Court orders on mid-day meals, and active campaigns for the right to education have also made a major contribution to this new momentum for the universalisation of elementary education.
Idle classrooms
Having said this, we must highlight the fact that the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children. To start with, school enrolment does not mean regular attendance. Almost everywhere, children’s attendance as noted in the school register was far below enrolment. Actual attendance, as observed by field investigators, was even lower.
Further, classroom activity levels are very low. One reason for this is the shortage of teachers. Despite a major increase in the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. The proportion of schools with only one teacher appointed has remained much the same – about 12 per cent. In 2006, an additional 21 per cent of schools were functioning as single teacher schools on the day of the survey, due to teacher absenteeism. Aggravating the situation is the fact that teachers often come late and leave early. Even when they are present, they are not necessarily teaching. In half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all when the investigators arrived – in 1996 as well as in 2006.
Even in the active classrooms, pupil achievements were very poor. Teaching methods are dominated by mindless rote learning, for example, chanting endless mathematical tables or reciting without comprehension. It is therefore not surprising that children learn little in most schools. For instance, we found that barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5.
No quick fix
Some quick fixes have been tried, but with limited results. One of them is the appointment of "contract teachers," often seen by State governments as a means of expanding teacher cadres at relatively low cost. In the government primary schools surveyed, contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers. Owing to the contractual nature of their appointment, and the fact that they are local residents selected by the Gram Panchayat, these contract teachers were expected to be more accountable than permanent teachers. This has not happened. The inadequate training and low salaries of contract teachers affect the quality of their work. In some schools, they were certainly more active than the permanent staff; but not in others where they were protected by their connections with influential people in the village.
Another way of improving school performance, related to the first, is to promote community involvement and decentralised school management. Most of the schools in our sample had a Village Education Committee or some other committee of this sort. In most cases, these committees have helped to improve the school infrastructure, select contract teachers, and supervise midday meals. However, they have been much less effective in improving the levels of teaching activity. Power in most committees rests with the President (generally the sarpanch) and the Secretary (generally the head teacher), who need to be held accountable in the first place. With the exception of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), representation of parents in these committees tends to be nominal, and their active involvement is rare. The survey found numerous instances where committee members did not even know that their name had been included in the committee.
This does not detract from the importance of community participation in reviving classroom activity. But active and informed community participation requires much more than token committees, especially in India’s divided and unequal social context.
A third quick fix is greater reliance on private schools. The proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often creates an impression that this is the solution. A closer look at the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’ ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very different from government schools. Their success in attracting children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards; some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for example, with misleading claims of being "English medium." Further, a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools). Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of ’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of class, caste, and gender in Indian society.
Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80 per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do something about classroom activity levels in government schools, instead of giving up on them.
The future
The title of the last chapter of the PROBE Report, published in 1999, was "Change is Possible." In many ways, this assertion has come true. Much has indeed changed – for the better – in the schooling system during the last ten years or so. The need of the hour is to consolidate the momentum of positive change and extend it to new areas – particularly those of classroom activity and quality education. The forthcoming Right to Education Act may help. But the first step is to stop tolerating the gross injustice that is being done to Indian children today. Wasting their time day after day in idle classrooms is nothing short of a crime.
(The authors are members of the PROBE team.)
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Struggling to learn
A. De, J. Drèze, M. Samson, and A.K. Shiva Kumar
There have been changes for the better in the schooling system over the last decade. But the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children and we must stop tolerating this.
How would you feel if half of the buses and trains that are supposed to be running on a particular day were cancelled at random — every day of the year? Quite upset, surely (unless you can afford to fly). Yet a similar disruption in the daily lives of children has been quietly happening for years on end, without any fuss: in rural north India, on an average day, there is no teaching activity in about half of the primary schools.
Positive changes
In 1996-1997, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) team surveyed primary schools in about 200 villages in undivided Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In 2006, we revisited the same areas to find out whether and how the schooling situation had changed over ten years. There were many signs of positive change.
First, school enrolment rates have risen sharply, for example, from 80 to 95 per cent in the age group of 6-12 years. For the first time, the goal of universal school participation is within reach.
Secondly, social disparities in school enrolment have considerably narrowed. For instance, the gap between boys and girls has virtually disappeared at the primary level. Enrolment rates among Scheduled Caste and Muslim children are very close to the sample average – about 95 per cent in each case. Enrolment among Scheduled Tribe children, however, is lower at 89 per cent.
Thirdly, the schooling infrastructure has improved. For instance, the proportion of schools with at least two pucca rooms went up from 26 to 84 per cent between 1996 and 2006. Nearly three-fourths of all primary schools now have drinking water facilities. Toilets have been constructed in over 60 per cent of all schools.
Fourthly, school incentives are reaching many more. To illustrate, free uniforms were provided in barely 10 per cent of primary schools in 1996, but this went up to more than half in 2006. Similarly, the proportion of schools where free textbooks are distributed was less than half in 1996, but close to 100 per cent in 2006.
Fifthly, cooked mid-day meals have been introduced in primary schools – they were in place in 84 per cent of the sample schools. The bulk of the gap was in Bihar, where mid-day meals were still in the process of being initiated at the time of the survey.
Economic growth, rising parental literacy, and the rapid expansion of rural infrastructure and connectivity have certainly facilitated these achievements. But public initiatives such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Supreme Court orders on mid-day meals, and active campaigns for the right to education have also made a major contribution to this new momentum for the universalisation of elementary education.
Idle classrooms
Having said this, we must highlight the fact that the quality of education remains abysmally low for a vast majority of Indian children. To start with, school enrolment does not mean regular attendance. Almost everywhere, children’s attendance as noted in the school register was far below enrolment. Actual attendance, as observed by field investigators, was even lower.
Further, classroom activity levels are very low. One reason for this is the shortage of teachers. Despite a major increase in the number of teachers appointed, the pupil-teacher ratio in the survey areas has shown little improvement over the years. The proportion of schools with only one teacher appointed has remained much the same – about 12 per cent. In 2006, an additional 21 per cent of schools were functioning as single teacher schools on the day of the survey, due to teacher absenteeism. Aggravating the situation is the fact that teachers often come late and leave early. Even when they are present, they are not necessarily teaching. In half of the sample schools, there was no teaching activity at all when the investigators arrived – in 1996 as well as in 2006.
Even in the active classrooms, pupil achievements were very poor. Teaching methods are dominated by mindless rote learning, for example, chanting endless mathematical tables or reciting without comprehension. It is therefore not surprising that children learn little in most schools. For instance, we found that barely half of the children in Classes 4 and 5 could do single digit multiplication, or a simple division by 5.
No quick fix
Some quick fixes have been tried, but with limited results. One of them is the appointment of "contract teachers," often seen by State governments as a means of expanding teacher cadres at relatively low cost. In the government primary schools surveyed, contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers. Owing to the contractual nature of their appointment, and the fact that they are local residents selected by the Gram Panchayat, these contract teachers were expected to be more accountable than permanent teachers. This has not happened. The inadequate training and low salaries of contract teachers affect the quality of their work. In some schools, they were certainly more active than the permanent staff; but not in others where they were protected by their connections with influential people in the village.
Another way of improving school performance, related to the first, is to promote community involvement and decentralised school management. Most of the schools in our sample had a Village Education Committee or some other committee of this sort. In most cases, these committees have helped to improve the school infrastructure, select contract teachers, and supervise midday meals. However, they have been much less effective in improving the levels of teaching activity. Power in most committees rests with the President (generally the sarpanch) and the Secretary (generally the head teacher), who need to be held accountable in the first place. With the exception of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs), representation of parents in these committees tends to be nominal, and their active involvement is rare. The survey found numerous instances where committee members did not even know that their name had been included in the committee.
This does not detract from the importance of community participation in reviving classroom activity. But active and informed community participation requires much more than token committees, especially in India’s divided and unequal social context.
A third quick fix is greater reliance on private schools. The proliferation of private schools in both urban and rural areas often creates an impression that this is the solution. A closer look at the evidence, however, does not support these expectations. The quality of private schools varies a great deal, and the ’cheaper’ ones (those that are accessible to poor families) are not very different from government schools. Their success in attracting children is not always a reflection of better teaching standards; some of them also take advantage of the ignorance of parents, for example, with misleading claims of being "English medium." Further, a privatised schooling system is inherently inequitable, as schooling opportunities depend on one’s ability to pay. It also puts girls at a disadvantage: boys accounted for 74 per cent of all children enrolled in private schools in the 2006 survey (compared with 51 per cent of children enrolled in government schools). Private schooling therefore defeats one of the main purposes of ’universal elementary education’ – breaking the old barriers of class, caste, and gender in Indian society.
Despite the recent mushrooming of private schools, about 80 per cent of school-going children were enrolled in government schools in 2006 – the same as in 1996. This situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, which makes it imperative to do something about classroom activity levels in government schools, instead of giving up on them.
The future
The title of the last chapter of the PROBE Report, published in 1999, was "Change is Possible." In many ways, this assertion has come true. Much has indeed changed – for the better – in the schooling system during the last ten years or so. The need of the hour is to consolidate the momentum of positive change and extend it to new areas – particularly those of classroom activity and quality education. The forthcoming Right to Education Act may help. But the first step is to stop tolerating the gross injustice that is being done to Indian children today. Wasting their time day after day in idle classrooms is nothing short of a crime.
(The authors are members of the PROBE team.)
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
Sunday, February 8, 2009
"I live smelling death, but it is fine."
'My life cleaning Delhi's sewers'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7872770.stm
India may be spending billions on its high tech space programme but its spending on sewers is decidedly low tech and deadly, reports the BBC's Rupa Jha.
I will never forget the sight of that thin short man, wearing nothing but cotton underpants, strapped into a harness arrangement, disappearing down into a dark manhole beneath the streets of my home city.
The diameter of the hole was so small that he bruised himself while slipping down.
Inside was a dark well, full of sewage, with giant cockroaches sticking to the wall.
Before he climbed in I asked him his name. I was really surprised when he answered flamboyantly, "Rewa Ram - Son of Khanjan."
I thought: "He must be educated, seems to speak some English." But when I asked him, he said: "No. I'm a complete illiterate."
When I looked down that hole into the drains of Delhi, the smell was overwhelming. Down below, he was coughing, trying hard to keep breathing.
He was struggling to clear a blockage with his bare hands.
Dizzying smell
All of a sudden, a pipe protruding into the drain above his head started spewing out water and human faeces that poured over his body.
I began to feel dizzy just looking down into this mess.
My nostrils were filled with that obnoxious smell, a bit like of rotten eggs. I wanted to vomit. I felt weak and wanted to run away from the smell.
I was born and brought up in India and for the past 15 years I have lived in Delhi, the capital city of one of the world's most rapidly growing economies. I am a member of the growing, upwardly mobile middle class.
I suppose I represent the "roaring Tiger" India, but I am regularly shocked and surprised when I see the struggle for dignity that so many face here.
Literally beneath the glitter of the big city lies a vast network of these dark drains, where so many Rewa Rams are struggling with toxic gases and human waste. They suffer disease and discrimination in return for cleaning the city's sewage system.
Deadly job
Rewa Ram is just one of thousands of sanitation workers in India who work hard to keep the cities, towns and villages clean.
Most of them come from the community of lower caste Dalits as they are known, or untouchables.
Health experts working in the field told me most of these workers would die before their retirement because of the poor health and safety conditions they work in. Their life expectancy is thought to be around 10 years less than the national average.
Dr Ashish Mittal, an occupational health consultant, did a survey of the working conditions of sewage workers.
He told me most of the workers suffer from chronic diseases, respiratory problems, skin disorders and allergies. He said they are constantly troubled by headaches and eye infections. I am not surprised.
Rewa Ram was pulled out when he started feeling dizzy from the toxic fumes in the manhole.
They were thick with a mixture of methane and hydrogen sulphide, both considered potentially fatal by the health experts.
He needed water to clean himself, just a splash on his face could have made him feel better.
His colleagues started banging on doors of the rich neighbourhood where he was working. Nobody opened their gate.
Ancient sewers
Human rights activists and trade unionists I have talked to ask a simple question. If the government of India can spend billions on its space programme, if Delhi can reach all its targets for the beautification of the city in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, including an underground train system, then why can't the sewage system be modernised?
Why does it still rely on sending practically naked men down below the streets to clear the drains with their bare hands, being exposed to noxious gases which could take them to a premature grave?
I put these questions to the authorities.
The reply? "We are trying our best."
It did not really feel good enough after what I had seen.
The law courts have passed several orders banning human beings from going into the sewage system unless it is an emergency.
In Delhi it looks as if every day is an emergency in the sewers.
Smell of death
I asked Rewa Ram, still breathless and covered with the sewage from the drain: "How do you feel about having to do this work?"
With folded arms, he replied: "I am not educated, I come from a very poor family of untouchables. What else can I expect?
"At least I have a government job and I am able to feed my children. I get into this hell everyday but then this is my job.
"I live smelling death, but it is fine."
But is it fine? Why should he expect so little just because he comes from a lower caste and is not educated?
How can our so-called civil society be so indifferent to the millions like him? I, for one, am left feeling guilty.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Do you have the right kind of badge for WEF in Davos?
Rules and pecking orders at Davos
| By Stephanie Flanders BBC Economics editor, in Davos |
The World Economic Forum in Davos is supposed to be a gathering of the elite. A time when the world's movers and shakers go to the Swiss mountains to talk about being on top of the world.
It is a club. And with any club, the rule is that you want it to be as small as possible while still including you.
The knack of the organisers for exploiting this weakness of human nature fits with everything you have ever heard about the Swiss.
I am told that the private companies that bankroll the event find it ruinously expensive to bring anyone other than the boss. He or she gets in fairly cheap because it helps Davos to be full of number ones.
You pay a lot more to bring your number twos and threes. They are worth less to the gathering, but the organisers know they are the ones who will really, really want to come.
The result? A lot of money for the World Economic Forum, but also a lot of people in the club.
This year the "select few" going to Davos ran to more than 2,500.
Yet Davos has an answer to that too.
It is all in the colour of your badge. That tells you where you are in the pecking order, in the Forum's favoured phrase, your level of "guestdom".
And trust me, the powers that be have a very shrewd idea of who is up and who is down.
White badges mean you are a full participant.
If you are a journalist that means the holy grail of being able to wander the conference centre, collecting bigwigs - and their mobile phone numbers - from the hallways, like so many hanging fruit.
Reporters with orange badges can only lurk in the background, like the second-class citizens they are.
A purple badge with a red stripe means you are "with" someone - someone like Tony Blair or George Soros.
Plain purple or green spells even higher levels of the elite elite. But I think you have to be a former president to even know what they mean.
The upshot is that thousands of self-important people can spend four days living cheek by jowl in a tiny ski resort and still come away with their egos intact - assuming no-one asked the president of Mexico to talk on a panel with fewer than two other heads of state.
Anthropologists would have a field day, if they had a chance of getting in.
Changing priorities
But at this year's gathering of the tribe, even cursory observation would have revealed a change of mood.
For all the careful gradations of colour and access, there was no escaping the feeling that all these titans of global capitalism were in the same boat, and that boat was going down.
Five minutes from the conference centre there was even a concrete basement where the likes of Richard Branson and the CEO of Nike turned off their mobile phones, wrapped their heads in a bandage, and spent an hour "living the life of a refugee". The gift bags said it all.
A few years ago they were giving away state-of-the-art electronic organisers. This year there was a bargain basement pedometer and a request that you walk around the village instead of taking the limo.
There were sideshows to distract the condemned.
A neuro-biologist turned Buddhist monk told the participants that it was time "to take a more altruistic world view".
The Forum's own group of Young Global Leaders held an event declaring it was time to "De-Worm the World".
The UN sponsors of the "refugee run", as it was called, said it was based on the idea that you only understand a man if you walk a mile in his shoes.
It was probably less than a mile, but for many at Davos this year I suspect that pretending to wear a refugee's shoes was a pleasant break from actually wearing their own.
Reversal of fortunes
Back inside the conference hall, there was no badge to escape the gloom about the global economy.
And in the end, perhaps for the first time in its 40-year history, the starry list of participants told you less about the state of the world than the list of those who stayed at home.
Most of the world's leading bankers did not show. Those that did come only came out at night.
The financiers were top dogs here even two years ago. Now even Davos man considers them the lowest of the low.
Governments and their old-fashioned rescue packages are back on top. The American government most of all.
None of the key players in the new Obama administration made the trip. They were too busy saving the world.
The grandees at Davos want them to succeed. But they know that in the world economy that comes out of this, they may no longer have the plum spot.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7871994.stm
Another Bizarre thing - Proud to be Indian? I doubt it..
Sri Ram Sena's bizarre V-Day threat
Vicky Nanjappa | February 05, 2009 | 16:54 IST
story from Rediff.com
Vicky Nanjappa | February 05, 2009 | 16:54 IST
story from Rediff.com
Unfazed by the outrage over its attack on a Mangalore pub, the self-styled moral brigade of the Sri Ram Sena on Thursday threatened to forcibly "marry off" couples dating in public on Valentine's Day.
Addressing a press conference at Bengaluru on Thursday, the Sena founder Pramod Muthalik said that if girls and guys could date in the open then he sees no harm in them being married off.
Muthalik said that his activists would hold protests at hotels, hostels and colleges where Valentine's Day celebrations are held.
Muthalik announced that he had formed five teams to go around the city on Valentine's Day. "Our team members would have a video camera and also a tumeric stub. If our team member finds anyone dating, we will force them to get married . We will take the couple to the sub-registrar's office and the marriage will be solemnised," he said.
He termed Valentine's Day as anti-Indian culture and urged educational institutions and the police to help discourage this. "There is a need to safeguard our culture and we will do everything in the book to ensure that this happens," he added.
The Shri Ram Sena has also submitted a memorandum to the Bengaluru city police commissioner in which they have sought help to ban Valentines Day. In the memorandum, the Sena has also assured of a peaceful protest on Valentine's Day, if it is celebrated in Bengaluru.
Muthalik, however, said that the entire operation would be a peaceful and that they will take the help of the police. When questioned what he would do if the government refused to support his initiative, he said that they would think about it if the government let them down.
"I have directed all members not to intimidate the students and make them understand about our culture," he said.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is non-committal on whether it would support the Sena but added that they were against the celebration of Valentine's Day as it was not part of Indian culture.
The police however say that they are geared up for February 14 and added that all measures will be undertaken to ensure that the city is peaceful.
http://in.rediff.com/news/2009/feb/05sri-ram-senas-bizarre-vday-threat.htm
No kissing please, we are Indians : Bizzare...
No kissing please, we are Indians
A court in India recently dismissed criminal proceedings against a couple who were arrested for kissing. The BBC's Soutik Biswas examines India's tangled relationship with the kiss.
Look before you kiss in India. A smooch can get you in serious trouble in the world's largest democracy.
Earlier this week, a court in Delhi - ah, of all places, in the "happening" capital! - threw out the case against a young, married couple who were picked up by police allegedly for kissing near a railway station.
The kiss has been under threat in India for as long as I can remember.
Two years ago, an over-enthusiastic Richard Gere had the riot act read to him when he swooped down and clasped actress Shilpa Shetty and planted several kisses on her. The two, by the way, were at an event to tell lorry drivers about safe sex.
News television hyperventilated, serving up titillation and tattle in equal measure on the serial-kissing Hollywood actor. Some protesters burnt effigies of Gere; others shouted slogans demanding the death of the hapless Shetty. It took the Supreme Court to suspend an arrest warrant against Gere, and obscenity charges against Shetty.
Much earlier, in the early 1990s, I remember the public outrage after Nelson Mandela kissed actress Shabana Azmi when he came visiting.
Clueless
And when India's usually benign tabloids splashed grainy mobile phone pictures of a Bollywood couple - they were dating at that time - allegedly kissing some years ago, the star diva fretted and fumed and began legal proceedings against the paper.
Even marriage sometimes doesn't give you the licence to smooch - an Israeli couple was fined $22 by a court for kissing after getting married in a Hindu ceremony in Rajasthan. The priests had taken umbrage.
For clues to why Indians appear to be clueless about kissing, listen to a model-actress Udita Goswami.
"I have pledged that in any of my forthcoming films I will not give a lip kiss," she told a newspaper.
"I am not comfortable doing that. I belong to a traditional family and my values do not allow me to indulge in such acts."
But a kissing famine has led to a curious demand for it in the dark confines of the movie theatre - and become a passport to fame for some.
A Bollywood starlet's film some years ago was hyped as one in which she had kissed her dazed looking co-star 17 times. (It so happened that the kisses were the only memorable thing about the film.)
Since then kiss-starved audiences have been counting the starlet's kisses in all her films - one later film of hers was advertised as one with "99 slaps - 1 kiss" so that fans were not entirely disappointed.
A Bollywood dance girl kicked up a storm when she was smooched in front of the cameras by a little-known singer at his birthday party. She hummed and hawed about the "inappropriateness" of the kiss and the media and the kiss-hungry republic lapped it up.
India's ancient past is littered with kisses, if literary work is any evidence.
'Westoxication'
Vedic Sanskrit texts, dating back to 1500 BC, apparently contain the first mention of a kiss in writing. (A caveat from a researcher: "This does not mean that nobody kissed before then, and it doesn't mean that Indians were first to kiss.")
India's famous epic poem and one of the world's oldest literary works, The Mahabharata, composed sometime between 3000 BC and 1500 BC, mentions kissing.
The Radhika Santwanam, an collection of erotic poetry from a courtesan in a court in southern India, from the mid-18th century, describes a kiss in fairly graphic detail: Move on her lips/The tip of your tongue/Do not scare her/By biting hard.
And in Kama Sutra, the definitive epic of amour, the scholar Vatsayana, devotes a chapter on the art of kissing. He painstakingly details some 30 types of kisses - straight, bent, turned, press, nominal and throbbing are some among them.
And Richard Gere, please take note, Indian cinema's first kiss dates back to 1933 in a film called Karma where the actress is lip-locked with actor and real life husband Himanshu Rai for some four minutes. Four minutes!
So why does India have this tortured and twisted relationship with the kiss?
Some people play it down, saying those who protest belong to a "loony fringe" of moral fundamentalists. Others say it is a hangover from tradition in an ancient civilisation. Still others say many Indians long for traditional mores as Western consumerist values swamp the country.
Or is it a response to what the Iranian intellectual Jalal-e-Ahmad called "Westoxication" - superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West?
Do some Indians - cutting across class - actually rail against such "Westoxication" when they are revulsed by couples kissing? "Looked at closely," says leading Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta, "revulsion against Westoxication is principally an aesthetic sneer and not a full blooded call for a return to tradition".
Or is the rage against the kiss born out of a hypocritical morality that equates sex with sin and desire with guilt? As sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan tells me, "India is the only country which has a body police and not a thought police".
There must be some truth in all these theories.
So, torn between tradition and seductive imported values, Indians will continue to grapple with the Big Question - to kiss or not to kiss? And, as a friend quips, "When we do kiss, we don't tell".
Sunday, February 1, 2009
What Is Education For?
What Is Education For?
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel's words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."
The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival - the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe's Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes' epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we're losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:
"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities.... In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.
A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four proposals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisciplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"
Six myths about the foundations of modern education,
and six new principles to replace them
by David Orr
One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27)
Winter 1991, Page 52
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.
David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.
The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.
It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel's words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."
The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival - the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.
SANE MEANS, MAD ENDS
What went wrong with contemporary culture and with education? There is some insight in literature: Christopher Marlowe's Faust, who trades his soul for knowledge and power; Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, who refuses to take responsibility for his creation; Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who says "All my means are sane, my motive and object mad." In these characters we encounter the essence of the modern drive to dominate nature.
Historically, Francis Bacon's proposed union between knowledge and power foreshadows the contemporary alliance between government, business, and knowledge that has wrought so much mischief. Galileo's separation of the intellect foreshadows the dominance of the analytical mind over that part given to creativity, humor, and wholeness. And in Descartes' epistemology, one finds the roots of the radical separation of self and object. Together these three laid the foundations for modern education, foundations now enshrined in myths we have come to accept without question. Let me suggest six.
First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. Ignorance is not a solvable problem, but rather an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. In 1930, after Thomas Midgely Jr. discovered CFCs, what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance became a critical, life-threatening gap in the human understanding of the biosphere. No one thought to ask "what does this substance do to what?" until the early 1970s, and by 1990 CFCs had created a general thinning of the ozone layer worldwide. With the discovery of CFCs knowledge increased; but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.
A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth.. "Managing the planet" has a nice a ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life systems can never be safely managed. The ecology of the top inch of topsoil is still largely unknown, as is its relationship to the larger systems of the biosphere.
What might be managed is us: human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things that avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.
A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry. We still lack the the science of land health that Aldo Leopold called for half a century ago.
It is not just knowledge in certain areas that we're losing, but vernacular knowledge as well, by which I mean the knowledge that people have of their places. In the words of Barry Lopez:
"[I am] forced to the realization that something strange, if not dangerous, is afoot. Year by year the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles. Rural populations continue to shift to the cities.... In the wake of this loss of personal and local knowledge, the knowledge from which a real geography is derived, the knowledge on which a country must ultimately stand, has come something hard to define but I think sinister and unsettling."
In the confusion of data with knowledge is a deeper mistake that learning will make us better people. But learning, as Loren Eiseley once said, is endless and "In itself it will never make us ethical [people]." Ultimately, it may be the knowledge of the good that is most threatened by all of our other advances. All things considered, it is possible that we are becoming more ignorant of the things we must know to live well and sustainably on the Earth.
A fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production. As a result of incomplete education, we've fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.
Fifth, there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the "mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade." When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that "if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naiveté, and I would take very good care never to do the same again." His advice to students was to "be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.
Finally, there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. This, of course, represents cultural arrogance of the worst sort, and a gross misreading of history and anthropology. Recently this view has taken the form that we won the cold war and that the triumph of capitalism over communism is complete. Communism failed because it produced too little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. This is not the happy world that any number of feckless advertisers and politicians describe. We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass. At its worst it is a world of crack on the streets, insensate violence, anomie, and the most desperate kind of poverty. The fact is that we live in a disintegrating culture. In the words of Ron Miller, editor of Holistic Review:
"Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul."
WHAT EDUCATION MUST BE FOR
Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? Let me suggest six principles.
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.
A second principle comes from the Greek concept of paideia. The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one's own personhood. For the most part we labor under a confusion of ends and means, thinking that the goal of education is to stuff all kinds of facts, techniques, methods, and information into the student's mind, regardless of how and with what effect it will be used. The Greeks knew better.
Third, I would like to propose that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. The results of a great deal of contemporary research bear resemblance to those foreshadowed by Mary Shelley: monsters of technology and its byproducts for which no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility. Whose responsibility is Love Canal? Chernobyl? Ozone depletion? The Valdez oil spill? Each of these tragedies were possible because of knowledge created for which no one was ultimately responsible. This may finally come to be seen for what I think it is: a problem of scale. Knowledge of how to do vast and risky things has far outrun our ability to use it responsibly. Some of it cannot be used responsibly, which is to say safely and to consistently good purposes.
Fourth, we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. I grew up near Youngstown, Ohio, which was largely destroyed by corporate decisions to "disinvest" in the economy of the region. In this case MBAs, educated in the tools of leveraged buyouts, tax breaks, and capital mobility have done what no invading army could do: they destroyed an American city with total impunity on behalf of something called the "bottom line." But the bottom line for society includes other costs, those of unemployment, crime, higher divorce rates, alcoholism, child abuse, lost savings, and wrecked lives. In this instance what was taught in the business schools and economics departments did not include the value of good communities or the human costs of a narrow destructive economic rationality that valued efficiency and economic abstractions above people and community.
My fifth principle follows and is drawn from William Blake. It has to do with the importance of "minute particulars" and the power of examples over words. Students hear about global responsibility while being educated in institutions that often invest their financial weight in the most irresponsible things. The lessons being taught are those of hypocrisy and ultimately despair. Students learn, without anyone ever saying it, that they are helpless to overcome the frightening gap between ideals and reality. What is desperately needed are faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.
Finally, I would like to propose that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular courses. Process is important for learning. Courses taught as lecture courses tend to induce passivity. Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world." Dissecting frogs in biology classes teaches lessons about nature that no one would verbally profess. Campus architecture is crystallized pedagogy that often reinforces passivity, monologue, domination, and artificiality. My point is simply that students are being taught in various and subtle ways beyond the content of courses.
AN ASSIGNMENT FOR THE CAMPUS
If education is to be measured against the standard of sustainability, what can be done? I would like to make four proposals. First, I would like to propose that you engage in a campus-wide dialogue about the way you conduct your business as educators. Does four years here make your graduates better planetary citizens or does it make them, in Wendell Berry's words, "itinerant professional vandals"? Does this college contribute to the development of a sustainable regional economy or, in the name of efficiency, to the processes of destruction?
My second suggestion is to examine resource flows on this campus: food, energy, water, materials, and waste. Faculty and students should together study the wells, mines, farms, feedlots, and forests that supply the campus as well as the dumps where you send your waste. Collectively, begin a process of finding ways to shift the buying power of this institution to support better alternatives that do less environmental damage, lower carbon dioxide emissions, reduce use of toxic substances, promote energy efficiency and the use of solar energy, help to build a sustainable regional economy, cut long-term costs, and provide an example to other institutions. The results of these studies should be woven into the curriculum as interdisciplinary courses, seminars, lectures, and research. No student should graduate without understanding how to analyze resource flows and without the opportunity to participate in the creation of real solutions to real problems.
Third, reexamaine how your endowment works. Is it invested according to the Valdez principles? Is it invested in companies doing responsible things that the world needs? Can some part of it be invested locally to help leverage energy efficiency and the evolution of a sustainable economy throughout the region?
Finally, I propose that you set a goal of ecological literacy for all of your students. No student should graduate from this or any other educational institution without a basic comprehension of:
• the laws of thermodynamics
• the basic principles of ecology
• carrying capacity
• energetics
• least-cost, end-use analysis
• how to live well in a place
• limits of technology
• appropriate scale
• sustainable agriculture and forestry
• steady-state economics
• environmental ethics
Do graduates of this college, in Aldo Leopold's words, know that "they are only cogs in an ecological mechanism such that, if they will work with that mechanism, their mental wealth and material wealth can expand indefinitely (and) if they refuse to work with it, it will ultimately grind them to dust." Leopold asked: "If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?"
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