Bored Beyond Belief !!

Introduction:

“A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame”.

In India, education has always been viewed as a moral and teaching has been valued for its transformative impact on learners. Transformative, because it transforms the learner as well as the teacher in a deep, mysterious and abiding manner. A teacher’s work requires mastery over a body of knowledge to be taught as well as the development of personal knowledge about what is worth teaching and which ways are relatively more effective. The pre-service teacher education programme formally teaches them the technique of teaching. But most of what experienced teachers learn about teaching, is learnt on-the-job, by making sense of one’s day to day experiences. And it needs to be constantly restructured in the light of subsequent experiences.

For a school, the most important asset is its teaching force. And, the most important investment a school management, administrators, and parents can make in a school system is to ensure that teachers continue to learn. Continuous, high-quality professional development of teachers is essential not only for a school, but also for the nation’s goal of high standards of learning for every child.

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“We must act now – we cannot wait for everything to be right – for bandwidth to increase and technology penetration to increase in schools. Many things in life can wait. But the child cannot. Now is the time when his bones are being formed, his blood is being made and his mind is being shaped. His name is not tomorrow. It is today”

- Argentinean writer Gabriella Marcell

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become, within a very short time, one of the basic building blocks of modern society. Many countries now regard understanding ICT and mastering the basic skills and concepts of ICT as part of the core of education, alongside reading, writing and numeracy. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) considers ICT a tool for developing countries to progress and leapfrog to the developed world. India during the last decade has also embarked on ICT for development in rather big way and sought to transform India into what has been termed as “Knowledge Superpower”.

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Plastics have opened the way for a plethora of new inventions and devices. Its low cost of production, light weight and easy process of manufacture has made it a raw material of choice for the manufacturing of plastic bags and packaging materials. But this virtually indestructable plastic has become the bane of poor developing countries like ours, where the governments battling on many fronts have let the menace of plybags grow.

India’s towns and cities are littered with ploybags. They float on busy roads and wave like prayer flags from the top of the trees. Waste dumped in plastic bags on the street for collection often ends up in the stomach of the foraging cattle. The plastic industry is jumping on the green bandwagon with a new line of environmentally safe products. In reality, these products are no friend of the environment.

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Teachers lie at the core of any living society. They are important mediators of social change, social reconstruction and social rejuvenation. A teacher’s role is not only that of the leader of the children but of the guide to the entire community. Teachers being so vitally important for any society, the task of their preparation and education assumes equal importance.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become, within a very short time, one of the basic building blocks of modern society. The incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies in education and training programmes has profound influence in teaching and teacher preparation. The student accesses knowledge and information through Internet, TV, satellite and cable network and digital media to synchronise learning mediated through these multiple delivery mechanisms.

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Globalisation is a qualitatively new phenomenon of multi-dimensional nature posing a variety of complex trends in the economic, social and cultural fabrics of all societies. It impacts on all conceivable facets of life, including education. Consequently, education services are naturally commercialised, privatised and capitalised. Education can be seen wearing a new face-‘modernised’ for a knowledge economy based on information technologies. Its values, preferences and tastes have certainly become different due to globalisation.

It is evident that the dawn of the new age in India has been characterised by unimaginable advances in knowledge, triggering major changes in the objectives, contents, and methods of higher education. The globalisation of the economy and its accompanying demands on the workforce requires a different education that enhances the ability of learners to access, assess, adopt, and apply knowledge, to think independently to exercise appropriate judgement and to collaborate with others to make sense of new situations. The objective of education is no longer simply to convey a body of knowledge, but to teach how to learn, problem-solve and synthesise the old with the new.

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“Less visible, but even more widespread, is the legacy of day-to-day, individual suffering. It is the pain of children who are abused by people who should protect them, women injured or humiliated by violent partners, elderly persons maltreated by their caregivers, youths who are bullied by other youths, and people of all ages who inflict violence on themselves. This suffering – and there are many more examples that I could give – is a legacy that reproduces itself, as new generations learn from the violence of generations past, as victims learn from victimizers, and as the social conditions that nurture violence are allowed to continue. No country, no city, no community is immune. But neither are we powerless against it. Violence thrives in the absence of democracy, respect for human rights and good governance.”

- Nelson Mandela (WHO’s World Report on Violence & Health)

Violence and abuse affect all kinds of people every day world over. It doesn’t matter what race or culture you come from, how much money you make, or if you have a disability. It may take the form of physical and emotional abuse, neglect and sexual abuse. Violence against anyone, in any form, is a crime, regardless of who committed the violent act. It is always wrong, whether the abuser is a family member, a current or past spouse, friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

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Most Indian women, particularly from poor homes, lead an existence of extreme subordination with very little control over their lives. So women who are disabled not only face the usual gender discrimination but also discrimination due to their disability.

From the research done, it emerged that gender does not take a backseat, even in the lives of adolescents with disability. Boys and girls cope up with usual deep rooted gender stereotypes and prejudices. For most Indian females, opportunities for growth and development are limited and restricted by the fact that they remain ‘protected’ in the parents’ home until they get married after that in their in-laws’ home. Doing household tasks and looking after the family is seen as the foremost duty of a girl. Freedom of movement is too restricted. There is a need to break the shackles for the empowerment of women, including those with disabilities. Empowerment means raising people’s consciousness about the strength within by the way they view themselves and society.

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For a long time, me and a friend of mine had wished to start an educational portal. But the plan never really took off. Then I got this brilliant idea of using this site as a means to meet my end. This site presented an excellent platform to publish some well written articles by me and my friends.

Today, the first article has finally been posted. Its by my dear friend gunjan and if I get due permission from her I shall put her picture here too

For later references, I have specially created a page titled “Articles written” which will in a way provide an index for all the articles ever posted here.

Like cholera, typhoid and more recently, chicken flu, schizophrenia is another plague endemic to this world. Rather left to me, I would say it is an ailment plaguing ALL the peoples of this world and only a peculiarly few are aloof from it. Schizophrenia, as the Oxford dictionary (edition 7th, 1984) defines it is “a mental disorder marked by disconnection between thoughts, feelings and actions.” However, in view of the current tide of times, I would say it is more of a mental order of things of the state wherein the disconnectivity, the disenchantment, disbalance and the disillusionment has become an ordinary, rather an expected affair.

Disconnectivity from the world and the self has become the norm. Gandhiji tried to establish the relation between the head and the heart. But alas! He failed. And the irony of it is that his idea fell promptly not only on the national soil, but internationally as well.

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