http://www.good.is/post/is-education-reform-effective-depends-on-the-definition/
like hipsters, the purpose of education is easier to define in the negative (what it shouldnt accomplish), but ill try anyway. most generally, to produce citizens of democracy and of "the world"... that is, people who are able to make informed decisions on their own, think critically, creatively, and independently. education should explore not only the vast depth of what previous people have thought and done, but should also make you explore your own thoughts and actions by encouraging you to develop reasoning for why you have those thoughts, or provide paths for you to change your opinions/views on the world if they were previously based on ignorance. education should expand peoples mind to not only what is, but what isnt and what could be. a true education fosters a love for learning, an ability to learn for oneself, to judge the quality of one's own work, to be open-minded, and to have an understanding and appreciation of different perspectives, cultural or otherwise.
there is of course a million other things that could be said, but at this point we can stop and ask the natural question: how would you accomplish this? and furthermore, how would you determine that this goal was accomplished? these are difficult questions, ones that i certainly dont know the answer to, but i have my own ideas about... but to finish off i might as well throw out there the idea that i dont think there is any way to measure the success of such an education as was described above. in my opinion, the act of measuring the success of education, which puts an end goal on it, would distort the process away from pure discovery and exploration, and instead focus on the end goal.
is this a contradiction? to say that education has a goal, but then deny it by not focusing on it? i think its a necessary one. zen, if you will. one can have goals, but seek to achieve them "by accident," that is say, naturally. to design a system to achieve and insure the outcome of those goals is the surest way to prevent them from happening.
to be more concrete: the trap we've fallen into is the belief that we need to have some sort of oversight on the quality of education. once we decide that we need some objective metric, then testing naturally comes into the picture. but the problem is this: someone who really understands something can do well on the test, but someone who does well on the test does not necessarily understand the subject at all. so focusing on doing well on a test does not necessarily correlate to understanding the material. a test is a limited subset of the subject, the tip of the iceberg. but theres so much more beneath the surface that is lost. instead, it would be better to just learn for its own sake, without any pressure. then, if by chance you were to test those students, i think they would do better, but it wouldnt even matter.
an implicit assumption most people have is that the end goal of education is our economic prosperity. this too, i think, is misguided. focus on just pure learning for its own sake, and the talented and inspired people produced will prosper, as will everyone around them.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
India: Part 1
I've avoided writing a reflection of my trip for a while now. For over a month, I've stalled and stalled, due to equal parts laziness and... not really knowing how to express what happened. In any case, now I have the advantage of perspective (letting the trip marinate), but I lose out on the finer details that bring the trip to life. I think I've reached the point where I need to use this medium as a tool for me to understand how I feel.
First impressions
We left for India on Monday June 13th, around noon. After a short layover in China, we landed in New Delhi at the ripe hour of 1 am, Wednesday morning. I think one of my first thoughts was... this isn't that hot. This isn't that chaotic. I can handle this... I got this!
We shopped around for a taxi that could take us to the guesthouse we were going to stay at for the next few days. Luckily for us, the driver had no idea where this place was, but we headed out anyway, my dad babbling in Hindi to the driver, ordering him to stay on the right side of the road. Whether the driver couldn't understand him or simply chose to ignore him, we will never know.
Another thought that quickly entered my head was how remarkably similar this felt to Syria... people out and about at 3 in the morning... old, loud, and smelly cars, dilapidated buildings built mostly of concrete. An odd mix of things imported and built in the fifties with modern technology, like new moss on a rotting log. A sense of desperation, that people would do whatever it takes to put bread on the table, even if it was just for one day. Picture a man riding a rusted bike, talking on a cell phone, hauling twenty or thirty propane tanks balanced precariously on top of each other, while weaving through traffic, which is composed of people, bikes, cars, trucks, cows, all going in different directions.
But also, a mixture of ancient architecture with harsh new buildings, like dirty shells surrounding the pearl of the oyster, hiding it from view. An incredible beauty...thousands of thousands of years of history. More ways of living and thinking than there are people in Los Angeles. No concept of a "fake" person because that is a luxury only afforded to Hollywood. But all this is of course not readily apparent when you are driving through the streets of Delhi at 3 am.
Week 1: Delhi and Jaipur
First day we met up with my dad's old friend, from back in high school and through college. We then went to IIT Delhi, where my dad and his (for lack of a better phrase) bros worked post-college for a couple years. It was cool meeting friends that my dad had never once mentioned, but maybe that had something to do with the fact that he hadn't seen these people in 35 years. In spite of that, they got on like it had been a couple months or something, which was comforting.
After lunch, my dad and I left the campus to explore the city a little. We found one of the millions of "auto rickshaws" (basically green and yellow motorized tricycles with a cover, ideal for darting in between cars, cows, or what have you). Our driver, Raja (yes, haha) turned out to be quite the enterprising fellow, as he immediately started trying to monopolize our transportation, in addition to suggesting a few stores we should drop by. We did go to a camera shop he suggested, as the camera we brought used 4 AA batteries every 5 minutes, making it worse than worthless.
Anyway, we first went to a place called Qutab Minar, which is basically a site built by a Muslim king. There's an iron shaft that hasn't rusted in a couple hundred years, which people are still trying to figure out. This place definitely reminded me of Syria, with its architecture/art style, which is largely Islamic (ie geometric patterns instead of representing people). But there was one crucial difference...the addition of Hindu and Buddhist art styles as well.
This was a running theme throughout the trip, the unity of these "separate" cultures, which is really just a British interpretation of Indian history, which was taken up by Indians themselves, creating the current conflict. Point is, the "Hindu v Muslim" conflict is completely artificial, the unfortunate consequence of a misinterpretation of history appropriated by people looking to define what is Indian and what is not.
After we saw that we continued on to see the Lotus Temple, a Baha'i temple shaped, not surprisingly, like a lotus. Then we returned after a solid day of touring the city to our guesthouse, and reunited with my dad's friend to have dinner.
The next day was pretty different, and was one of the hardest days of the trip. With his friend gone, dad decided we should check out places in the heart of the city. We headed out to one place, called Redfort (literally a red fort, with a bunch of Indian political buildings set against British-era stuff). The area surrounding it was crazy.... people everywhere. I really don't know how to put in words the teeming mass of life surrounding this place. People begging everywhere... which I had a lot of trouble with because I just don't know how to handle that... going into the trip I wasn't sure how I would react to the poverty that I encountered... I'm still not sure how I felt. Less emotional than I anticipated, but in a guarded way, steeling myself and holding back to avoid having to deal with an incredible guilt, an involuntary sense of revulsion, coupled with attempting to mask these emotions.
After Redfort we started planning the next few days of our trip. Our plan was to go to Jaipur in two days (Saturday) and go to Kalkata immediately afterward. I don't know why but I didn't like planning these things... I think it has something to do with the fact that I hate spending money. Seeing my dad drop thousands of rupees on our trip to Jaipur, and to the Taj Mahal (in the last week of the trip), in the backdrop of people starving on the street, was just too much for me. I hated feeling like a spoiled little tourist, wasting money when so many people needed it so desperately more than I did. I tried to express this to my dad, who kind of brushed off how uncomfortable I was with this.
We then tried to get to the outskirts of the city to see my aunt and cousins, for the first time. My dad hadn't seen them in 35 years. I was really excited to meet them... a sense of anticipation...what would they be like, and what would I learn about myself in the process? Getting there was pretty ridiculous. Public transportation didn't extend beyond the city, so we tried to take an auto rickshaw. However, they lived in a different district, so the union that the driver was in would not allow him to cross the border. This meant at the border, we had to change drivers, which for whatever reason turned out to be really complicated.
Anyway, we got there pretty late and ended up staying for an hour. When I met my aunt she immediately embraced me, although we could not speak to each other. She was much older than my dad, and at first I wasn't even sure if she was my aunt because she and my dad did not exactly act like I imagined brother and sister would act. My cousin and her husband were incredibly kind. My cousin told us that my aunt was afflicted with depression, and dementia due to the roots of her teeth affecting her brain... we also learned that my other cousin was hospitalized due to a negative reaction to chemotherapy.
It was strange to hear this news... I really didn't know how to feel. I don't even know if I felt anything. Which I then would feel guilty about, building a shit castle of emotion on top of a base of guilt. On the drive back, I tried to convince my dad to either return to Delhi one day earlier, or to cancel our trip to the Taj Mahal so that we could see my hospitalized cousin. This got into the relationship my dad has with his family... I wanted to understand why my dad didn't see his family for so long. I still don't really understand but at this point he felt that it would be "fake" to suddenly care and try and show up... who were we to show up so randomly?
After that day, either from genuine guilt or from guilt at not feeling anything, I started to view everything as a luxury. Showers? I limited my water so that I wasn't running it continuously, like we do back in the states. I felt horrible eating out because that meant we were living like kings.
It was only Thursday, and it felt like we were going to be here forever... I started keeping track of how much longer the trip was going to last.
Friday was a much easier day, as we again spent it with my dad's professor-type friends. We met one of his friends who I found pretty interesting. He started out as a professor of electrical engineering, but ended up making his own school. One of his students did a science fair style project on the tensile strength of bamboo, which piqued his curiosity on the subject and now he is pretty much the professor of bamboo research. In India, there are essentially no forests, so everything is built purely of concrete. This is horribly expensive, bad for the environment, and not particularly resilient. Bamboo, on the other hand, has the potential to be cheap, sustainable, and hardy. It was cool to see someone trying to improve the living situation, and to hear how he, through a series of small steps, transformed his occupation to what it is now.
First impressions
We left for India on Monday June 13th, around noon. After a short layover in China, we landed in New Delhi at the ripe hour of 1 am, Wednesday morning. I think one of my first thoughts was... this isn't that hot. This isn't that chaotic. I can handle this... I got this!
We shopped around for a taxi that could take us to the guesthouse we were going to stay at for the next few days. Luckily for us, the driver had no idea where this place was, but we headed out anyway, my dad babbling in Hindi to the driver, ordering him to stay on the right side of the road. Whether the driver couldn't understand him or simply chose to ignore him, we will never know.
Another thought that quickly entered my head was how remarkably similar this felt to Syria... people out and about at 3 in the morning... old, loud, and smelly cars, dilapidated buildings built mostly of concrete. An odd mix of things imported and built in the fifties with modern technology, like new moss on a rotting log. A sense of desperation, that people would do whatever it takes to put bread on the table, even if it was just for one day. Picture a man riding a rusted bike, talking on a cell phone, hauling twenty or thirty propane tanks balanced precariously on top of each other, while weaving through traffic, which is composed of people, bikes, cars, trucks, cows, all going in different directions.
But also, a mixture of ancient architecture with harsh new buildings, like dirty shells surrounding the pearl of the oyster, hiding it from view. An incredible beauty...thousands of thousands of years of history. More ways of living and thinking than there are people in Los Angeles. No concept of a "fake" person because that is a luxury only afforded to Hollywood. But all this is of course not readily apparent when you are driving through the streets of Delhi at 3 am.
Week 1: Delhi and Jaipur
First day we met up with my dad's old friend, from back in high school and through college. We then went to IIT Delhi, where my dad and his (for lack of a better phrase) bros worked post-college for a couple years. It was cool meeting friends that my dad had never once mentioned, but maybe that had something to do with the fact that he hadn't seen these people in 35 years. In spite of that, they got on like it had been a couple months or something, which was comforting.
After lunch, my dad and I left the campus to explore the city a little. We found one of the millions of "auto rickshaws" (basically green and yellow motorized tricycles with a cover, ideal for darting in between cars, cows, or what have you). Our driver, Raja (yes, haha) turned out to be quite the enterprising fellow, as he immediately started trying to monopolize our transportation, in addition to suggesting a few stores we should drop by. We did go to a camera shop he suggested, as the camera we brought used 4 AA batteries every 5 minutes, making it worse than worthless.
Anyway, we first went to a place called Qutab Minar, which is basically a site built by a Muslim king. There's an iron shaft that hasn't rusted in a couple hundred years, which people are still trying to figure out. This place definitely reminded me of Syria, with its architecture/art style, which is largely Islamic (ie geometric patterns instead of representing people). But there was one crucial difference...the addition of Hindu and Buddhist art styles as well.
This was a running theme throughout the trip, the unity of these "separate" cultures, which is really just a British interpretation of Indian history, which was taken up by Indians themselves, creating the current conflict. Point is, the "Hindu v Muslim" conflict is completely artificial, the unfortunate consequence of a misinterpretation of history appropriated by people looking to define what is Indian and what is not.
After we saw that we continued on to see the Lotus Temple, a Baha'i temple shaped, not surprisingly, like a lotus. Then we returned after a solid day of touring the city to our guesthouse, and reunited with my dad's friend to have dinner.
The next day was pretty different, and was one of the hardest days of the trip. With his friend gone, dad decided we should check out places in the heart of the city. We headed out to one place, called Redfort (literally a red fort, with a bunch of Indian political buildings set against British-era stuff). The area surrounding it was crazy.... people everywhere. I really don't know how to put in words the teeming mass of life surrounding this place. People begging everywhere... which I had a lot of trouble with because I just don't know how to handle that... going into the trip I wasn't sure how I would react to the poverty that I encountered... I'm still not sure how I felt. Less emotional than I anticipated, but in a guarded way, steeling myself and holding back to avoid having to deal with an incredible guilt, an involuntary sense of revulsion, coupled with attempting to mask these emotions.
After Redfort we started planning the next few days of our trip. Our plan was to go to Jaipur in two days (Saturday) and go to Kalkata immediately afterward. I don't know why but I didn't like planning these things... I think it has something to do with the fact that I hate spending money. Seeing my dad drop thousands of rupees on our trip to Jaipur, and to the Taj Mahal (in the last week of the trip), in the backdrop of people starving on the street, was just too much for me. I hated feeling like a spoiled little tourist, wasting money when so many people needed it so desperately more than I did. I tried to express this to my dad, who kind of brushed off how uncomfortable I was with this.
We then tried to get to the outskirts of the city to see my aunt and cousins, for the first time. My dad hadn't seen them in 35 years. I was really excited to meet them... a sense of anticipation...what would they be like, and what would I learn about myself in the process? Getting there was pretty ridiculous. Public transportation didn't extend beyond the city, so we tried to take an auto rickshaw. However, they lived in a different district, so the union that the driver was in would not allow him to cross the border. This meant at the border, we had to change drivers, which for whatever reason turned out to be really complicated.
Anyway, we got there pretty late and ended up staying for an hour. When I met my aunt she immediately embraced me, although we could not speak to each other. She was much older than my dad, and at first I wasn't even sure if she was my aunt because she and my dad did not exactly act like I imagined brother and sister would act. My cousin and her husband were incredibly kind. My cousin told us that my aunt was afflicted with depression, and dementia due to the roots of her teeth affecting her brain... we also learned that my other cousin was hospitalized due to a negative reaction to chemotherapy.
It was strange to hear this news... I really didn't know how to feel. I don't even know if I felt anything. Which I then would feel guilty about, building a shit castle of emotion on top of a base of guilt. On the drive back, I tried to convince my dad to either return to Delhi one day earlier, or to cancel our trip to the Taj Mahal so that we could see my hospitalized cousin. This got into the relationship my dad has with his family... I wanted to understand why my dad didn't see his family for so long. I still don't really understand but at this point he felt that it would be "fake" to suddenly care and try and show up... who were we to show up so randomly?
After that day, either from genuine guilt or from guilt at not feeling anything, I started to view everything as a luxury. Showers? I limited my water so that I wasn't running it continuously, like we do back in the states. I felt horrible eating out because that meant we were living like kings.
It was only Thursday, and it felt like we were going to be here forever... I started keeping track of how much longer the trip was going to last.
Friday was a much easier day, as we again spent it with my dad's professor-type friends. We met one of his friends who I found pretty interesting. He started out as a professor of electrical engineering, but ended up making his own school. One of his students did a science fair style project on the tensile strength of bamboo, which piqued his curiosity on the subject and now he is pretty much the professor of bamboo research. In India, there are essentially no forests, so everything is built purely of concrete. This is horribly expensive, bad for the environment, and not particularly resilient. Bamboo, on the other hand, has the potential to be cheap, sustainable, and hardy. It was cool to see someone trying to improve the living situation, and to hear how he, through a series of small steps, transformed his occupation to what it is now.
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