OpenEd: Week1

In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right?
Why or why not?
In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate* education through a certain age or level?

Short summary
Introduction
Analysis: 1. the Italian paradox; 2. virtue and emancipation; 3. the pursuit of happiness: emic vs etic perspective; 4. memorizing (Feynman on Brazil's education)


SHORT SUMMARY
It seems quite obvious that all the people should have the right to education, but what is not universally agreed upon is if this right could also be a duty and to what extent (in terms of age, quantity and quality) education must be compulsory.
Besides the right of education, the question is on the capacity to exercise it. In many countries where education is free poor children don't go to school because they have to work. Furthermore, in some countries, girls can’t be 'educated' since this diminishes their value once they are to get married. So the problem of education interwaves with women position in society and perhaps the two issues are sometimes - not always - strictly connected.
As a matter of fact, the right to education has a fundamental correlation to several other important human rights such as the right to vote, to health care, to be free...
Ignorance - not only the lack of money - sometimes prevent people from exercising their rights. Making high quality educational resources freely available could be a solution for some developing countries but some problems still exist.
One more question is if education is ‘universal’ or must be ‘locally’ addressed?
Of course answers can be different depending on the perspective we look from: "emic" or "etic"? Finally: the right to education has connection with the “pursuit of happiness” or can ignorance be "happier"? :)

INTRODUCTION
The three texts we read this week (Tomaseski's Primer 1 and 2, Wiley's Report 2006) , and the discussions they have forstered, focus on some basic dicotomies (or apparent dicotomies) opposing concepts that might have different meanings according to the cultures they are referred to.
Consequently it is necessary to make some differences or to specify some issues both in a syncronical (geographical or social) or in a diacronical (historical) perspective: what is 'good' for a nation, it's not for another; what was taught and the way it was taught some years ago, it's no more effective (as Wiley shows). Before presenting the dicotomies and specifications, I will sum up the different positions.

Here, as an index, I will present some of these dicotomies and some of the specifications that have been illustrated both in the assigned readings and in my collegues' blogs.

Some dicotomies:
Right / Violation
Right / Duty
Empirical / Normative
Indoctrination / Education
Promise / Performance
Free-Open / Mandatory
Universal / Local
Public / Private
Free for adults / Compulsory for children
(plus all the dicotomies presented by Wiley in Table 1. Changes Occurring in the Business, Science, and the World)


Differences /Specifications
- Education is not Good Education per se (Andreas Formiconi)
- Schooling is not Education (see reference to Illich’s Deschooling Society also mentioned by Stian)
- The right to education has a fundamental correlation to several other important rights such as, to vote, to health care, to human rights, to a democratic society (Rreo)
- It would be better to replace the expression "right to education" with "right to learning and communicating" (Elisa)
- Is education to be considered a new way of colonization? (Antonio)
- Global economical issues also interfere in local realities (Cati)
- There is a tension between offering of aid and the idea of “partnership” with local people (Karen)?
- People living in poor countries need more than food and medicine (Mario)
- Openness is the gateway to connectedness, personalization, and participation (Wiley 2006)
- Open Ed exposes teaching to the quality-increasing pressures of peer review (Wiley 2006)

ANALYSIS
I will not go trough all these items but I'll try to reflect only on some of them.
Some are connected. For example, let's take the first three:
Right / Violation -- Right / Duty -- Empirical / Normative

1. THE ITALIAN PARADOX
Tomaseski opens her first report with this consciousness
"…exposing and opposing the abyss between the normative and empirical worlds" (Tomasevski 2001, Primer 1, page 8).
What she argues in both Primer 1 and Primer 2 is that although the right to education is included in some Constitutional Charts and a lot has been 'declared' in both Jomitien and Dakar's Final documents, practically there are still many "obstacles on the way of the right of education" and she points out the "rights versus capacity question" (as Wiley synthesize, commenting Karen's blog).
In Primer 2 (p. 18, Table 3) Tomasesvki presents a Table concerning the
Constitutional guarantees of free and compulsory education for all children
This table is interesting and can be connected with a similar one in her website (http://www.right-to-education.org/): Table Countries without free public primary education available to all school age children by region and we can observe that the list is still very long
Later on she put the question in terms of real accessibility of poor children (or poor girls, depending on the context) to primary school, which should be guaranteed to every child.

In Italy the right to education is guaranteed by the articles 33 ("Art and science are free and their teaching must be free) and 34 of Constitution ("School is open to everybody.... Education, mandatory for 8 years, is free and compulsory"...).

One thing which has always puzzled me is that until the end of last century (my Italian collegues can confirm?) due to unemployment, people coming from the South of Italy were 'forced' to go to university in the hope that, once graduated, they could get a job. Instead, in the North, where there were industries and it was much easier to get a job after compulsory education, only a few people coming from rich families or very gifted students would go to University. Isn't this a paradox? Which are the consequences?

2. VIRTUE AND EMANCIPATION
Tomasevski in Primer 1 (p. 34) presents a box concerning Uganda:
Box 13 Pitfalls of reductionism: The price parents pay for having schooled their daughters
In Uganda girls can’t be 'educated' since this diminishes their value once they are to get married: "Myth has it that education turns them into prostitutes", writes Tomasevski.
It reminds me of one work I did on German women diaries and the education of burgeois girls in the 19th century. The general idea at that time was that women had to be educated - since this contributed to their "virtue" (the nobility of soul opposed to the nobility of heritage/state) - but not too much: they had to be well acquanted with all the subjects 'useful' to have a conversation in society or with their husband.
This situation (similar to that of Italian women up to the 20th century) was frustrating, since women were 'educated' enough to be conscious of the limits imposed to them. One of the diaries uses the expression "Scheuklappen" to describe this condition (i.e. the things put on the eyes of horses and used to prevent them from looking at the sides of the street).
In different periods and in different part of the world, women education is always related to the position of women in that context and sometimes education isn't a medium to get freedom for women as Tomasevski point out in Box 10. Bolivia: The toll of being a woman, indigenous and a teacher (p. 29).

3. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Following Tomasevski's statement, "People living in poor countries need more than food and medicine", Mario asks an interesting question:
"Is it really possible to establish, at a centralized level, what skills and knowledge are needed to be successful (and happy) in every context (geographical, social, familiar, productive)?"

Some of my students had one interesting experience last year in Peru. Some Medicine and Nursing students went there for a workcamp focused on "education to health" (hygiene and prevention of illness).
When they came back, they told me that people preferred spending money to buy a new tv or a satellite antenna (to watch football or soap operas) rather than spending a few dollars for the vaccination of their children or to pay the bus travel to school for them (sometimes school are very far and children are forced to walk kilometers to get there).
The "priorities" are different.
Rreo writes: “if there is one thing that I learned as an Anthropologist it’s that this strategy will likely NOT apply to all countries / cultures the same".
As for strategy I agree completely: for example, in this case, perhaps, producing video on "education to health" my students would have caught better the attention of the Peruvian parents.
But, for contents, the question is if we have to teach Peruvian parents to take care of children's health and education and how we can do it without interferring too much with their way of life.

Karen writes "There is a tension between offering of aid and the idea of “partnership” with local people. On the one hand, many say that the local people must drive the process of reform. On the other, donors are making judgments about what is “right” and “wrong.” I worry about outsiders making these decisions without always regarding local cultural values."

This reminds me the distinction that antropologists make between etic and emic (From: http://faculty.ircc.edu/faculty/jlett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm)
The terms “emic” and “etic,” which were derived from an analogy with the terms “phonemic” and “phonetic,” were coined by the linguistic anthropologist Kenneth Pike (1954). He suggests that there are two perspectives that can be employed in the study of a society’s cultural system, just as there are two perspectives that can be used in the study of a language’s sound system. In both cases, it is possible to take the point of view of either the insider or the outsider.

As 'outsiders' we would argue that some values are more important than others; but altough this is etic (and even "ethic"!!!) it is important to take into account also the 'insider' perspective (emic). As Karen observes commenting on Antonio's Blog "Are we sure that Lesotho herders should continue to be herders?”… perhaps it should their choice not ours? Of course, that implies them having a voice in the decision, which may imply some basic level of information if not education"
One more question is: "Are Lesotho herderes happier than they would be if they were 'educated'?"
Is ignorance happier than consciuouness?
Viewing the same point from another 'angle':
has the right to education connections with " the pursuit of happiness" (so central in US Constitution)?
"The pursuit of happiness" is the title of recent movie directed by Gabriele Muccino, based on a true history. Chris Gardner is a struggling salesman who attends an unpaid stockbroker internship where one in twenty has a chance of a lucrative full time career.
Of course here the accent is more on the possibility to get a wealthier position, but there are also some hints on the value of education as a form of personal and familiar fulfillment.

MEMORIZING
Tomasevski (Primer 1, p. 34), quoting Frank Dall, observes how detrimental "the classroom-centred model designed to service a pre-industrial European society” has been and points out that "one visible feature of this model are square schools, even if all huts around them are round".
This image seems to me very near to the picture painted by Wiley (p. 1): "A typical experience in a higher education classroom might be characterized as follows..."
where the stress is on
tethered to a place / printed materials / the experience is closed / each student is isolated though surrounded by peers / the information presented is generic / students are consumers.

Although referred to higher education these elements are very similar to the Agonies of 13-year old schoolboy (Tomasevski Primer 1, p. 36).
One paragraph is particularly striking me, since I had the same 'experience':
I am facing the classroom being quizzed on Europe in the middle of XIX century. Panicking about the grade, I am trying to remember the year when the war between France and Prussia broke out. In another sequence, I am in the midst of writing a mathematics test to discover that I cannot cope with a single question. I am mixing up Pythagorean theorem with Archimedes’s law, the capitals of Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia are intertwined with the names of animals living in Mediterranean rocks,...

This is the way many subjects are often (exceptions are very rare) taught in Italy as in many other countries.
I read recently an excerpt from a book of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman concerning Brazilian science education. See previous post. Of course what he says might be referred to many other countries, not only to Brazil.
As Wiley observes "higher education has fallen out of step with business, science, and everyday life". Is openness the solution?
I will be able to answer this question only going further with this course.

One reason Wileys points out is that "openness takes teaching directly into the heart of the scholarly world for the first time – it exposes teaching to the quality-increasing pressures of peer review"
Furthermore it will forster realignment of education with "changes in society and in its student base".
Bu all this implies that the way we are teaching and learning must be totally rethought.... and even the architectonic structure of educational institutions has to be changed.