EDUCATION

As the capitalist elite continues to pour ever more resources into its crusade to dismantle society, it’s important to keep a tally of the damage done—if only to direct popular attention to where it’s needed most, and to where the Left’s own resources are needed most. High on the list of capitalist priorities, and thus of priorities for left-wing resistance, is the goal to privatize everything from education to nature to policing and soldiering. With that in mind, here’s a list of some recent “negative externalities” of privatization that I’ve culled from news sources.

In recent weeks and months Americans have seen large teacher strikes and protests erupt in several states simultaneously. These unprecedented strikes are sharply bringing to the fore the long-standing poor and humiliating working conditions faced by millions of teachers in America as a result of the destructive neoliberal agenda of the rich.

This post is based on a letter I wrote in reply to someone who has known me as a teacher. I have responded to her as one concerned citizen to another, but with her student experience in mind. We agreed it would be an idea to make the response available to anyone else who shared similar concerns.

Forgetting the relationship between education and society and ignoring the required engagement between thinker theorists and innovators on one side and society on the other, the governments, legislators and people hypnotized by the neoliberal economy have came to an understanding that commericialisation/marketisation of education from first grade to PhD is the best way forward not for any appreciable societal transformations[Read More...]

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

  The true teachers are those who help us think for ourselves –Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan India’s education sector has expanded rapidly in the last decade but the quality of learning remains pathetic on account of unimaginative and misguided policies. The Modi government’s budget  this year was a mixed basket for the education sector, which is bogged with several serious issues aside[Read More...]

                                The recent UGC move to grant autonomous status to 62 educational institutions have been hailed in various quarters. MHRD has praised it and have equated the move to grant autonomous status to Universities with “New economic policies of 1991”. The new move has been[Read More...]

Through the title I don’t want to shed a sense of pessimism about the future of Jawaharlal Nehru University, instead my attempt is to lay bare the context which is indeed very frustrating and demotivating. Also, being in the campus from the last two year it seemed to me that somewhere down the line a crisis is also emanating from[Read More...]

Can you imagine being invited into an English school on the spur of the moment and getting a welcome like this?
The post Dispatches from Damascus. Part Two appeared first on BSNEWS.

People’s Tribunal on Attack on Educational Institutions was held at the Constitution Club of India, New Delhi, on April 11-13, 2018. The tribunal was organised by the People’s Commission on Shrinking Democratic Space in India (PCSDS). The jury panel of the tribunal comprisedJustice (Retd.) Hosbet Suresh, Justice (Retd.) B.G. Kolse Patil, Prof. Amit Bhaduri, Dr. Uma Chakravarty, Prof. T.K. Oommen,[Read More...]