The life-long learning part of this blog...

So, I know it's been a while since I last wrote on this blog and believe me when I say I've had some serious separation anxiety over the last few months. But I just couldn't think of a topic to write about while sounding both intelligent and funny. Needless to say, the longer I took to come up with something smart to say, the more pressure I put on myself and the less I wanted to actually write the post.

At some point, I tried to convince myself that my lack of intelligent things to say was linked to the absence of full-time and hard core formal learning taking place. At best, I spent the whole year learning to take on and excel at the responsibilities of a homemaker. No so very impressive to say the least. But then again, its not like I didn't learn anything in the past year. So here are a few valuable lessons I learnt in the past year (And all of these are only from experience): 

1. If you are cracking eggs to make something, leave the eggs in their little cardboard carton while you are cracking the others. They are safe there. Do NOT put them on the counter to await their demise. If you do, they will try to get away and save themselves.
2. When you are washing white clothes in a white load of laundry, be sure to remove that primarily white top that has a little bit of colorful embroidery on it. Unless you want all of your whites to be light blue when they come out of the wash.  
3. When you crack the egg over the pan, do NOT add the eggshells to the pan. (Believe me. It seems like common sense, but if you have never cooked before, its possible your scrambled eggs will seem unusually crunchy!)
4. While making chapati dough, you may be excited and feel the urge to use both hands to knead the dough and make it extra soft with the added pressure of another hand. Do NOT use both hands. you will be stuck with two hands messy and covered in very sticky goo, and zero ability to use them.
5. While vacuuming the carpets, make sure to lift up the curtains before you try and vacuum under them. If you attempt to get under them without taking care to get them out of the way, there will be a lot of ripping and a lot of cutting of fabric out of the roller of the vacuum. There will also be no curtains on your window. Not such a great thing if you are worried about peeping toms.
6. If you accidentally forget rule number one and do leave an egg on the counter and it starts to roll off the counter, do NOT try to stop it with your body. You will end up with crushed egg goo running down the leg of your shorts.

The list goes on and on. I realized though I am learning something new and valuable everyday, I am not actually going out of my way to learn something new. To be the life-long learner I claim to be, on pretty much all my social media profiles. 

And so, I have taken it upon myself to start a conscious learning process, in which I will attempt to teach myself things that go beyond my formal education. 

For example: About 3 weeks ago, I took it upon myself to learn how to knit. I have known how to and loved crochet for about 11 years now, and I decided it was time to learn how to knit. It took me a while, a lot of concentration, and several YouTube video tutorials to finally complete my first ever knit garment. A shrug. (For those of you who don't know what a shrug is, its pretty much a cropped jacket, or as one of my male friends so eloquently put it, just sleeves). 

So that was my first experiment in teaching myself something new. I decided that while knitting was very much within my comfort zone, I think my next assignment should be something that I would consider more difficult or outside of my interests. So I decided to learn Calculus. Needless to say that failure was pretty epic, and I put down my pencil within two hours and the first page of my book. Math is not my subject and never has been and I will have to reserve Calculus for a different time (I think my 23 hour journey to India that is coming up should provide me with the adequate time and boredom to try and take on this task). 

However, in the meantime, I found an Intro to Computer Programming, 7 week long, online course that was being offered by two professors from the University of Toronto, through the Coursera Portal. It started yesterday, so I am a day late, but I am so looking forward trying to learn Programming. As I get through the course, I will keep posting to update on progress (existent or non-so-much). 

Wish me luck!

Social change or social domination?

Education = social change.

I always took this equation to be an axiom. It made perfect sense. In fact, in my mind, the equation expanded to even more: 

Education 

= reading and writing 

= being able to avail of different kinds of knowledge and view points 

= betterment of the self and the family 

= eventual SOCIAL PROGRESS.

It was like a hallelujah moment. Social progress would be achieved if education was administered. My constant belief. And hence, I became (and still am) obsessed with the idea of bettering education, making education more accessible to the masses, etc. 

However, I never took a more cynical view about it. I never even looked at education from the Marxist school of thought, despite having studied in detail their ideas on the media and 'cultural hegemony'. I know. I'm stupid for not having made the connection. (Especially when you follow the link on cultural hegemony and read the very first few lines on Wikipedia).

This quite obvious idea actually dawned on me when I was reading Seeking Common Ground: Public schools in a diverse society, by David Tyack. He wrote about how, throughout the years of American Independence, the founding fathers devised a system of education that would "Americanize" the diverse population that made up the United States of America. Not only were subject matters designed to follow this agenda, but even moral education was set up that had a set of morals that best suited their interests. In a way, they were brainwashing the public into believing some things were "un-American" while others, were completely "American" so as to promote their own agenda. The next book I read was To Remain and Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education by K. T. Lomawaima and T. L. McCarty. This book talked in even more detail about how Native American Indians were subject to extensive cultural cleansing through education to once again "Americanize" them and mainstream them into the society. In order to maintain their democracy, the founding fathers turned the United States into an almost dictatorship.

Reading these two books made me think about how education in the United States was always about brainwashing and how it was similar in our own case in India. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a British Minister during the British control of India devised a system of education which, sadly, is still followed today, called Macaulayism. 

I agree that in order for order, it is required that the people be educated and know their rights, duties and all that fun jazz. But it scares me to think that what I was thinking to be a medium of social change was actually a tool of domination all along. A method of bringing the people under control. "Brainwashing them". History has always been the story of the victor. 

But can we change that? Can we make education about something other than submission the a higher authority? Can we make education about learning that which is required for living rather than that which is required for living (in submission)? 

I think we can.

I think the extensiveness of globalization will make it so that there wont be just one highest power that will be the be all and end all of education. There will be standards set by other countries, or by our own that would keep raising the bar in terms of education. That will, I hope, remove the domination factor and allow for education to be about learning to be the best one can be.