Education for all.

How can the global community achieve the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women? This question is the focus of Goal 3 of the Millennium Development Goals endorsed by world leaders at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 and of this report prepared by the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality. The report argues that there are many practical steps that can reduce inequalities based on gender inequalities that constrain the potential to reduce poverty and achieve high levels of well-being in societies around the world. There are also many positive actions that can be taken to empower women. Without leadership and political will however the world will fall short of taking these practical steps--and meeting the goal. Because gender inequality is deeply rooted in entrenched attitudes societal institutions and market forces political commitment at the highest international and national levels is essential to institute the policies that can trigger social change and to allocate the resources necessary to achieve gender equality and womens empowerment. Many decades of organizing and advocacy by womens organizations and networks across the world have resulted in global recognition of the contributions that women make to economic development and of the costs to societies of persistent inequalities between women and men. The success of those efforts is evident in the promises countries have made over the past two decades through international forums. The inclusion of gender equality and womens empowerment as the third Millennium Development Goal is a reminder that many of those promises have not been kept while simultaneously offering yet another international policy opportunity to implement them. (excerpt)

Taking action : achieving gender equality and empowering women

EFA discourse has moved from a commitment to quality to its measurement without adequate consideration of what quality entails, particularly in the vital domain of pedagogy. Meanwhile, the demand for quality indicators has left important methodological questions unanswered. This paper provides a critique of typical quality indicator frameworks from international and EFA sources. It notes a concern with input and context at the expense of process, an arbitrariness in what is focused upon, an excessive use of proxies, neglect of international pedagogical research, and fundamental confusions about the key terms ‘quality’, ‘indicators’ and ‘measures’. After considering one of the more promising Indian frameworks, from NCERT, the paper proposes criteria for assessing all such initiatives, central to which are comprehensiveness, evidential basis, validity, reliability, impact, manageability and appositeness to level and context of use. In respect of the latter, the paper presses the need for the question ‘Who needs to know what?’ to be asked at each level of the system from national to local. The paper then investigates the empirical and conceptual basis for accounts and indicators or quality, arguing the importance of national culture and circumstance alongside international pedagogical research. The paper finds that the interface between the latter and the EFA literature is extremely weak; and that school effectiveness research is given a prominence in EFA contexts which it is not accorded elsewhere and which its flawed methodology and cultural insensitivity do not justify. Underlying the selective use of evidence is a more general failure adequately to conceptualise what is being researched, and the paper sets out a map of the territory of pedagogy at the levels of ideas and action to remedy this deficiency, illustrating its value by considering just one of the various aspects of teaching identified, classroom interaction. Pressing home the concern about the conceptual problems of the field as it currently stands, the paper points to the tendency to treat indicators and measures as synonymous, and to the distortion which follows an excessive preoccupation with measures. It argues that to jettison indicators on the grounds that they are non-measurable is to ignore much of what matters most in the quality of learning and teaching. This exclusivity also contradicts claims that the dangers of trying to represent quality as quantity are fully understood. Finally, the paper proposes principles of procedure to guide future work on quality indicators and measures in the EFA context, together with priorities for action and four practical initiatives to take the debate forward in the particular context of India’s EFA programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. As a whole, the paper both engages with the current EFA discourse on quality and indicators and steps outside it. The author is an educationist and researcher, though one with substantial international and EFA experience, including India, DPEP and SSA. He makes no apologies for the fact that his perspective may not sit readily with that which has dominated the EFA quality debate up to now. Indeed, a collision of perspectives may be just what is needed by way of ‘incitement to discourse’. Correspondence: Professor Robin Alexander, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK, or rja40@cam.ac.uk. See also www.robinalexander.org.uk.

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Education For All, The Quality Imperative and the Problem of Pedagogy. CREATE Pathways to Access. Research Monograph No. 20.

Unemployment among educated young men has become a central feature of globalization. In this article, I examine the experiences and strategies of unemployed young men in the north Indian city of Meerut. Many of these men complain that they are “just passing time” (doing “timepass”) in run-down government universities. But they also use this idea of themselves in limbo to fashion novel cultures of masculinity that partially bridge caste divides. I use a discussion of these young men's predicament to argue for an ethnographically sensitive political-economy approach to the study of youth, culture, and neoliberal transformation, one attuned to both the durability of social inequalities and counterintuitive cultural practice.

Timepass: Youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in India

Phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU) is a whole word measure for measuring phonological proficiency. It measures the length of a child’s word and the number of correct consonants. The present study investigated the phonological length of utterance in native Kannada speaking children of 3 to 7 years age. A total of 400 subjects in the age range of 3-7 years participated in the study. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited from each child and analyzed for PMLU as per the rules suggested by Ingram. Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis test were employed to compare the differences between the means of PMLU scores across the gender and the age respectively. The result revealed increase in PMLU score as the age increased suggesting a developmental trend in PMLU acquisition. No statistically significant differences were observed between the means of PMLU scores across the gender.

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LANGUAGE IN INDIA Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Introduction PART ONE: DYNAMICS OF COLONISATION Colonial Citizen as an Educational Ideal Appropriate Knowledge Conflict of Curriculum and Culture Meek Dictator The Paradox of Teacher's Personality PART TWO: DYNAMICS OF THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE Pursuit of Equality Quest for Self-Identity Meanings of Progress Conclusion

Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas

If textbooks are treated as a vehicle for education, the living word of the teacher has very little value. A teacher who teaches from textbooks does not impart originality to his pupils. He himself becomes a slave of textbooks and has no opportunity or occasion to be original. It therefore seems that the less textbooks there are, the better it is for the teacher and his pupils. [M. K. GANDHI (Harijan, September 9, 1939)]

Origins of India's "Textbook Culture.".

The author explains the history texts of India and Pakistan selectively narrate their histories for various ideological and cultural reasons. To show how the two perceptions vary, he compares the textbooks currently used in Indian and Pakistani schools and examines the representation of major episodes and the portrayal of personalities.

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan

Introduction - K. Kumar. * Intrastate Conflicts, Women, and Gender Relations: An Overview - K. Kumar. * Confronting the Aftermath of Conflict: Women's Organizations in Postgenocide Rwanda - C. Newbury and H. Baldwin. * Women's Organizations in Postconflict Cambodia - K. Kumar and H. Baldwin. * Georgia in Transition: Women's Organizations and Empowerment - A.L. Morton. S.A. Nan, T. Buck, and F. Zurikashvilli. * Women's Organizations in Postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina - M. Walsh. * El Salvador and Guatemala Refugee Camp and Repatriation Experiences - P. Weiss Fagen and S.W. Yudelman. * Women's Organizations in El Salvador - L. Stephen, K. Ready, and S. Cosgrove. * Conclusion: International Assistance to Women's Organizations: Lessons for the International Community - K. Kumar.

Women and Civil War : impact, organizations, and action

The term ‘quality’ as used in recent education discourse has its origins in the factory floor and production, as a measure of control of the features of merchandise produced. In the form of measureable specifications, it is used by national bureaucracies and international aid and lending agencies as lending itself to scientific management of and monitoring investments in education. Going back to the concept of ‘quality’ as the essential character of a thing, the paper argues that quality has always been integral to the concept of education, deriving from what is considered worthwhile as an aim or experience in education. The paper traces the history of the term beginning with important changes in the concept of education influenced by education thinkers and moving to the role of the concept in the context of universalisation of education, the growing importance of democracy as a political choice, and economic globalisation. The final section of the paper draws out implications for teacher professionalism,...

Krishna Kumar

Papers

Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas

Origins of India's "Textbook Culture.".

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan

Women and Civil War : impact, organizations, and action

History of the quality debate