Discussion of All Things Political

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AN EVENTFUL two months have passed since mass protests toppled former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali--largely out of the media spotlight once the revolution spread to Egypt, but with great importance for the struggle for democracy and justice, in Tunisia and beyond.

In December and January, a nationwide movement emerged in Tunisia, led by workers, students and the unemployed, calling for the hated autocrat to go. After just four weeks, the Tunisian people achieved what had seemed impossible: they challenged a 23-year dictatorship backed by a massive, brutal security force--and won. In doing so, they also exposed the complicity of the French and U.S. governments, which were both long-time allies and defenders of Ben Ali's corrupt regime right through his final days.

When Tunisians' nonviolent demonstrations forced Ben Ali to flee to Saudi Arabia on January 14, the victory immediately gave confidence to emerging protest movements across North Africa and the Middle East. In Egypt, where a struggle against President Hosni Mubarak had been brewing for over a decade, the lesson was clear: If Ben Ali and his security forces were not invincible, than Mubarak could be ousted as well.

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But Tunisia provides important lessons for anyone who hopes to learn from the struggles, debates and conflicts within an unfolding revolutionary situation. In particular, Tunisia offer insights into what it means for hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, to actively take part in trying to transform society from the bottom up.

The movement against Ben Ali was driven in large part by demands for democratic political reforms and an end to the country's oligarchic rule. But growing anger over soaring food prices, inadequate wages and widespread unemployment--especially in the interior of the country--fueled the struggle as well.

Thus far, the interim Tunisian government, which replaced Ben Ali's administration, has proven hostile to enacting reforms that would significantly alter Tunisia's economic inequality. New political freedoms have been won, but these incredible victories have only come about because the interim government has been faced with protests and workers' strikes--on an almost daily basis.

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If anything, the toppling of Ben Ali has proven to be only the opening round in a revolution that is now involving even greater numbers of Tunisians, who are actively and collectively tackling larger questions about what to do next.MORE

Burundi finally appended its signature to water usage from Nile River, providing the Nile Basin Countries with the sixth endorsement which was mandatory to exploit waters from the mystic river. The agreement signed in Kampala, Uganda effectively paves way for the ratification of the long standing Nile Accord, a move likely to strip Egypt of its veto power over rights to the flow from the world's longest river.

A 1929 treaty brokered by former colonial power, Britain, granted Egypt a veto over projects that may alter the flow of the Nile. Another 1959 accord between Egypt and Sudan claimed 90 percent of the Nile’s flow for the two countries.
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After a decade of talks, five Nile nations Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya in May 2010 signed a deal that allowed upstream countries to implement irrigation and hydropower projects without first seeking Egypt's approval. A sixth signatory was needed for the CFA to come into force and once it has been ratified by the six national legislatures, a Nile Basin Commission will be created. MORE

Finland’s schools weren’t always so successful. In the 1960s, they were middling at best. In 1971, a government commission concluded that, poor as the nation was in natural resources, it had to modernize its economy and could only do so by first improving its schools. To that end, the government agreed to reduce class size, boost teacher pay, and require that, by 1979, all teachers complete a rigorous master’s program.


Today, teaching is such a desirable profession that only one in ten applicants to the country’s eight master’s programs in education is accepted. In the United States, on the other hand, college graduates may become teachers without earning a master’s. What’s more, Finnish teachers earn very competitive salaries: High school teachers with 15 years of experience make 102 percent of what their fellow university graduates do. In the United States, by contrast, they earn just 65 percent.

Though, unlike U.S. education reformers, Finnish authorities haven’t outsourced school management to for-profit or non-profit organizations, implemented merit pay, or ranked teachers and schools according to test results, they’ve made excellent use of business strategies. They’ve won the war for talent by making teaching so appealing. In choosing principals, superintendents, and policymakers from inside the education world rather than looking outside it, Finnish authorities have likewise taken a page from the corporate playbook: Great organizations, as the business historian Alfred Chandler documented, cultivate talent from within. Of the many officials I interviewed at the Finnish Ministry of Education, the National Board of Education, the Education Evaluation Council, and the Helsinki Department of Education, all had been teachers for at least four years.

The Finnish approach to pedagogy is also distinct. In grades seven through nine, for instance, classes in science—the subject in which Finnish students have done especially well on PISA—are capped at 16 so students may do labs each lesson. And students in grades one through nine spend from four to eleven periods each week taking classes in art, music, cooking, carpentry, metalwork, and textiles. These classes provide natural venues for learning math and science, nurture critical cooperative skills, and implicitly cultivate respect for people who make their living working with their hands.



But perhaps most striking on the list of what makes Finland’s school system unique is that the country has deliberately rejected the prevailing standardization movement. While nations around the world introduced heavy standardized testing regimes in the 1990s, the Finnish National Board of Education concluded that such tests would consume too much instructional time, cost too much to construct, proctor, and grade, and generate undue stress. The Finnish answer to standardized tests has been to give exams to small but statistically significant samples of students and to trust teachers—so much so that the National Board of Education closed its inspectorate in 1991. Teachers in Finland design their own courses, using a national curriculum as a guide, not a blueprint, and spend about 80 percent as much time leading classes as their U.S. counterparts do, so that they have sufficient opportunity to plan lessons and collaborate with colleagues. The only point at which all Finnish students take standardized exams is as high school seniors if they wish to go to university.

Regard for students’ well-being is evident in more subtle ways, as well. Since 1985, students have not been tracked (or grouped by ability) until the tenth grade. Furthermore, since 1991, authorities have rejected the practice of holding back underachievers, concluding that the consequences of grade repetition were too stigmatizing to be effective and that students would be better off being tutored by learning specialists in areas of academic weakness.MORE

This morning, with good reason, much of the news in the twittersphere is focused on the popular uprisings in Egypt and the government’s harsh response by shutting down the internet, allowing for a mass cover up of violations of human rights. While it is easy to ignore what is happening in Egypt and the state response by dismissing it as something happening in a foreign land, tear gas canisters have also been opening over land currently occupied by the United States.
As we have been writing about, in Puerto Rico protests continue against rising fees in the university system but there are also protests against the violence being used against students and journalist attempting to do their jobs and cover the struggleMORE

Yesterday marked the second day of coordinated civil disobedience at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras as part of a strike that protests an $800 fee that some say is aimed at making the constitutional protected right to education in Puerto Rico a privilege.
Video from the first day of civil disobedience where at least 50 people were arrested. In one scene it looks as if about five police officers pile on top of one protester in order to arrest him. In the background you can hear a woman saying, “Ya, you have him already,” so that police will get off his back.MORE

Government crackdowns have become much more aggressive in the past few weeks.Assistant Superintendent of Field Operations, Leovigildo Vazquez, admitted to using pressure point compliance holds that many consider a form of torture. In protests last week, police used tear gas, pepper spray, batons, and Taser guns against students. One student was clubbed in the head and another hit by a car.

UPR serves about 65,000 students on 11 campuses, and is the largest university in the Caribbean. It is estimated that at least 10,000 students will drop out of the system as a result of the fee hike.

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Jamie landed on America's shores with the self-anointed mission to remake our eating habits for the better. Ground zero is Huntington, West Virginia. In an opening montage we are told the city of 50,000 "was recently named the unhealthiest city in America ... where nearly half of the adults are considered obese" as we see lardy folk shuffle through the frame.

While Jamie's efforts touch on many problems of school food -- from overuse of processed foods to lack of funding to French fries being considered a vegetable -- the "Food Revolution" is a failure because the entertainment narrative is unable to deal with complexities or systemic issues. Instead, all problems are reduced to individual stories and choices. The series may sprinkle some facts and hot-button issues into the mix, but what keeps the viewer hungering for more is the personal dramas, conflicts and weepy moments that are the staples of reality TV.

Because Jamie is packaged as a one-man whirlwind, tangling with "lunch lady Alice" while "Stirn' things oop," there is no mention of the existing, deep-rooted movement for local, healthy food from the farm to the market to the table, as well as schools. It's also more fun and shocking to "slag off" a poor school district in Appalachia for serving pizza and flavored milk for breakfast than to examine how West Virginia has imposed some of the strictest school nutritional standards in the nation. But that's entertainment.

The reality behind "Food Revolution" is that after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called "staggering." On top of that food costs were way over budget, the school district was saddled with other unmanageable expenses, and Jamie's failure to meet nutritional guidelines had school officials worried they would lose federal funding and the state department of education would intervene.

SINGAPORE, Nov 15 (IPS) - With support from Singapore, Japan and other countries interested in Buddhism, India's ancient Nalanda University, dating back to 5th century B.C., may soon be restored to its past glory as a primary seat of learning in Asia.

An ambitious 150 million US-dollar project was unfolded at an international symposium titled ‘Reviving Buddhist Cultural Links', held here this week. Essentially a joint venture between the provincial government of India's eastern Bihar state - where Nalanda is located - and the Singapore government, it envisages the participation of several countries with large Buddhist populations, including Sri Lanka, Thailand and China.

Opening the symposium on Monday, Singapore's foreign minister George Yeo said the project was not about the religion but "Buddhist values and philosophy which have become an integral part of East Asian civilisation".

Yeo added that as Asia reemerges on the world stage, Asians could "look back to their own past and derive inspiration from it for the future." Thus he noted, "We should develop Nalanda as an icon of the Asian renaissance, attracting scholars and students from a much wider region as the ancient university once did."

Indian President Abdul Kalam, delivering a keynote address via live multimedia videocast from New Delhi, described the project as a "model for evolving a happy, prosperous and peaceful society in our planet" and helpful in the "evolution of the enlightened citizen." The process, he said, has three components - education with a value system, religion transforming into spirituality and economic development for societal transformation.

"The mission of unity of minds is indeed gaining momentum from Bihar, the birthplace of ancient Nalanda," observed Kalam.

The symposium was attended by over 200 Asian scholars, government officials and Buddhist monks and nuns from Singapore, India, Thailand, Japan, China and many other countries. MORE