An open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi

letter

My dear Prime Minister,

With world’s largest young population of under 35 years of age, Bharat stands on the crossroads – of demographic dividend or disaster! Hope or despair!
Bharat is at risk.

Will the Bharatiya people connect with rewarding vocations, live a fuller life and promote harmony and peace; for themselves, their families, mohallas, cities or societies at large, or will they continue to fight for doles, subsidies, concessions; all in the name of caste, religion or region? Will they be empowered enough to not only address their own mundane and sublime challenges or will we be slung into a state of absolute chaos and anarchy?

Is our generation creating opportunities of empowerment for all or are we readying a recipe for disaster? Are we headed for highly dissatisfied, discontented, fragmented collection of nation states or sub states, negating the very idea of Bharat? Will Bharat as a nation survive, subsist or thrive?

Amongst several others, the key answer could also be around empowering our generations through education & training. The quality of our schools, college and universities will determine and define our future. – Dividend or Disaster!

ASER 2015 [Annual Status of Education Report], an annual survey has reported on the status of education in general and learning outcomes in elementary schools. Following are the excerpts from the report; 30.8% in 2015 [8 crore children] up from 16.4% in 2006; of all 6-14 year old children in rural Bharat are enrolled in private schools.

33.5% of boys, compared to 25.9% of girls in the age group of 11-14 years are in private schools.

Private school enrollment in 2014 grew to; Manipur (73.3%), Kerala (62.2%), Haryana (54.2%), Uttar Pradesh (51.7%), and Meghalaya (51.7%).
Proficiency in reading as also in arithmetic continues to be very poor in government schools, in spite of the fact that nearly 40% children in the government schools pay for private tuition.

It can be safely assumed that the ratio of children enrolled in private or non-governmental urban and secondary schools exceeds 65% of total enrollments in this segment, across the country.

The low achievement grades in state schools and the consequent rising enrolments in the private schools amply demonstrate that the aspirational Bharat does not trust the state schools. The credibility of the state as provider of school education stands seriously eroded.

Seventy years after independence, government is still struggling with the fundamentals of reading, writing and basic arithmetic. Not to speak of 21st century skills! The educational policy and its implementation has been rather tardy. The task of educating nearly 450 million young people is becoming only more daunting, yet very critical and immediate.

The catalytic, developmental and regulatory role of the government also appears seriously flawed. The apex institutions like National Council of Educational Research & Training, [NCERT], National University of Educational Planning & Administration [NUEPA] and National Council of Teacher Educational too have not performed as expected.

The growth of enrolments in the private schools presents a new challenge now. The new phenomenon of parent teacher standoff and flood of litigation, encouraged largely by an unimaginative, ignorant, disconnected & insensitive bureaucracy, clutching to the archaic, colonial and leftists inspired controls – made-worse, agitates against the very spirit of stakeholders’ collaboration for nurturing our future generations.

Given the present situation, we seriously run the risk of the left inspired, control-savvy politicians and bureaucrats destroying the private schools in the same way that they destroyed public education and in turn put the whole nation at risk.

It is in this context that the government has to reposition itself in providing a relevant and responsive policy framework, a regulatory framework that seeks to promote & facilitate and also become a competent provider of education. In the dynamic social, cultural and educational landscapes of the 21st century, the policy framework and the regulatory regime has to move away from “Restrict, Prescribe & Control” to “Facilitate, Support and Collaborate” with the non-governmental initiatives in education.

In these times of internet, supported by abundant data and information, we should allow the collective wisdom of parents and the local communities to chose their schools without any restrictions. They will punish the under-performing schools by rejecting them and shifting their wards out of such schools.

While the delinquent schools need to be censored, the performing schools should be given more autonomy and freedom to innovate and re-invent the future of education and schooling. Allow fresh ideas to germinate.

Let the collective wisdom of society prevail. Let there be minimal controls. Small countries like Finland and Korea, now at the top of educational quality tables globally, have demonstrated that Autonomy with Accountability will work in all situations – private or state schools.
It is time that governments actively encouraged and supported public – private partnerships in improving standards and quality of school education with the final objective of improving the learning outcomes for students. It should now consider incubating, supporting and creating intellectual & educational infrastructure that includes, but is not limited to, teacher preparation programs, continuing professional development and developing vibrant school leaders.

I write this to you on behalf of millions of teachers and families and seek your support and guidance in chartering the course for Bharat as an emerging knowledge society. While Bharat must be ensured its due place of pride in the emerging world order, it must also ensure enduring peace & prosperity for its future generations.

The country knows that your government has inherited a difficult situation in this regard, but given who you are, people believe if anyone can fix it, it is YOU. And the time is NOW.

Let us fix our education and training.

Yours Sincerely,

Om Pathak

Surat terbuka untuk presiden Amerika

As the new US administration moves to enact a series of ever-more discriminatory policies, and as the material consequences of those policies begin to be felt around the world, those of us based in the UK face an additional blow as they watch their government throw its lot in with Trump’s.

su asu

In response to this blow, we, a group of UK-based legal academics and academic support staff, decided that one relatively straightforward action we might take, as the first step in a wider strategy of resistance, would be to draft an open letter of protest to the Prime Minister. This initiative was born at Kent Law School and has been supported by colleagues at universities across the country.

Here is the letter. If you would like to join us in signing it, please click on this link and add your name to the list of signatories. From now until 6.00pm on Sunday, 5 February, the letter will be open for any member of a UK university to sign. After that date, it will be sent with all signatures to the Prime Minister and to other media outlets.

Please share the link to the letter as widely as possible amongst your colleagues.

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Dear Prime Minister,

We would like to express our collective dismay at your decision to align the British Government with the administration of the new President of the United States, Donald Trump.

President Trump’s recent actions have serious domestic and global implications. Among the most alarming are his openly discriminatory decisions to block immigrants and visa holders from seven Muslim-majority states from entering the US and to suspend the US’s Syrian refugee admissions programme indefinitely; to insist on the construction of a wall along the US-Mexican border, threatening Mexican goods with a 20 per cent import duty (notwithstanding US commitments under NAFTA) if Mexico does not pay for it; to suspend federal funding to any US global health organisation willing to discuss issues surrounding abortion with its clients; to freeze federal support for the US Environmental Protection Agency, threaten a US exit from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and throw his weight behind the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline projects; to voice his support for outlawed torture techniques including waterboarding; and to threaten or dismiss (in the case of the acting Attorney-General, Sally Yates) any member of the US legal and judicial establishment who questions the legitimacy of his government’s measures.

While many of these actions were anticipated during his campaign, much more surprising is your decision as British Prime Minister to refrain from expressing clear opposition to the Trump government on behalf of the UK as a whole, even as Trump puts his promises into action, bringing tens of thousands out onto the streets in protest in the UK and across the world.

We would like to remind you that seeking to realign the UK with the US while breaking its ties with Europe will be a disaster not only for the British economy and the NHS, but also for:

Britain’s already-tarnished reputation as an open, multicultural society capable of supporting vulnerable individuals and communities and acknowledging its imperial past;
The safety of UK citizens, residents and civilians worldwide, now more vulnerable than ever to forms of extremism and nationalism, including white supremacism;
The resilience of an international order founded, however imperfectly, on a commitment to the equality of individuals and states; and
The possibilities available for thinking differently about the challenges of the twenty-first century and, in particular, about the extent to which those challenges are reproduced by the ‘solutions’ on offer in such a profoundly skewed international order.
The alacrity with which Trump has put in place, by Presidential decree, a swathe of openly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic measures, together with the President’s total disregard for existing US commitments under international law, indicate that the British Government’s decision to renew its ‘special relationship’ with the United States at this time can only lead, in the short-term, to further suffering and discrimination. We can only hope that this self-serving programme will, in the long-term, set in motion a demand for real change that governments and communities across the world will be forced to answer.

With this in mind, we call on you not only to cancel Trump’s invitation to visit the UK but also, and more fundamentally, to withdraw the support of the British Government for the United States more generally until these indefensible policies have been reversed and disavowed. If you do not, we fear that the UK will find itself, like Trump, on the wrong side of history, with serious consequences for us all.

Yours sincerely,

Legal academics and professional staff across the UK