[Edu-sig] SHIKSHANTAR

[Arthur]

Interesting site:

SHIKSHANTAR
The Peoples Institute for Rethinking Education and Development

http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/

I was too present in the 60's to be be very sympathetic now to "The
Peoples Institute ..." naming convention, but I will give to it no more
importance than that of a naming convention ... and read on.

What drew me here was following the link to "The Geek Shall Inherit the
Earth" article by Mako Hill, linked from 

http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/stories_resistance.html

My thread starts with the fact that Mako Hill is a Debian developer
working for Mark Shuttleworth's company, and who happens to be speaking
this week in New York at NYLUG regarding, among other things, the ubuntu
distribution.

What resonates with me from the SHIKSHANTAR is the concept of resistance
to schooling.  Let's assume that means to the extent the schooling is
bad, and acknowledging that most schooling is bad (and I would contend
signs point to it getting worse).

And within that, what particularly appeals to me, is legitimizing
self-education, as education, and the effort to organize and gather
resources around that concept.

My PyCon presentation was "PyGeo - An Adventure in Self-education with
Python. 

But seeing the possibilities of self-education as an organizing
principle for a form of radicalized resistance is not something I
conceptualized before visiting SHIKSHANTAR.

If what Kirby calls something to the effect of my dark visions of the
future - an increasingly mechanized, profit-driven schooling - are at
all prescient ,that it seems time to start identifying more with
resistors, than with reformers.   I seem to be in that transition.

Art