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November 2019

Education

CodeIndia will help govt get meaningful computer education to schools

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

delhi, delhi schools

The Department of Science and Technology announced its pilot project at a school in Delhi. (Representative image)

How necessary coding has become for education is evident from the fact that over the last couple of years, apps have sprung up both on iOS and Android to make coding fun. While more children are taking to coding in the West—each profession now demands basic computer skills—in developing countries, skill development has been linked to traditional fields like driving, masonry, etc. Thus, the effort by the principal scientific advisor of the government to introduce coding in schools is a positive step in preparing children for jobs of the future. The Department of Science and Technology announced its pilot project at a school in Delhi. Under the programme, kids would be taught skills like creating cartoons, introduction to creative computing using scratch, creating websites, CERN CMS data workshop, Python language, built-in functions and modules, as well as how to build projects.

The initiative is undoubtedly expected to prepare a workforce for the future— World Economic Forum highlights that artificial intelligence specialist, blockchain specialist, and big data analyst are some of the likely professions of the future. But, there are some concerns that the government needs to address beforehand. Reports from ASER highlight that even after a decade of widespread use of the web, schools in rural areas still lack the requisite infrastructure. So, in 2010, while only 8.6% of children were using a computer, this had fallen even further to 6.5% in 2018. If the government is serious about changing the dynamics of employment, it must bring about a change in rural areas. Making computers available will be the first step, but imparting advanced education is also essential. Coding is as vital in the 21st century as writing was in the 16th century.

[“source=financialexpress”]

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Internet

The internet is hell-bent on making spies out of citizens

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Anyone who has encountered ‘predictive typing’ in Gmail, or been offered ‘suggestions’ for future purchases by Amazon, or received ‘targeted advertisements’ on Yahoo, will immediately recognize how these make us think and act in ways that take the control of our own actions away from us

Anyone who has encountered ‘predictive typing’ in Gmail, or been offered ‘suggestions’ for future purchases by Amazon, or received ‘targeted advertisements’ on Yahoo, will immediately recognize how these make us think and act in ways that take the control of our own actions away from us(Shutterstock)

Each one of us possesses a sense of self that is unique and unlikely to be confused with anyone else’s. There may be times when we sense our uniqueness melt away and merge with something beyond the ‘I’ that we, for the most part, take for granted — when we are cheering on our favourite team (think of the recent ‘Pink Test’), or participating in some collective ritual (doesn’t matter whether benign or malign), or sunk deep into a meditative trance that evokes that “oceanic feeling” that Romain Rolland, inspired by his study of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, wrote of in a letter to Sigmund Freud, among others. The defining characteristic of this self is its individuality, its private-ness. When I think of ‘me’, it is invariably this private self that I contemplate, not the many public selves that are on display in different avatars in different places and spaces: the columnist whose words you are reading right now; or the university teacher holding forth to a classroom of bored students; or the morning-walker making small talk with fellow peregrinators around Rabindra Sarovar; and so forth. But what happens when we lose our privacy? When the conditions that make it possible to think of this unique ‘I’ are taken away from us?

“Indians place very little value on privacy; at the same time they delight in secrecy.” So began a piece, written twenty-one years ago for this newspaper by perhaps India’s best-known sociologist, André Béteille. He went on to illustrate his thesis with the example of his own experience in a “south Indian village” where a young man would invariably come every afternoon to the room Béteille was renting, lay out his mat on the floor, and go off to sleep. When Béteille tried to explain to his influential “local patron” that the young man’s behaviour was making him “feel acutely uneasy”, he was met with bafflement. In Béteille’s words, “I might feel that my privacy was being invaded, but according to the moral code of the community in which I lived, I was just being selfish.” Béteille went on to assert that such loss of privacy leads inevitably to greater secretiveness on part of the privacy-deprived individual. In his words, “Secrecy becomes the natural defence against the excessive demands of gregariousness. People who are obliged to live in each other’s pockets develop a special urge to be secretive…”

At the time when Béteille wrote his article, few in India had heard of the internet and fewer still were aware of the impending digital, internet-based revolution that would change the very nature of our existence. Two decades on, we all live a significant part of our lives in the digital mode, where — along with increased access to information, goods, services, and a host of other things — we are also becoming increasingly aware of how every click of our mouse, every stroke on our keyboard, is being stored away, retrieved, analysed, and used to make predictions about, and exert control over, the trajectories of our lives.

An enormous amount has already been written about the consequences of this loss of privacy, but much of it has had to do with the content of the information and the data that are being collected from individual human beings; relatively less attention has been paid to the data about such data, the metadata, that are being collected and stored on each one of us. Advocates for protecting privacy, therefore, have typically focussed on the content of the data gathered on individuals. As a result, as emphatically pointed out by perhaps the world’s best-known whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, in his recently-published autobiography, Permanent Record, the law “gives substantially more protection to a communication’s content than to its metadata — and yet intelligence agencies are far more interested in metadata — the activity records that allow them both the ‘big picture’ ability to analyze data at scale, and the ‘little picture’ ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual person’s life, from where they presume to extrapolate predictions of behaviour.”

So, not just what I do, but, crucially, how I do what I do, becomes vitally important when discussing privacy in our digitally-determined world. For the knowledge of how I do things — in what order, to what degree, at what time of night or day, from where, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum — not only allows predictions about how I am likely to act in the future but also makes possible powerful ways of curtailing individual freedom, wresting away the autonomy, the freedom to do as I choose, that is such an important part of what I have called a “sense of self”. Anyone who has encountered ‘predictive typing’ in Gmail, or been offered ‘suggestions’ for future purchases by Amazon, or received ‘targeted advertisements’ on Yahoo, will immediately recognize how these make us think and act in ways that take the control of our own actions away from us. All of these can be seen as forms of subtle, and not-so-subtle, coercion, where, again, the autonomy of the individual self is eroded. Knowledge of such matters leads, perhaps inevitably, to self-policing and self-censorship, where we hesitate before visiting a particular website, pause before using a specific word, and think twice before using a service or purchasing a good. Once again, it is the private, autonomous self that is being eroded.

It seems that the internet is hell-bent on making spies of us all — guarding our secrets zealously as we negotiate a world where with every passing day we are giving up or losing what little we have left of our private, inviolate ‘Is’. Let me hasten to add, I am no digital Luddite, and I do think that the internet-led revolution has brought enormous benefits to all of us. But Béteille’s analysis of privacy and secrecy, coupled with Snowden’s account of how “[n]o matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book” (Permanent Record, p. 326), makes me wonder whether the internet is not pushing all of us into little self-made hidden vaults, where we are constantly trying to hide our motivations and actions, maybe even from ourselves. Of course, individuals (Snowden himself), organizations (Privacy International or our own Centre for Internet & Society), and governments (most notably, the European Union), not to speak of technologists and software companies (the Tor Project), are trying to ensure that individual privacy and human rights remain protected. But the battle to protect our inviolate, autonomous, individual selves in this age of the Internet of Everything is far from won — and not least because data gathering and mining make for very big business indeed. Whether we like it or not, we are all fighting in the battles over privacy, and secrecy, here and now.

[“source=telegraphindia”]

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Internet

After internet blackout, Iranians take stock

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Iran's government imposed a week-long internet blackout after protests broke out across the country following a surprise hike in the price of petrol [File: Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA via Reuters]

Tehran, Iran – Iranians are getting their digital lives back on track following a nearly seven-day long blackout that severed internet access for most of the country.

Imposed by the government following protests that broke out in response to a surprise petrol price hike, the blackout disrupted daily routines, postponed university application plans and dealt a blow to the bottom lines of many businesses.

The restoration of internet access, which started late last week, has been greeted with relief by millions, while the country’s information minister has reassured the public that the government values global online access.

Still, many Iranians are struggling to process the implications of being barred from digital global infrastructure that has become essential to the smooth functioning of everyday life and commerce.

It was a major jolt for us all.

TEHRAN RESIDENT

‘We are all alone’

Iran’s National Security Council cut internet access in certain parts of the country after protests erupted in the wake of a petrol rationing scheme announced abruptly at midnight on November 15.

The rationing plan, which slashed subsidies and dramatically raised petrol prices, is designed to fund cash benefits for Iran’s poorest citizens during a time of profound economic stress for low and middle-income Iranians.

The country’s oil sales have slowed to a trickle as the economy has been crippled by successive waves of United States sanctions reimposed after the administration of President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

By afternoon on November 16, all civilian fixed-line and mobile phone internet connections across Iran had been severed.

“I think it was a major jolt for us all,” one Tehran resident told Al Jazeera, asking for his name to be withheld to protect his privacy.

At the apex of the blackout, Iran’s internet connectivity levels flatlined at 5 percent for several days, according to non-governmental internet governance observatory NetBlocks.

Iran’s leadership has blamed “thugs” linked to exiles and foreign adversaries, including the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, for instigating the anti-government protests – the most violent to sweep the country in a decade.

On Monday, Amnesty International said at least 143 demonstrators were killed across Iran. Iranian officials have called previous estimates by the rights group “speculative” and said only casualty figures confirmed by the government are reliable.

As connectivity started being restored late last week, frustration and anxiety rippled across Persian social media.

“God has forgotten us, the world has forgotten, we are all alone, we only have ourselves!” read one tweet posted over the weekend.

I believe that living without the virtual space and without connecting to the global network is no longer imaginable.

IRAN MINISTER OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY, MOHAMMAD JAVAD AZARI JAHROMI

‘National information network’

While most lives were disrupted by the blackout, local services including bank transactions continued unhindered, thanks to what Iranian officials refer to as the “national information network” – a country-wide intranet supported by domestic digital infrastructure.

Select businesses, including major ride-hailing app Snapp, were up and running within a day of the blackout commencing.

Local versions of popular internet tools and applications were also enabled, including an Iranian internet search engine and a navigation app. Both seized the opportunity to gain more customers, though they attracted only a modest user base compared with their international counterparts.

After partial access to the global internet was restored, Iran’s Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi released a video message on Saturday to reassure the public that the government understood the need for global connectivity.

“I believe that living without the virtual space and without connecting to the global network is no longer imaginable,” he said.

The day before the message was released, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Azari Jahromi for what it claimed was the minister’s role in “wide-scale internet censorship”.

I was so stressed because I couldn’t follow up on my university applications.

IRANIAN STUDENT

Communications down

The internet blackout prevented protestors from communicating with each other, and people from accessing social media reports on the extent of the unrest.

But other communications were also severed.

Many people could not communicate with their loved ones outside the country via online apps that use voice over internet protocol (VoIP), forcing them to revert to more costly phone calls.

One Tehran resident who asked Al Jazeera to withhold her name to protect her privacy said she could only afford 10-minute phone calls with her boyfriend who had recently moved to the United Kingdom to study. She hopes to continue her studies in the UK as well in the near future.

“I plan on joining him soon and I was so stressed because I couldn’t follow up on my university applications,” she told Al Jazeera.

The Iranian diaspora took to social media during the blackout to call on universities to extend their application deadlines to accommodate prospective students in Iran who were unable to go online. Several major institutions, including McGill, Stanford and Harvard universities, subsequently extended deadlines for Iranian applicants.

Universities across Iran were also hamstrung during the blackout, with researchers and professors unable to communicate online with their peers abroad.

I guess bitcoin is not that censorship-resistant.

TEHRAN-BASED INDEPENDENT COMPUTER PROGRAMMER

Businesses hit

For some Iranian businesses already hampered by sanctions, the blackout inflicted even more financial pain.

Importers and exporters suddenly had no way of contacting their foreign partners and could not track their cargo shipping by land or sea.

Many online businesses and tech startups were effectively shut down for a week. Those that managed to reinstate limited bandwidth connection reported that their sales were cut by as much as 90 percent.

Most foreign exchange shops and stockbrokers had to close their doors, while scores of online businesses run by individuals or small groups through social media, mostly Telegram and Instagram, came to a standstill.

Cinemas across the country took a huge hit, with ticket sales falling 60 percent nationwide and some provinces experiencing even sharper drops.

Former president of the Iran Chamber of Commerce, Mohsen Jalalpour, told Iran News Agency that the internet blackout dealt an estimated $1.5bn blow to the country’s beleaguered economy.

In October, before the blackout, the International Monetary Fund estimated Iran’s economy was on track to contract 9.5 percent this year.

Iran’s tourism sector, neglected for decades and now the focus of a government renewal campaign designed to attract more foreign currency, was also caught out by the blackout.

Many tour and travel agencies closed shop for the entire week. Ebrahim Pourfaraj, president of the Iranian Association of Tour Operators, told the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) that members of the association were completely in the dark.

“All previous negotiations with foreign travel agencies and tourists have been left unanswered,” he said. “We have no idea whether they have accepted travel offers to Iran.”

Independent contractors who rely on the internet to conduct business were also grappling with the implications of the blackout.

A computer programmer who accepts projects from abroad and gets paid in bitcoin said that being cut off from the internet not only negatively affected his work, it also exposed the limitations of cryptocurrencies.

“I love my work but I had nothing to do but to just sit around for a week,” the programmer, who asked not to be identified, told Al Jazeera.

“I guess bitcoin is not that censorship-resistant when there is literally no internet.”

[“source=aljazeera”]

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Education

Hundreds march in India to demand ‘affordable education for all’

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Hundreds march in India to demand 'affordable education for all'

Hundreds in India’s capital, New Delhi, have rallied in support of the students from a prestigious public university, who have been protesting against proposed increases in housing and other charges for weeks.

The demonstrators on Saturday chanted slogans such as “Affordable education for all” and “Fight for your rights” amid concerns the rise in hostel and mess charges announced last month at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) would make education there unaffordable for most students.

Calling the government “anti-poor”, the protesters tried to march towards India’s parliament building, barely 3km away, but were stopped by a huge contingent of police force.

The protests began in late October after the rent in JNU for a single-occupancy room was increased to the equivalent of $8 a month from less than $1, while the security deposit in hostels was doubled to nearly $160.

The JNU Students’ Union, which has been leading the protests, said nearly half of the university’s students belonged to families with less than 144,000 rupees ($2,018) of annual income and would find it difficult to study further.

“This fee hike is unacceptable,” Lata Kumari, a doctoral student in JNU, told Al Jazeera during the protest.

The students are also protesting against what they called “regressive” hostel rules regarding what they wear or restrictions on going out. They have been demanding that the vice chancellor should be sacked for taking such “anti-student measures”.

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees public universities, has appointed a three-member committee to address the students’ concerns.

JNU protest 1
The protesters said they were fighting to save public education in India [Bilal Kuchay/Al Jazeera]

‘Higher education for all’

On Saturday, the protesters from JNU were joined by students from other universities in New Delhi as well as other activists.

“The fee hike announced by the administration would deprive about 80 percent of students from quality education as most people in our country cannot afford to pay such high fees,” said Yogendra Yadav, a
former JNU student and president of Swaraj India party.

Yadav said the JNU students have raised “a larger question: will people have equal rights to higher education in India or not?”

Saswati Sengupta, who teaches at New Delhi’s Miranda House College, told Al Jazeera that right to education “should not be based on the strength of the money a person has”.

“This [education] is a right we deserve to give to everyone after more than 70 years of independence now,” she said.

Veteran theatre personality Maharaj Krishna Raina, who also marched with the protesters, said he was there since he was concerned about “the future of India’s poor people”.

“If higher education is not made possible for the poor and the marginalised people, this nation has no business to exist,” he said.

On Monday, nearly 100 JNU students were detained when they tried to march from the university campus to India’s parliament.

The JNU Students’ Union said dozens of students in that rally were attacked by the police.

On Friday, representatives of the students’ union met members of the committee formed by the government to look into the JNU crisis.

After the meeting, the students said their protest will continue until the charges are completely rolled back.

At their protest on Saturday, JNU Students’ Union president Aishe Ghosh told Al Jazeera that fee rise was not only a JNU issue.

“It is being faced by all the top universities in India,” she said. “How to channelise this [protest] into a national movement is what we are looking into now.”

[“source=aljazeera”]

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Education

Can Rich Content Improve Education?

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Metallic Wrecking Ball Shattering The White Wall

Modern high-stakes testing really kicked into gear with No Child Left Behind, and then got another huge boost with the advent of Common Core. All through that era, teachers pushed back against the fracturing of reading instruction, the idea that reading is a suite of discrete skills that can be taught independent of any particular content.

The pendulum has begun its swing back. Content knowledge is coming back into vogue, and while there are plenty of cognitive science-heavy explanations out there, the basic idea is easy to grasp. If you know a lot about dinosaurs, you have an easier time reading and comprehending a book about dinosaurs. If you are trying to sound out an unfamiliar word on the page, it’s easier if you already know the word by sound. If you learn and store new information by connecting it to information you already have banked, that process is easier if you actually have plenty of information already stored away.

Classroom teachers have known this. Some have argued that the Common Core acknowledged this (but did so in the appendix, none of which is tested material). And while much of the education reform crowd joined the “skills” push (one attempted catchphrase of the new SAT created under Common Core creator David Coleman was “skilled it”), some reformers never lost faith in the work of Ed Hirsch, Jr., who has himself stayed committed to the idea through his Core Knowledge Foundation.

Today In: Leadership

So if we restore rich content to education and provide students with a wealth of background knowledge, will that revitalize education and fix some of the issues that have plagued us? Or will this, like the great skills revolution at the beginning of the century, turn out to be a terribly misguided idea?

Well, both. Hirsch’s 1983 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs To Know, underlines two of the potential pitfalls of rich content in education.

First, consider the subtitle–what every American needs to know. If we had every single American compile a list, what are the odds that any two would match? English teachers especially are familiar with the problems of an ever changing canon. Kate Chopin was once a somewhat obscure U.S. writer; she’s now solidly in the canon. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was beloved, then reviled, then beloved. Someone is always looking to kick Shakespeare out of the canon, even as others will fight for him with their last breath. And somewhere, someone is at this very moment getting ready to correct me on one or all of those last three sentences.

Agreeing in what should make the cut is, as all English teachers well know, an endless wrangling debate. Any discussion about loading up rich content knowledge for students will be accompanied by an endless argument about what content will be included–and I do mean endless. This is not to argue that the attempt should not be made–only to point out that if you insist that nothing will do other than your exact list, you will never get it done at all. Not only that, but the list that seemed sort of okay this year will need fixing next year.

Second, there is a danger in having a list, particularly if the list is generated by a large committee. A teacher has 180 teaching days, minus days spent testing, minus days spent practice testing, minus days lost to a school assembly, minus days lost to being randomly pulled from class for a conference, minus time lost for procedural things like handing out lockers. A really, really generous estimate of actual teaching days would be 160. So at the rate of one item of critical rich content background knowledge per day, we can hit 160 items. But there is no such thing as “rich” content that will be learned by a student in one day.

One of two things may happen. Your list of crucial background knowledge may be radically reduced to, say, thirty items. Or the teacher will spend the year racing through and checking off a list (”Students! Please look at the front screen. That’s a picture of Plato, an old dead smart Greek guy. He wrote some stuff about a cave. Boom! Moving on to our next unit now…”).

There’s a further danger that the speedy check-off list approach finds bureaucratic expression in a big standardized test used to judge and compare schools. Such a standardized test would be a bad way to assess the richness of student achievement and education–different from our current bad tests, but still bad, and still incentivizing teaching the test, rather than to the richness of the content (Question 1: Plato is associated with A. a cave B. a boat C. a nation or D. the trombone).

Nearly twenty years of test-driven top-down education reform has hollowed out too much of our education system. A rich content focus can reverse some of that damage, particularly by reversing the practice of pulling students out of history and science classes so that they can spend more of their day practicing reading skills (you may think that sounds nuts, but a principal in my old district regularly did it, and he was not an anomaly in the U.S.). Students could read full works of literature instead of excerpts of bad articles. Students could experience the fun and excitement of becoming knowledgeable experts on particular topics.

But it would be a mistake not to recognize that a content knowledge movement could be botched in ways that do new, different kinds of damage to the education system of this country. As the pendulum swings back, we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a wrecking ball.

[“source=forbes”]

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Internet

Why Iran’s Internet Shutdown Is A Stark Warning For Russia

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Ergogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Sochi

With escalating public protests over steep fuel price rises, Iran shut down its internet over the weekend to prevent images and videos leaking to the outside world, and to frustrate attempts by protesters to organise themselves. The move, which was described by NetBlocks as “one of the most complex ever tracked” and took a full 24 hours to put into effect, started on November 15. By the following evening “Iran’s largest mobile network operators including MCI, Rightel and IranCell subsequently fell offline.” A day later, internet connectivity was down at around 5%, with only the authorities and a few of the official news outlets maintaining connectivity.

Even for a country as restricted as Iran, with material limitations on the information accessible from inside its borders, this is extreme, “the most severe recorded in Iran since President Rouhani came to power, and the most severe disconnection tracked by NetBlocks in any country in terms of its technical complexity and breadth.” As reported by AFP, the Supreme National Security Council took the decision and used the ISNA news agency to indicate the shut down was only intended to last a day. While some reports continue to leak onto social media, the news flow has been stemmed.

Today In: Innovation

As localised as the situation in Iran might seem, it is part of an increasing trend by authoritarian regimes to control public access to information and the outside world. Where once this seemed the preserve of China given its firewalled internet structure, technical advances have enabled clampdowns in places as diverse as Kashmir and Moscow. A recent Freedom on the Net report claimed that automated monitoring of citizens access to information and use of social media has now become endemic, impacting a full 90% of internet users around the world.

But the situation in Iran should serve as a particularly acute warning to Russia given the timing. At the beginning of this month, President Vladimir Putin secured his own internet shut down capability, the so-called sovereign internet that enables his government to disconnect the country from the rest of the world, transferring to a domestic-only network and severing links to non-Russian websites and services. The deployment of this so-called RuNet was signed into law in May and deployment of the technology within the country’s internet access points began in October. As of now, the country’s connectivity authorities are testing the effectiveness of this “kill switch.”

The public justification for this new capability is to defend Russia in the event of “threats to the stability, security and integrity of the functioning of the internet and the public communications network,” in other words a cyberattack by the the U.S., its allies or its proxies. But critics have denounced the regressive step for its isolationist and censorship risk, arguing that it introduces a Chinese-style firewall to both disconnect Russia from the world and also systemise the use of deep packet inspection to monitor the day-to-day usage of the internet by citizens. Freedom On The Net has warned that Russian internet freedom has now declined “for the sixth year in a row—restricting online anonymity and increasing censorship.”

In August, the Russian authorities used a targeted internet shutdown to hamper its own protesters who were gathering to denounce elements of Putin’s rule. Moscow’s three main mobile network operators—MTS, MegaFon and VimpelCom—shut down their mobile internets, explaining this was caused by “overcrowding,” but according to BBC Russia, it was at the request of the city’s authorities. The networks were told to inform customers “there were no difficulties in providing services.”

And so for anyone assuming the new internet kill switch would never be used by Putin to stem national level protests or escalating political dissent, they should maybe think again. In truth, the lesson from Iran plays into Russia’s hands: The complexity of an actual shutdown is lessened when a switch is built into the system. Which in fact comes with a twist: As much as these latest events should serve as a warning to Russia’s 150 million citizens, one can also assume that Teheran will be looking at making the job of effecting such a shutdown easier next time around. And they only need to look as far as Moscow for advice and assistance in that regard.

[“source=forbes”]

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Education

Misplaced Modesty Hampers Sex Education in Japan’s Schools

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Learn About the Body—But Keep It Clothed

This is a page from a health and physical education textbook for third and fourth grade school students. The textbook is Minna no hoken (Health for Everyone, published in 2011 by Gakken) and the page is titled, Otona ni chikazuku karada (“As the Body Approaches Adulthood”).

Shown are a boy and girl, around age 10 and as adults. All are depicted wearing short-sleeved tops and shorts. Says Hashimoto: “How can you learn about the changes in the body by looking at an illustration of clothed figures?” In the 2005 edition of the textbook, the figures are naked, but someone decided to put clothes on them for the 2011 edition.

What are the textbooks like in other countries and how do they handle sex education? Hashimoto explains, “Many countries carry out comprehensive sex education based on UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. Comprehensive sex education covers much more than just the subject of how the body develops. It encompasses everything from relationships and rights to sexual diversity and gender equality.”

The international differences are stark, as she explains. “In Finland and France, they teach biological facts, such as the role chromosomes play in determining the sex of a fetus; they delve into the diversity of human sexuality; and they explore the phenomena of human relationships. In China, they use explicit illustrations of the sexual organs to teach about sex, and the sex education in major Chinese cities is strongly influenced by the attitudes of Chinese citizens who have studied abroad. In Japan, however, as we can see by this textbook illustration, nothing is taught about the biological and scientific facts of human reproduction.

“In South Korean sex education textbooks, they even explain how to put on a condom. Thailand doesn’t go into that much detail, but does teach about safe sex as one way to deal with sexual urges. The correct way to put on a condom is not taught in Japan. Most sex education textbooks in Japan just do not meet international standards.”

Hashimoto Noriko believes Japan has much progress to make in the area of sex education. (Photo provided by Hashimoto)
Hashimoto Noriko believes Japan has much progress to make in the area of sex education. (Photo provided by Hashimoto)

A great part of this is due, says Hashimoto, to National Curriculum Standards that prohibit teaching about the processes of fertilization in fifth-grade science or about pregnancy in first-year junior high school health and PE classes.

Hashimoto explains how sex education in Japan got to this point.

“In the 1990s, sex education in Japan was among the most advanced in Asia, in part because of the AIDS scare. It was possible then to teach junior high school students about sexual urges and sexual behavior, sexual intercourse and birth control, and sexually transmitted diseases. The revised government education guidelines for elementary schools issued in 1992 for the first time called for health class textbooks for the fifth and sixth grades. A supplementary reader published in 1991 included a section on sexual intercourse. A textbook with similar content is being used in South Korea right now for sixth grade classes. But in Japan, this supplementary reader is out of print.”

Backlash Against Sex Education

Japan’s sex education was at the forefront in the 1990s. Why did it suddenly regress? The backward trend is related in part to a 2003 campaign to stop sex education at what is now the Nanao Special Support School, a Tokyo public institution for children with special needs. The campaign was led by some members of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly who were shocked to learn the school was teaching children with mental disabilities about sex using songs and dolls. They criticized the school for teaching “inappropriate” content that went well beyond government curriculum guidelines. The Sankei Shimbun concurred with a report critical of such “extreme” education, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education took disciplinary action against the principal and other teachers at the school. The faculty and parents fought back, however, taking the case to court with the claim that such intervention by metropolitan assembly members and the board of education was illegal. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, where it ended in 2013 in the defeat of the Tokyo metropolitan government and legislature.

These sex education materials in the health care office at the Nanao school were confiscated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in 2003 in response to growing public disapproval of sex education in general.
These sex education materials in the health care office at the Nanao school were confiscated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education in 2003 in response to growing public disapproval of sex education in general.

“The court decision stated that the National Curriculum Standards could not be interpreted as word-for-word legal writ,” says Hashimoto. “In other words, the Standards are simply guidelines and a school’s decision to do something outside of the guidelines cannot be immediately judged as illegal. This case took ten years to resolve and went all the way to the Supreme Court. During this decade, sex education stagnated in Tokyo schools, where the disciplining of the Nanao teachers had a chilling effect.”

In 2004, immediately following the furor over the Nanao incident, the Tokyo Board of Education revised its handbook on sex education to emphasize that sex education must be pursued systematically and in stages appropriate to students’ physical development and in line with the National Curriculum Standards.

The Nanao defeat did not deter a Tokyo assemblyman involved in the case to once again, in 2018, decry as “inappropriate” a school’s approach to sex education. This time the criticism was aimed at a ninth-grade class on birth control and abortion in a public junior high school in Adachi, Tokyo. The National Curriculum Standards recommend that these topics be covered in senior high school, but this does not mean the junior high school acted illegally by including them in their curriculum.

“This junior high school had found in a survey that nearly half of its students thought it was OK to be sexually active once they moved on to high school. This, and the fact that the school was located in a less affluent district, led to the decision that earlier education on birth control and abortion was imperative. The school did not bring up the topics all of a sudden. The teachers began by teaching the seventh graders about relationships and the importance of equality, gradually leading up to the topics of birth control and abortion.”

Hashimoto stresses: “Children who undergo sex education learn to control their bodies. Without proper knowledge, they are left defenseless. And yet there are people who do now want to give children the knowledge they need.”

The Problem with Sex Ed in Ethics Classes

In the case of this junior high school, the Tokyo Board of Education reprimanded the school for prematurely introducing topics that did not coincide with the children’s level of development, but the Adachi Board of Education refuted this claim. Against this background, the revised Tokyo Board of Education guidelines for sex education issued this year for the first time concede that sex education going beyond the National Curriculum Standards may be implemented with the approval of the parents. Still, Hashimoto sees a problem in the numerous examples given in the guidelines of sex education being implemented within ethics classes.

“I see problems with every one of the eight publishers of government-approved junior high school ethics textbooks,” says Hashimoto. “Take for example, the ethics textbook for public junior high schools published by Nihon Kyōkasho, a textbook publisher with close ties to Nippon Kaigi, an ultranationalist group. This ethics textbook—which, by the way, Tokyo decided not to use in its schools—has a section titled ‘Life Roles,’ which tells the story of a mother on the day she is to be interviewed for a promotion at work. Both parents work in this family, and they usually have the grandmother who lives nearby take care of their youngest elementary school child during the day. On this important day, however, the grandmother falls ill and needs to be taken to the hospital. The father says he must go to work, and the elder daughter, a university student, says she has to go to school to make a presentation. The mother phones her company to cancel the promotion interview saying, ‘It appears I have another role to play.’ The family’s junior high school daughter is left to wonder what this ‘other role’ might be. The message is: Housework, childcare, and nursing care of elderly parents take precedent over a woman’s career. This is completely out of line with the concepts of gender equality and diversity in UNESCO’s International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education.”

The Impact of the Failure to Teach About Sex

The biological, scientific facts of sex, noted earlier, and the concept of gender equality are missing in Japan’s sex education, says Hashimoto. Gender equality is a core concept in the global standard set by UNESCO’s Guidance. Japan’s failure to teach this concept is evident in a number of areas.

“Some years ago Thailand introduced a policy allowing married couples to choose to have different surnames. This is still not allowed in Japan. As with the approval of oral contraceptive pills, Japan is once again the last holdout in the United Nations to approve such policy. The virility drug Viagra was promptly approved to treat erectile dysfunction in men, but it took a long time before contraceptive pills were approved. As can be seen in the ethics textbook example cited earlier, there is a neoconservatism, which first appeared in the 1970s, that blames Japan’s economic ills on a decline in morals and advocates a return to traditional conservative values. This dovetails nicely with the neoliberal interest in the pursuit of profit.”

Hashimoto goes on: “These people want to cut back on social security. The family should be the safety net, they say, and women should sacrifice themselves for the family. But this perception of society goes completely against the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women which calls for the elimination of gender-based roles.”

The CEDAW was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979, took effect in 1981, and was ratified by Japan in 1985. Later, in 1999, an amendment was added that allowed for individuals to directly appeal to the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women when their rights as stipulated by this treaty were violated and they were unable to find recourse within their own country. Hashimoto notes, though: “This is an optional protocol, and Japan is the only developed country that has yet to ratify it. If Japan had ratified this protocol, it would be possible to appeal to the United Nations to make Japan give couples the option to each retain their respective surnames after marriage.”

What does this kind of delay in promoting human rights mean for Japan?

“The UNESCO Guidance asserts that sex education from early childhood through adulthood can determine a person’s happiness throughout life. The failure to provide proper sex education hinders individual development and happiness. If things continue here as they are now, Japan is going to find itself isolated within the international community.”

[“source=nippon”]

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Internet

Journalists protest 100 days of internet gag in Kashmir

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Kashmir journalist protestThe journalists were holding their laptops in their hands and carried placards, which read: “100 days, No Internet”. (Photo: Twitter/MirzaWaheed)

Agroup of Kashmiri journalists held a peaceful protest at the Press Club in Srinagar on Tuesday against 100 days of internet blockade in Kashmir.

The journalists were holding their laptops in their hands and carried placards, which read: “100 days, No Internet”.

This is the worst situation the journalists are facing in Kashmir. It’s very humiliating. It does not even happen in a war-like situation,” Majid Maqbool, an independent journalist told IANS.

“We are not asking anything out of the turn. It’s our basic right to demand internet,” said Aakash Hassan, a journalist in Srinagar who was also part of the protest.

Internet services were suspended in Kashmir following the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5. A media centre has been established by the government to help journalists file their reports, but the journalists have been demanding the restoration of high-speed broadband for reporting in an unhindered manner.

[“source=indiatoday”]

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Internet

SpaceX launches 60 ‘Starlink’ satellites for global internet

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Image: Twitter/@SpaceX

SpaceX, on November 11, launched 60 mini ‘Starlink’ satellites. This is the second batch of an orbiting network meant to provide global internet coverage.

The ‘Falcon’ rocket launched into the morning sky, marking the unprecedented fourth flight of a booster for SpaceX.

The compact flat-panel satellites – weighing just 575 pounds (260 kilograms) each – will join the other 60 launched in May.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, wants to put thousands such ‘Starlink’ satellites in orbit, to offer high-speed internet service everywhere. Musk plans to start service next year in the northern US and Canada, with global coverage for populated areas after 24 launches.

Last month, Musk used an orbiting Starlink satellite to send a tweet: “Whoa, it worked!!” Employees gathered at company bases on both coasts cheered when the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

“These boosters are designed to be used 10 times. Let’s turn it around for a fifth, guys,” company’s launch commentator said.

This also marked the first time SpaceX used a previously flown nose cone. The California-based company reuses rocket parts to cut costs.

Stacked flat inside the top of the rocket, the newest satellites were going to manoeuvre even higher following lift-off, using krypton-powered thrusters. SpaceX said there was a potential problem with one of the 60 that could prevent it from moving beyond its initial 174 mile-high (280 kilometre-high) orbit.

In that case, the faulty satellite will be commanded to re-enter and burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Each satellite has an autonomous system for dodging space junk.

In September, however, the European Space Agency had to move one of its satellites out of the way of a Starlink satellite. SpaceX later said it corrected the problem.

SpaceX is among several companies interested in providing broadband internet coverage worldwide, especially in areas where it costs too much or is unreliable. Others include OneWeb and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.

According to Musk, Starlink revenue can help SpaceX develop rockets and spacecraft for traveling to Mars, his overriding ambition.

[“source=moneycontrol”]

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Education

Education and a segregated society

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Image result for Education and a segregated societySir, – Margaret Marshall (Letters, November 7th) points out that poll after poll shows that a majority of parents in Northern Ireland would like their children’s schools to transform to integrated status, yet the majority of children attend schools that are segregated.

Although I am fully supportive of educational pluralism, I also support parental choice. I do not subscribe to the view that the mandatory integration of schools will somehow make sectarianism history.

It could be construed from Margaret Marshall’s letter that those parents who choose denominational education for their children are in some way not genuinely committed to a shared society.

It could also be construed that Ms Marshall favours a compulsory integrated school system for all children against the wishes of some parents. Does Ms Marshall suggest the forced integrated education, not just of Catholic and Protestant, but also Jews, Hindus and Muslims?

Since the foundation of the Northern state a policy of segregation of communities was rigorously enforced.

Indeed, a recent survey found that in excess of 90 per cent of the population in the North lives in denominationally segregated housing.

Therefore, the successful integration of students in education can only come about if there is the same appetite to pursue a similar policy of integrated housing.

This policy of integrated education which Ms Marshall proposes must be consensus-based, where difference is not just tolerated but respected, where all creeds, colours and systems are celebrated and where the existence of schools with a differing ethos is both welcomed and defended. – Yours, etc,

[“source=irishtimes”]

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