When is a good time to start educating children about certain things? This is an ongoing debate in many parenting circles. The more conservative a society is in their attitudes towards ‘morality’, the more likely it is that children will reach adulthood without receiving any coherent information on important topics such as substance abuse or sexuality. Here is an interesting commercial telling people to talk to their children early about things like alcohol abuse. What do you think?
This, of course, brings me to the other big one. World AIDS Day just passed by and there was lots of talk in the print and television media about it. (Unlike a lot of other problems, HIV/AIDS does get its share of public attention and funding.) We had a lot of newspaper coverage on this in India as well but — and this is the part that flummoxes me — there is still no proper sex education offered in schools here. So basically, children can access information on HIV and sex and sexuality from the media, but not formally from the educational system in a structured way. As if doing this would somehow amount to giving them ‘permission’ for things they would otherwise stay away from.
It’s quite clear that educational institutions should include HIV and human rights / non-discrimination issues wherever they can and link it to the more formal subjects that they are relevant to. It’s astounding that some governments around the world still fail to observe this basic measure. For those who think their kids should know more and are looking to take things into their own hands, there’s lots of material available on the Internet. UNAIDS and WHO has a detailed cartoon strip that might help. This is an extract but you can go here for the full thing.
Shifting track slightly, this report by Human Rights Watch caught my attention the other day. It seems that Thailand’s success in dealing with HIV is getting a serious shot in the foot because of discrimination against its highest population of HIV positive people — drug users. Now, it’s obvious that there are severe legal implications here and these are getting entangled with the larger issue of providing treatment and creating a mighty mess. The report says:
In 2004, Thailand rescinded a national policy that explicitly permitted the exclusion of injection drug users from antiretroviral treatment programs.
But drug users still face serious obstacles in accessing needed health care. Many health care providers do not know or do not follow HIV/AIDS treatment guidelines, and continue to deny antiretroviral treatment to drug users, even those in methadone treatment programs.
When drug users do receive treatment, it is under complicated circumstances and often surreptitiously because they are worried about being turned in to the police.
Out of fear of reprisal, drug users who do receive antiretroviral treatment are unlikely to tell their physicians about their drug use, or to seek information about drug dependence treatment from their antiretroviral treatment provider. This fear is not unfounded: the report confirms that many public hospitals and clinics share information about drug use with law enforcement, both as a matter of policy and practice. Some clinicians operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward drug users, refusing to inquire about patients’ drug use or drug treatment history, in some cases despite knowledge or suspicion of current drug use or methadone treatment.
The government’s failure to ensure conditions in which safe exchange of information is possible compromises drug users’ access to adequate HIV and other health care services. As a result, drug users face harmful drug interactions without health care workers to consult about the dangerous potential consequences for their health and, ultimately, their lives.
The International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights (PDF), a 120-page document published jointly by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, points to the connection between protection of human rights and effective HIV programmes. The incidence or spread of HIV is disproportionately high among some populations because these groups, being vulnerable in any case, find it harder to access treatment or fight discrimination. Typically, these groups include women, children, those living in poverty, minorities, indigenous people, migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons, people with disabilities, prisoners, sex workers, men having sex with men and injecting drug users. Legally and socially, such groups need to be addressed and included in the battle against HIV. And while this may be easier said than done, it’s important to see that an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ attitude is going to hurt everyone in the end.
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It’s very hard to take a serious issue and convey it in a fun manner without losing some of the seriousness. The makers of Wallace & Gromit have done it astoundingly well. Their new campaign for Leonard Cheshire Disability called Creature Discomforts, which you can view here, manages to be sincere and cute at the same time, without slipping over into sentimentality or trivialising the issues. This is probably largely due to the fact that the voices behind the characters are people with real disabilities.
The biggest messages are about stigma and access. Like Kevin Gillespie who gives voice to Brian the Bull Terrier says:
“We went to have a look at a pub that we were considering visiting on a group day out which calls itself disabled friendly, but when we got there we found there was gravel outside which made it difficult to move our wheelchairs around, an extremely sharp right turn to get into the entrance, and then a step to get to the bar! That’s not what I’d call disabled friendly.”
“It’s things like this that make you feel excluded as there are certain places I’d like to go to but can’t because of access problems”.
These barriers, however, don’t stop Kevin getting out and about locally. “It’s really important for me to actually live in, and feel part of the community. I must admit, I have lived here for five years and I cannot recall anyone looking at me as if to say ‘What planet has he come from?’ Everyone has looked at me as they do able bodied people and forgotten about the chair”.
Here is the Guardian’s opinion on the campaign and here is a video on the making of it.
One of the things that struck me is that the campaign talks about access to bars, restaurants, places like that. In developing countries, we are so far behind on this curve that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny. To begin with, there is little data on disability. When poverty and social marginalisation are added to the cesspool, disabled people are discriminated against in many more ways.It is telling that in my social circle, I seldom meet disabled people. It is a quiet but systematic exclusion that takes place so much below the surface that most of us are not even aware of it.
A recent World Bank report found that disability seriously affects economic prospects in India and “physically challenged children are four to five times less likely to be in school than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children.” In my own experience, organizations will usually not hire a disabled person. In fact, India’s disabled employment rate seems to be falling. Deprived of economic opportunity (and even before that, education), disabled people seldom earn enough to gain access to more than the basic necessities. You don’t see them in bars or nightclubs, rarely at restaurants or malls. So people forget about the issues of disabled people because it’s easy to.
It’s a vicious cycle and I think schools hold a large piece of the puzzle. If schools sponsored a few classes that were disabled-friendly, it would help bring them into the mainstream besides inculcating awareness from a young age among the other kids, who in turn would hopefully grow up to be less discriminatory as adults. Parents would also possibly understand disabled people better if they were friends with their children, came home, stayed for tea. It would go a long way towards driving up our collective awareness and empathy up a notch. What do you think?
Globally, more than 40 per cent of respondents do not understand that AIDS is always fatal. In India, where rates of HIV are rising, 59% believe that HIV is a curable disease. These are the disturbing findings of this study on what people across nine countries think of AIDS.
In a collusion of opinion and fact, this first-ever perception audit also found that 86 per cent of adults in the United States, U.K., France, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa believe stigma and shame to be a contributor to the spread of HIV. Seventy-six per cent report lack of access to treatment to be a problem as well.
Some astonishing fallacies about access to treatment seem to be in circulation as well. According to the survey, many people mistakenly believe there is currently a cure for HIV. People also believe treatment is more widely available than it is. According to the study, “nearly half of all respondents believe that most people diagnosed with HIV are receiving treatment, when in fact only one in five people who needed treatment received it in 2006.”
The survey also suggests an enduring stigma surrounding HIV. Nearly half of the people surveyed reported being uncomfortable working with those who are HIV positive, while slightly more than half of the respondents did not want to live in the same home as someone infected with HIV.
It seems that a quarter century of AIDS education, public health campaigns and a continuous “mainstreaming” of HIV-positive people in the U.S. and Europe have done little to sort out the public’s confusion. The problem may be that while advances in treatment and prevention have fueled a misguided sense of complacency about the disease, personal prejudices have kept the stigma and shame about HIV alive.
Besides public awareness campaigns, mainstreaming HIV/AIDS awareness into education is imperative. But in many countries, attitudes towards sex and sexuality make it difficult to discuss topics like safe sex. Cultural taboos forbid speaking to children or teenagers about such matters and health becomes a distant lower priority as compared to “morality”. Avert looks at how HIV/AIDS education for young people is commonly approached in some detail here. And UNICEF has some resources that you can download here.
Of course, culture is an important parameter to keep in mind while communicating. But innovation and sensitivity should not hinder honesty or plainspeak when it comes to important, potentially life-and-death impacting factors. For example, look at this MTV commercial for AIDS prevention.
It’s funny but I’m unsure of whether it conveys the seriousness of the issue. People will laugh and even remember the ad, but will they really use a condom because it tells them to? What do you think?
Imagine getting married at 13. In some places in the world, it’s not so hard to imagine. Thirteen-year-old Shimu in Bangladesh is having a hard time warding off proposals. Her grandmother wants her to stop studying and marry one of her many suitors. Ironically, Shimu is a popular TV star in Bangladesh and plays the title role in a serial which promotes girls’ education.
In the television serial, her character Alo fights to stay in the fifth grade instead of working in a garment factory or getting married like her family members demand. In her real life, she wants to study but is finding it increasingly difficult to remain in school because of poverty and age-old traditions that dictate a girl is better married off.
Child marriage, which has long been prevalent in south Asian countries, has many harmful, long-term effects. It leads to utter powerlessness on the girl’s part because with no education, she has no means to support herself in the outside world. In a male-dominated society, it is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that she is never able to stand up for her rights. The husband is in an advantageous position in multiple ways. Usually much older, he is also more educated and therefore able to earn. The wife, is therefore, reduced to a slave in many cases. From the Washington Post story on Shimu:
In Bangladesh, two in five girls ages 15 to 17 are married, even though the minimum age at which it is legal to marry is 18, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. Violence in such marriages is frequent. There are thousands of cases each year in Bangladesh in which child brides are drenched in acid for refusing sex, talking back to mothers-in-law or not doing enough housework, aid workers say.
To many of those who live in developed countries, these may seem like gruesome but remote tales and there is little sense of what one can do about such things. But in an increasingly globalised world, one can hope that there will be a trickle effect in many areas, not just the economic. As Kathleen Selvaggio of International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) points out in a letter to the editor of WP:
Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) have introduced bipartisan legislation to curb child marriage by addressing its root causes — poverty and inequality. Their bills would monitor child marriage in the annual U.S. human rights reports and authorize modest funds to support community-based programs targeting adolescent girls to prevent early marriage.
Those who read the article may be wondering what they can do. One simple step is to ask their elected officials to support these bills.
Approximately 50 million girls are married in the developing world, and 100 million more girls are expected to marry in the next decade if nothing changes. By urging Congress to support this legislation, we can begin to reverse this trend. Collectively, in partnership with developing countries, we can help girls walk into classrooms, not down the aisle.
Shimu’s future, meanwhile, remains uncertain. Her grandfather wants her to continue studying but funds are low and they will soon be evicted from their current house. UNICEF workers recently started a fund to help the family relocate, which may ease the family’s financial burden. Hopefully, like her character Alo, Shimu too will be able to remain in school.
A charter school in Florida has come under fire for tying its Hebrew-language based curriculum to religion. Opponents of the Ben Gamla Charter School say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew — and aspects of Jewish culture — outside of a religious context.
How do you feel about publicly financed schools that cater to particular languages or cultures?
I think the question can be broadened to how important a role culture should play in education at all, which demands a closer look at the interplay between culture and society. The Dictionary of Modern Sociology defines culture as “the total, generally organized way of life, including values, norms, institutions, and artifacts, that is passed on from generation to generation by learning alone.” So culture is both integral to a person and inherited from the past. Because it defines so much of how a person should live, it forms a crucial component of his or her identity.
But in an increasingly globalized world, people often have to learn new ways of life and unlearn what has been passed down to them. This can lead to people feeling confused, overwhelmed or unanchored from their identity — psychological conditions that can have far-reaching impact on social interaction and relationships. Increasing globalization, travel and immigration are creating more subcultures within nations, which means that questions surrounding this are assuming center-stage.
Traditionally, the tricky business of culture has been negotiated in different ways. Countries have adopted approaches ranging from monoculturalism (when in Rome be as the Romans are) to multiculturalism (be yourself even while in Rome) and melting pot (do whatever comes naturally). But the thorniest angle of culture is always values.
In a perfect world, we would all believe in the same basic values and uphold the same fundamental rights. But this is not really the case, is it? Varying rules and attitudes regarding relationships, sex, marriage, divorce and recreation prevail in different cultures. Where does one draw the line between respecting other cultures and condoning heinous practices? How far should a state go to maintain and encourage subcultures without endangering the fundamental principles of its nationhood? Walking the tightrope between respecting cultural diversity and building a world that is safe and free for all remains one of the key challenges of our times.
I tend to agree with this view on the politics of culture:
When culture is treated as nothing more than an innocent accretion of solutions and practices, and each culture is seen as something inviolate, then all cultures are accepted at face value and cultural relativism is the suggested standard. So we hear that we should avoid ethnocentrism and respect other cultures. To be sure, after centuries in which indigenous cultures have been trampled underfoot by colonizers, we need to be acutely aware of the baneful effects of cultural imperialism and of the oppressive intolerance manifested toward diverse ethnic cultures within our own society.
But the struggle to preserve cultural diversity should not give carte blanche to anyone in any society to violate basic human rights. Many patriarchal cultures, for example, are replete with “sacrosanct customs” that, on closer examination, promote the worst kinds of gender victimization, including the mutilation of female children through clitorectomy and infibulation, and the sale of young girls into sexual slavery.
If one applies to this to the debate around education, the answer seems simple enough — conditional support. But examining what these conditions should be and defining them accurately and precisely is required as a first step towards a pluralistic world that still has some basics in common.
Have you ever had an ideal learning space–a classroom, library, common room or study that you wanted to spend time in? More and more universities are looking at ways in which they can make students more comfortable in their learning environments. Here is an interesting example. Oxford Brookes University has created a space for undergraduate students that is bright, snazzy and equipped with swish gadgetry where they can do collaborative study. There are some doubts about exactly how useful this room will be because of its specific attributes and you can head over to the article to read about them. Meanwhile, I’m going to do a bit of daydreaming of my own.
My ideal group study area would have a warm, homey feel to it–wooden floors, a comfy armchair or two, some beanbags, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the wall, bookshelves lining the walls, and many rounds of tea and coffee available easily. I think I’d be distracted by shiny modern gadgetry. Can you get your reading done when bright knobs and buttons are beckoning and the sofas resemble something you’d find in a lounge bar? More power to you, if you can. Me, I’d want to get up and play. Something resembling a favourite author’s study, say like this one, would do very nicely instead.
One of the challenges of studying with other people is the tendency to get distracted. There’s always the faint, nagging urge to chew the fat, gossip, or discuss the match instead of focusing on Foucault or Smith. Before you know it, the discussion has been derailed and you’re all heading out for a drink with solemn promises that you’ll finish today’s work tomorrow. I think a place like this would gently tug you back to study mode every now and then. A useful thing.
At the same time, nobody likes to be uncomfortable and this is the problem with traditional classrooms and libraries a lot of the time. Hard plastic or wooden furniture, straight-backed chairs that hurt the back, and vacant walls appeal to very few people. Reading feels like a penance of sorts rather than something enjoyable, which it is meant to be. Mayo Clinic has a different take on it though. They have designed the classroom of the future, where children learn at ’standing desks’ using laptops and iPods. They feel that this active method of learning could help tackle the US’s problem of child obesity.
Meanwhile, as a nod to the flavour of the week–Pottermania!–I will leave you with a J.K. Rowling’s description of a Hogwarts classroom:
He emerged into the strangest-looking classroom he had ever seen. In fact, it didn’t look like a classroom at all, more like a cross between someone’s attic and an old-fashioned tea shop. At least twenty small, circular tables were crammed inside it, all surrounded by chintz armchairs and fat little poufs. Everything was lit with a dim, crimson light; the curtains at the windows were all closed, and the many lamps were draped with red scarves. It was stiflingly warm, and the fire that was burning under the crowded mantelpiece was giving off a heavy, sickly sort of perfume as it heated a large copper kettle. The shelves running around the circular walls were crammed with dusty-looking feathers, stubs of candles, many packs of tattered playing cards, countless silvery crystal balls, and a huge array of teacups.
Globally, more than 40 per cent of respondents do not understand that AIDS is always fatal. In India, where rates of HIV are rising, 59% believe that HIV is a curable disease. These are the disturbing findings of