Vanuatu

literacy vs. equal access

- The education material is printed in English. Anybody who is not proficient in English is unable to benefit from them. The people who are fluent in English are also the ones who were priveleged enough to be able to attend post-secondary school oustide the country. So, this results in a self-contributing circle of inequity and inaccess.

- The people who were never traditional-schooling oriented are the ones doing jobs that do not require too much education. If you try to teach them using the conventional methods, it isn't too helpfull to them and not too productive, results wise. What is needed more is spending one-on-one time with these individuals and going a lot slower than before. *BUT* IF you are hard-pressed for time and pressured to produce quantative results, teaching these people takes last priority as these people would not be able to apply the gained knowledge to be more efficient at their jobs or to help out other locals. But, by virtue of refusing to put in this extra time, are you not practicing discrimination?

- Lastly, my issue with technology: Why is it that we have managed to translate everything into only the main, currently power-dominating countries, such as English, French and Spanish? Yes, it is partly due the popularity demographics: there are more Spanish or French speakers in this world than those speaking Bislama or any of the other 100+ indigenous languages. But I'd like to argue that there is something more sinister behind this: we know that by keeping all mainstream technology in the languages that are historically and geographically our domain, we can continue to maintain a higher step on the intellectual status-quo.

posted by faa-T @ 5:06 PM