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Friday, September 02, 2011

MONGOLIA PROGRESSING IN HIGHER EDUCATION, KUDOS!

MONGOLIA PROGRESSING IN HIGHER EDUCATION, KUDOS!

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

The scions of Genghiz Khan have slept for so many centuries since the heydays of their great ancestor. Genghiz Khan began an accelerated formation of central institutions of power and the growth of civilization among his tribes, thus transforming tribal primitivism to civilizational oasis.

Genghiz Khan’s lineages are that of Kublai Khan in China and the Mogul emperors Akbar, Shah Jehan, and others in India. Such is the greatness that Mongolia left upon the entire planet, to which I am in full awe and admiration for its people. And, I am saddened by the long dormancy or sleep that befell the great emperor’s scions, who at one time aped the Stalinist devils of Soviet ignominy to no avail.

“Time’s they are a-changing” today in Mongolia, and economic growth is rapid. Like the thunderous East Asia to the south and east of its borders, Mongolia is upbeat from economics to human development pursuits (health, education, gender empowerment).

The same pattern of growth is now wakening the education sector in Mongolia, inclusive of its tertiary education. Below is a very gladdening report from the Asian Development Bank about the innovations taking place in tertiary education in Genghiz Khan’s land.

[Philippines, 02 September 2011]

adb-supports-mongolias-push-more-relevant-higher-education

ADB Supports Mongolia's Push for More Relevant Higher Education

29 Jul 2011

MANILA, PHILIPPINES – The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is providing a $20 million equivalent loan to help Mongolia improve the quality of its higher education system and increase enrollment by youth from poor, remote communities.

The ADB Board of Directors yesterday approved the financing for the Higher Education Reform Project. Along with strengthening the relevance of existing higher education programs, it will also address issues such as governance and management, financing, and access.

“The ultimate goal is to boost the number of graduates who have the skills to match Mongolia’s changing economic needs, and who can bring international standards to its labor markets,” said Robert Schoellhammer, Country Director of ADB Mongolia Resident Mission.

Mongolia has over 100 higher education institutions but only about 40% of graduates manage to find employment. In response, the Government of Mongolia has drawn up a plan to rationalize higher education which includes reducing the large number of public universities from 42 to 16, and improving teaching and programs.

The project will aid the government’s plan by funding research facilities, staff training, e-learning centers and testing centers. It will aim to strengthen management capacity at universities to improve accountability and transparency, and will support new public-private partnerships and twinning arrangements with industry and foreign institutions to develop labor market-ready graduates.

It will also seek to tackle current imbalances in the system where few students from poor families in remote areas take higher education courses, and boys—despite being strongly outnumbered by girls—get the bulk of jobs on offer after graduation.

“Assistance will be given to increase state support mechanisms for students who are poor or living in distant areas, and for policies that can improve gender balance,” said Eisuke Tajima, Education Specialist in ADB’s East Asia Department. “As part of this initiative four rural institutions will be chosen to pilot distance learning courses to reach out to more students.”

ADB’s loan from its concessional Asian Development Fund has a 32-year term and will fund 90% of the project cost with the government providing an additional $2.2 million. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Science will manage the project which is due for completion by December 2016.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

Classes have resumed here in Manila/Philippines, and our campuses are again swarming with pupils, students, teachers. Focused on their tasks, the same stakeholders are barely aware of what’s going on in the world around them, a world that is changing fast at confusing rate.

While the rugs under our feet our changing, the old context of large classes (class sizes of 100-250) are still in vogue in many universities worldwide. Some other universities that may have abolished them in the past, are re-instituting the large class platform.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the large class platform belongs to the past ages of medievalism and industrialism. To implement it now, at this time, is a regressive decision.

The large class, which unconsciously glues students to the ‘Herd instinct’, is anathema to the overall evolutionary movement of the human psyche towards greater individuation. University education is supposedly an opportunity field for the flourishing of that individuation.

The ‘mad discourse’ is finding expression in many venues today. The large class platform feeds inputs to the mad discourse, and is subtly rooted in it in fact. Its rationale hides under the rubric of technocratese language, but any sharp observer will easily unveil the illusion and show the large class platform’s connection to the ‘mad discourse’.

Imagine if all students are subjected to the same large classes, where they cannot air feedbacks or questions at all as they are consigned to passive receivers of inputs from a lecture professor. Imagine exposing freshmen students to this platform for 4-5 years, and assess the degeneration of the same students into the hovels of passivity.

Such a regimentation is just but one step short of what the Phase III cybernetics is up to these days: chipping humans. Phase III cybernetics had worked out to erase the dividing line between human behavior and machine behavior, with practical uses aimed at chipping all humans in the future.

The same chipped humans can then be put under the control of mega-computer systems, their behavior eventually reprogrammable to make them more in tune with what the System demands. They can be sent to war fronts as armies and technicians, and will experience no fear as fear will be deleted or subjugated by mega-control commands from their own psyche.

Wars and police states of the near future will be easily justified with every technocratese language conceivable, rendering them as typical ‘mad discourse’ in the argot of Michel Foucault. Mad, in that the erasure of the boundary between reason and the irrational has been effectively erased or deleted.

If there is anything that university policy makers must do now, it is to abolish all large classes while there is still time. Globally, we concerned citizens are doing what we can to deter moves by elites to install nazi-type regimes in the West, leading to a global state later that will be in need of compliant citizens.

Let us all do our tasks now to take down school platforms that will be the launching pads for compliant humans who can be chipped in couples of years’ time. The VeriChip by Verizon Corp is now out, and before 2015 a more perfected prototype will be out, ready to be implanted to humans via syringe (by trained doctors/medics).

We still have the time to act, to note. Any decision that infringes on human liberties is dangerously fascistic, such as re-instituting or maintaining large classes.

Failing to act in time, we shall watch in horror as new ‘das boots’ kids will be churned out from our youth, commanded via chips to participate in building a Draconian deux ex machina of the near future. And they’re products of our universities, products of large classes.

By then, I will be having the last laugh. With resonating guffaws will I declare “I told you so.”

[Philippines, 27 June 2010]