What are words worth?

"Is it a difficult drive to the airport at this time of day?" I ask the balding gentleman in the front seat who drives my car to the airport in Melbourne. He looks up at me in the rear view mirror and smiles patiently. "It depends," he says. Before I can jump to "on what?" he continues: "If you begin the drive thinking that it's going to be easy, considering that most people are on the roads heading home, then you're bound to find it difficult. But if you just know that's the way it is, that five o'clock traffic can't be any different, and simply focus on getting there, it's just another drive." That wise comment was prelude to one of the most interesting conversations I've had, one that made the 45-minute drive in peak Melbourne traffic go by like a breeze. We discussed religion, working class politics in Australia and (a topic close to my heart) school education. He told me about his 11-year-old son who goes to a cha...

Travelling through the streets of any large city, one finds billboards screaming the promise of ‘world class’ education combined with a pledge to ‘create global citizens’ or ‘future ready’ graduates. Many of these promises and pledges come from schools carrying the tag “international”. They show pictures of happy pink-cheeked children smiling against a backdrop of spacious lawns or well furnished playgrounds; some show children performing activities ranging from playing the guitar to working on an airplane model, or interacting with a well groomed adult playing the role of teacher. Much before FDI in higher education became a reality, or even a hotly debated proposal, the international had seeped into elementary schooling. And arguably, it goes even farther back than most of us care to or are equipped to look. For years and years, we’ve had inputs from abroad coming into schools, whether in the form of textbooks that were clones of western readers, or pedagogy styles that had bee...

Wonder what keeps us writing and wanting to be visible in this space that has no boundaries other than the ability to access and use a computer. I realise that the impulse to put the freewheeling movements of one's mind on to a screen is not as strong as I had expected when I first signed on to this thing called a blog. The conversations I wish to have happen in real time and with people I can see and hear and touch. But the excitement of being online is just the opposite...who knows what strange turns on the bylanes of the Internet will bring friendship to you? Conversations in chat rooms that were once simulations of social spaces and then substitutes for social spaces, and now are social spaces in their own right. I hear of young people who 'meet' online and then progress to intense conversations where they move into private areas of chat rooms and then, offline into real spaces where the relationship might take on a 'really' serious nature. What are the expecta...