Chimaera

It sneaked up the middle of the night
A memory triggered by a posture
A moment that was known not to last
Rushed back contemptuously
Prolonged and enhanced
Like an unforgiving karma

What was then a stolen joy
Crept up as uncaught tears
Soaked up by the blackness and muffled TV
A longing that was never mine to fill
A loving that was never his to give

A Working Draft

Image source

A tingle on the foot
And the tiny cockroach crawled
brown against brown

A jerk on the seat
And the cool air slowly reached
metal against metal

And the ground begins to rumble
muffled conversations
turned to waves and faces
consolations and reassurances, of
A parting
not too long

A constant push on the horn
how often does it crash?
faces pausing and looking,
waiting
how long does it take?

A stop.
people streaming in and out
tangled with sounds and smells
of foods and words
repeated words

A lady passed
And the remains swept
has the cool air stopped?
And the bones began to itch
for a stretch
or a bouncier flesh

A long pause.
And the air hissed from the back
And the coolness receded
A baby's screams hushed
And the still greens, stretched
An S.35 slowly passed

sedated naps
Abruptly awakened
And the repeated word returns
A pause for a sell
And the word returns
Another S.35 passed

the checking of the numbers
increased with the anticipation of
An arrival
And the screen flashed:
where is the exit?
[A sigh]

Relevance of Schooling for All

Does the sheer joy of learning belong only to the privileged?

For a few years now I have been thinking about the relevance of formal schooling and its curriculum, particularly for members of the society who are marginalized – geographically, economically, politically, socially, or culturally. My encounters with communities living in poverty or in remote areas have made me seriously question what formal schooling means for them.

In an article I wrote in 2008 (available here in Bahasa), I argued that formal schooling in Indonesia is too academically oriented for a population where only 17.2% of 28 million youth age 19-24 pursue higher education. In rural areas, the percentage is even worse. During a visit to a small village of Marangkayu, in East Borneo province of Indonesia to conduct an evaluation for ProVisi Education, of the 22,117 people, only 7% graduated from high school.

In the attempt to start experimenting with what kind of schooling would be more relevant for communities in rural and remote areas, at the very last week of 2010, I had a lengthy discussion on this topic over coffee with a friend who is a social entrepreneur in the field of education. He shares his growing conviction that the only way to convince marginalized families on the importance of education is by ensuring that schooling makes a difference in their lives. Schooling has to directly translate into economical terms, if not immediate economical return for the families.

While this conviction is well founded on compassionate observations and is well meaning, I couldn’t help feeling a certain degree of discomfort. If schools are not only more relevant, but also introduce students to the wonders of the world, shouldn’t the sheer joy of learning become part of the main reason for education for all?

I found better comfort while finishing Stanley Aronowitz’s "Against Schooling (2008).” One of his main arguments is that because schools have become mere extensions of industrial productions, schools are no longer sites for social transformation. The growing pressure for higher education institutions to be financially more self-sustaining has taken away students’ “thirst for reflection” in exchange for the demand for ““relevance” in the curriculum” (p. 75). Quoting Gramsci at length, he suggests instead that education should find the balance between the two:

“The tendency today is to abolish every type of schooling that is “disinterested” (not serving immediate interests) or “formative” – keeping at most only a small-scale version to serve a tiny elite of ladies and gentlemen who do not have to worry about assuring themselves of a future career. Instead there is a steady growth of specialized vocational schools, in which the pupil’s destiny and future activity are determined in advance. A rational solution to the crisis ought to adopt the following lines. First, a common basic education, imparting general, humanistic, formative culture; this would strike the right balance between development of the capacity for working manually (technically, industrially) and the development of capacities required for intellectual work (Gramsci 1971, 27)."

Quadruple one and the creative act

Happy quadruple one! I have resolved to start blogging again this year, to outlet experiences, thoughts, reflections, hopes, expectations along my personal and professional journeys through life, and to channel them through writing, which had hopefully reached its all-time low productivity in 2010.

I did try putting matters into words, but it was awfully difficult, not because of a writer’s block, but more as an outcome of – what dawned on me while reading Aronowitz’ “Against Schooling” – the lack of time and space to create. 2010 was a busy year, as I plunged into what was then a new job: developing and managing quality improvement program for schools in remote parts of Sumatra. Between overutilization of my finite time and limited brain power and underutilization of my best skills, I was mostly left exhausted and uninspired on weekday nights and weekends. “We are all so busy doing things that we never have time for thinking,” summarizes Aronowitz (2008: 58) in a chapter entitled “The World Turned Upside Down – Again” in the previously quoted book.

In this brilliant less-than-eight pages short essay, Aronowitz starts by highlighting the problems of the globalized world – from millions of displaced people unabsorbed by available employments, the availability of less fulfilling jobs despite supposedly better skilled and more intellectual labors, the requirement of lifelong learning as a result of insecure employments, and the strengthening and overpowering of capitalism on almost all public domains. He argues that the need to provide and create alternatives to globalization as a hegemonic system (and other hegemonic systems for that matter) is unfortunately unaddressed in schools: the need to gain self-knowledge vis-a-vis the world-at-large, to know the histories of the self and of humankind, and to have the time and the space to reflect, to invent and to create.

Let’s carve out the time and the space it takes in 2011 to reflect, to invent and to create, in order to find “what the alternatives are to simply accepting things as if they were natural (Aronowitz, 2008: 57).”

Reading 1984 in 2008

“[C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love ... ?” asked Erich Fromm in his afterword to George Orwell’s 1984.

In his haunting novel, Orwell described very convincing procedures through which even the most ardent believer in humanity, “a minority of one” in the sea of an otherwise brainwashed society, could be turned into an automaton, made possible by the concept of doublethink.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... The process has to be conscious or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

George Orwell, 1984, 1949: 214.

The following remarks are probably personal side effects of being freshly influenced by Orwellian thoughts: Aren’t we all, to differing degree, doublethinkers? Don’t we all maintain contradictory beliefs in our minds as a survival method in evading what would otherwise be too painful of a reality, too unpleasant of a memory, and too feeble of a character?

About (In)visible Traces

For a while I’ve been thinking that the previous title of this blog – Space & (Indonesian) Society – hasn’t quite captured the development of my own thoughts over time. But I couldn’t quite pin point what are the threads of my interests and writings that have been captured within. Yesterday, an idea that has always been there hit me: It’s Italo Calvino’s quotation that I put under the title of my blog, cited from none other than his famous Invisible Cities.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino told a story of the journeys of Marco Polo, as being told to Kublai Khan. The presentation of the journeys was captured under different headings categorized as Cities and memory, Cities and desire, Cities and signs, Thin cities, Trading cities, Cities and eyes, Cities and names, Cities and the dead, Cities and the sky, Continuous cities, and Hidden cities, with five different journeys for every heading. The beauty of this work, apart from its exquisitely imaginative story and structure, (and I recommend you skip this next part if you haven’t read the book) is because all those journeys describe a city none other than Venice. One city, fifty five presentations/ interpretations: All trailing along different parts and perspectives of Venice.

While this blog is anything but about one subject matter, it is a continuous effort to shape my own thinking and interests, trying to find what connection there is, what may emerge from all this. And without realizing, I have been utilizing the same method that I’m most familiar with as a trained architect, but using a different language: Tracing in words what I used to trace in graphics.

In the world of architecture, to trace is to make lines over and over an older or another drawing (usually a site or an already existing or established design), trying to give a new form to the emerging design, to get to a point when suddenly all the elements seem to fall into place and the solution feels most right and logically elegant. Among its many other descriptions, some definition of “trace” and “to trace” captures many of the things that I’ve been trying to do: copying and quoting other people’s writings, going over certain topics over and over again, and, less often but more personally desired, making correlations among seemingly divergent topics – be they clear and visible or otherwise invisible to everyone including myself.

While I don’t expect to become Marco Polo or Italo Calvino, I do hope, at the end of it all, I will find my Venice.

So, as a tribute to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and my ingrained method of a previous life, I have decided to change the name of this blog to (In)visible Traces. For those of you that have links to this blog using the old name, please kindly revise, and I hope this will happen even less frequently in the future.

My Passion (for Markisa) Fruit

Image source

The months of May through August (or what used to be known as the dry season in Indonesia before climate became quite unpredictable worldwide) bring a certain delight for markisa (passion fruit in English, maracuja in Portuguese, maracuya in Spanish) lovers. I have only become recently addicted to markisa, but I have mostly been absorbed by the beauty of this fruit's structure and texture - which very much heightened the experience of eating this tangy and juicy fruit.

I enjoy cracking the hard outer shell, carefully turning the fruit around its cross section until the brown-dotted-yellow cracks, revealing an inner white and soft shell with the thickness and texture slightly denser of a cotton square. The spongy second shell needs a bit of a tension, instead of a compression, to rip open, which action most likely burst the third thin, translucent, elastic inner layer membrane. Hundreds of soft black seeds clung onto tiny clasps that are embedded onto the inner side of the membrane, organized neatly along three columns that run across the long section, from the tip to the bottom of the fruit. The space in between the three columns is exactly the lengths of two pulps. The black seeds are dulled by their transparent flesh casing, all carefully tugging themselves onto the clasps along the three columns, filling in completely the space within the ovoid fruit.

The fruit is a biological marvel that reminds me of D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form. And although I have never seen markisa flower or plant, it looks very exotic on pictures.

Image source

Here is a more technically accurate description of the fruit:

The nearly round or ovoid fruit, 1 1/2 to 3 in (4-7.5 cm) wide, has a tough rind, smooth, waxy, ranging in hue from dark-purple with faint, fine white specks, to light-yellow or pumpkin-color. It is 1/8 in (3 mm) thick, adhering to a 1/4 in (6 mm) layer of white pith. Within is a cavity more or less filled with an aromatic mass of double-walled, membranous sacs filled with orange-colored, pulpy juice and as many as 250 small, hard, dark-brown or black, pitted seeds. The flavor is appealing, musky, guava-like, subacid to acid.

Maybe I just miss a bit of an architectural talk :)

Laws of Imbalance Attraction

Have you ever wondered why, when meeting a person either for the first or hundredth time, you seem to be attracted to some while appalled by others?

Have you ever met a person, who you immediately felt like you’d known this person for your whole life, and become instant long-lost siblings you never had? And who, you knew, could never cross that line to become your lovers? On the other hand, there are people whose very presence in the same room could send you all jittery inside and whose closer proximity to you seem to recede the rest – people and surrounding alike – into that distant space and time which no longer matter for your current state of being.

Scientists have indeed inquire into these questions of human chemistry, presently and precariously concluding that the rules of attraction has something to do with our senses – vision and smell are the two more affecting ones. The same article said that our attractions have something to do with the symmetry of a person’s genes that find their matches inside the other person’s body through our animal instinct, so to speak.

But it doesn’t explain why there could be imbalance attraction between two people. What I mean is, I’m sure you’ve been in circumstances where you are attracted to some people but they seem to remotely or even blatantly distant to you, when others are obviously attracted to you but you don’t necessarily hold the equivalent feeling? Surely it’s not just chemistry, but what other factors are playing? And don't tell me it's fate! :)

On Age

In memoriam, 1999:

A man’s age is something that creates an impression. It is the epitome of his whole life. It has accrued slowly, the maturity that is his alone. It has come together in the teeth of all the obstacles conquered, the grave illnesses overcome, the pains that flesh is heir to, the despairs surmounted and the risks courted, of most of which he knew nothing at the time. It has come about by way of so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgettings, love.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Letter to a Hostage, in The Little Prince (1995: 112)

Between Collins and Dawkins

I recently finished reading Francis Collins’ “Language of God” (2006). Having read Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion” (2006), albeit belatedly, I am now able to contextualize TIME Magazine God vs. Science debate conducted almost two years ago now.

For me, Collins’ writing is more accessible and kinder (more politically-correct) than Dawkins’, although Dawkins’ emotional and carefully worded rant (which I’m sure most but the very open religionists would find highly offensive) at times is quite amusing to read.

Collins simplifies several major ‘players’ in the big debate of God vs. Science as such:

1. Atheism and agnosticism (when science trumps faith) – where Dawkins is obviously one of the main proponents.
2. Creationism (when faith trumps science)
3. Intelligent Design (when science needs divine help)

and proposes the fourth position: BioLogos (science and faith in harmony) – where he is one of the main proponents.

While Collins’ attempt to seek balance between and to certain extent justify his (and help others justify their) position as a scientist and a believer may hold its virtue in bridging the opposing players, in my view, he is probably more successful in convincing believers about science than he is in persuading scientists (and atheists and agnostics) to become believers. This is mainly because he does not really bring in a new argument to the table, but simply reinforces C.S. Lewis’ logics (and quotes his words throughout the book), specifically his questioning in “Mere Christianity” of where does human morality comes from (if not from God).

Dawkins’ response to “why are we good” question is:

“First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. ... third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, ... the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising” (Dawkins, 2006: 219-220).

I have my own reason why morality should not be defined as closely aligned with religion, as it would almost ‘allow’ those without religions to be immoral.

And as offensive as Dawkins can be for religionists, his closing response to the TIME Magazine debate is worthy of contemplation:

“My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis [Collins]. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable--but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed” (my italics).

Chanel Mobile Art: A New Branding Height

Marketing, branding, and promoting in these past few years have upped their bars to reach an unprecedented level of superb, aesthetically pleasurable, collaboratively sensual experiences.

In a post written almost a year ago, I mentioned briefly about British Council’s traveling exhibition Love & Money, which showcased works of artists and designers from the UK, done as part of the government’s effort to promote, market, and brand the country as the leading center of creative industries.

Several years ago, fashion house Prada created a lot of buzz (at least in the exclusive world of architecture) by hiring world renowned OMA to design its shop in New York City, Herzog and de Meuron in Tokyo, to be followed by others in other major cities.

Now, fashion house Chanel has launched an even more jaw-dropping project by combining all of the above. Not only it has a traveling exhibition of artworks specially commissioned by world renowned artists, but it also commissioned Zaha Hadid to design a mobile museum to house these artworks in their tours to Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow, and Paris.

So if you happen to live or will travel nearby these cities, do spend the time to check out this new height, while I can only blog and experience it virtually through this informative and animated website.

Information and University Competitiveness

Opinion, The Jakarta Post, 1 March 2008
Published as "University Competitiveness"*

Various newspapers and weblogs have, in the past few weeks, discussed about the controversial ranking of Indonesian universities by Globe Asia magazine (February 2008). The ranking is controversial because it places Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) directly under Universitas Indonesia and above other universities that have traditionally been regarded as the best in Indonesia.

On one hand, Globe Asia should be applauded for its attempt to rank Indonesian universities for the first time, because it gives the public access to previously unavailable information. The report manages to put into question the assumption that public universities in Indonesia are generally better than private universities (Suara Pembaharuan, 29 January 2008). It also raises the question whether the role of capital has enabled the better funded private universities to actually outperform the more reputable public universities, or whether it is merely marketing buzz.

On the other hand, the strong opponent to the ranking deems it fallacious because Globe Asia magazine, like UPH, is owned by Lippo Group and it gives more scoring weight to university facilities over faculty members and research (Priyo Suprobo, Kompas, February 15, 2008). Globe Asia also gives no indications of data collection methods or sources of information. In other words, the credibility of the information published by Globe Asia is questionable.

Underlying this debate is the issue of information, specifically access to, credibility of, and ability to discern information. Information affects public perception in general. In this case, information influences how the public conceive a university standing in comparison with the others, and it affects prospective students and their parents in making decisions about choosing one university over the others.

With the commercialization and privatization of universities, some fear that the universities with more marketing budgets under their belts will be able to conduct campaigns that may very well enhance and even exaggerate their reputations. So how do we ascertain that this will not be the case?

The answer lies in the attempt of information sources to give more access and more credible information to the public, while individuals try to gain and demand more access to more credible information, and increase our ability to discern information.

Apart from words of mouths, currently the Indonesian public has little or difficult-to-get access to hard indicators that could help us in determining the credibility of information about a university. University accreditation is rather dubious because of the ability of a university to manipulate the data, while the ones published by universities are often done for the purpose of marketing their own programs.

Within this context, any attempts to rank universities against a similar set of criteria should be encouraged as it helps the public to gain a better sense of a university standing. Any attempts to rank universities, either nationally or globally, however, have been imbedded with criticisms, some draw more than the others. But regardless of their many controversies, university ranking systems enable the public to get better sense about university standing in relation to the others.

For example, six of Indonesian top universities rank in the range of three to four hundredths in Times Higher Education Survey (THES), and did not even make the list of top five hundred universities in Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – regarded by many as one of the most credible university rankings. This information not only confirms our understanding that Indonesian universities in general lag behind those in many other countries, but it gives hard indicators which areas we lag in.

Therefore, what we need is to have more versions of Indonesian university rankings and to provide/ gain more access to other substantial information and reviews of universities, with more credible methodology that would ensure more objective information. In addition, a third aspect needs to be emphasized, i.e. the ability to discern information.

To be able to discern information is to be able to determine the relevancy, credibility, neutrality, and validity of the information. To gather information, one must be willing to pay with energy, time, or information processing in the brain; because of this investment, one will only make the effort to gather information if the information is considered relevant and thus worthy of the cost (Pinker, How the Mind Works, 1997: 142, 175).

Some information also cost money to access, while others, like advertising, is ‘free’ for public. Information gathering, therefore, is an investment of energy, time, information processing, and, quite often, money.

Education is an investment of a lot of energy, time, information processing, and money. Unfortunately, many prospective students, as observed by Richard James, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, and as I learned through my five years of teaching at university level in Indonesia, “do not have well-formed intentions and aspirations.”

In addition, education is one of the area that is prone to information asymmetry – a condition whereby an inequity of information exists in a transaction (Stiglitz, "Making Globalization Work", 2006: xiv), in this case, between the prospective students and their parents vis-a-vis the universities. Information about a university “... is impenetrable to all but the most informed and literate families and students ... making them [most students] – particularly those with less educational capital, at a loss” (James, 2002).

To help close the information gap, before we invest in our own/ our children’s education, we should invest our energy, time, brain tissue, and money in finding information about our/ our children’s intentions and aspirations, and about the universities. We should make ourselves better informed and more literate consumers of education.

Information, according to Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, also feeds into our knowledge and intelligence; our beliefs and desires are none other than information (Pinker, 1997: 25). Without sifting good information from bad, one may very well trust fallacious source, form fallacious beliefs and desires, and make fallacious investments.

Notes:

* This is the original, unedited version.

When Lego Can Become Socially Hazardous

Most of us would consider Lego as children’s toy – a pretty cool one too at that. Apart from choking hazard for children under 3 years old as is written in most Lego boxes, we would not consider Lego as harmless for children in general. But an early childhood after-school program in Seattle’s Hilltop Children’s Center discovers that through the making of Legotown, children could very much be in a socially hazardous situation. Some group of children dominated the scene, excluded the others, and created social inequity.

Luckily, the teachers at Hilltop Children’s Center didn’t stop at this finding. A chanced unmaking of the Legotown gave them the opportunity to discuss with the very young society the issue of power, ownership, and equity. The experiments also highlighted some very fine points about the very society we live in and discussed troubling issues we see in our everyday lives. The end of this long but worthy article reads:

"Children absorb political, social, and economic worldviews from an early age. Those worldviews show up in their play, which is the terrain that young children use to make meaning about their world and to test and solidify their understandings. We believe that educators have a responsibility to pay close attention to the themes, theories, and values that children use to anchor their play. Then we can interact with those worldviews, using play to instill the values of equality and democracy."

NOTE
Image is from Business Week "The Making of a Lego Brick"

On Waiting

Nothing could better capture the agony of waiting - the very state I am in at present:

"His mind and flesh were incapable now of enduring any uncertainties. Quivering like a piece of fruit inside a dish of jello, he waited impatiently for the moment when the gelatine would kindly harden. It seemed to him that the coagulation of the world would have to be completed before he could look up to the blue sky with an easy mind and admire to his heart’s content the sunrise and sunset and the rustling of the treetops."

Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet, 1963: 261-262.

To Lie or Not to Lie

Every time you lie, deceive, or cheat, you lose a little bit of your soul – Poi Dog Pondering, I’ve Got My Body

I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie. … there is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Pain forces even the innocent to lie – Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, no. 171

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies – Winston Churchill

By telling a lie to save a life, one is not touched by sin – The Mahabharata

... the greatest violation of man's duty to himself ... is the opposite of veracity, lying. ... To be truthful (honest) in all declarations, therefore, is a sacred and absolutely commanding decree of reason, limited by no expediency – Immanuel Kant

All quotations are taken from Evelyn Sullivan, The Concise Book of Lying.

Lately, I have been pondering about the extent of when honesty would be the best policy. I resigned from my job of 4.5 years a week before last because I couldn’t honestly believe that the new venture the company is attempting would work given the presence of some conditions. My resignation, although expected, was prompted by an ultimatum that those who did not want to be involved in this new venture should resign by the end of the week. Many of my ex-coworkers share similar views with me, but when being confronted by our (my ex) boss, they blatantly declared their supports, and later told me that they have not told her the truth*. I ended up being the only one who resigned.

The point of this post is not to debate over the morale of right or wrong, but rather is to discuss the properness of telling the truth or, when (is it ever?) appropriate, lies. Now some of you may start silently protesting ‘but I would never lie’. However, Sullivan says, let’s face it:

… the number of people who have never once in their lives told a lie is nil, and even those of use furnished with so spectacularly bad a memory, or such hyperactive faculties of repression, that they do not recall any instance in which they themselves have lied will not deny that on occasion others have lied to them (Sullivan, 2001: xi).

Despite the fact that I couldn’t have stayed with my ex-company based on principles, having not secured any job offer prior to my resignation is not necessarily the best decision either (albeit the fact that I still have a consulting work until March as a cushion), for my plan to go back to school this August makes me unemployable by most companies’ standards: Who would employ, or rather invest in, a person who they know would leave in a couple of months’ time?

From my own experience in trying to find this other job in the past couple of months, I could affirmatively answer: nobody. And through the process, I have been told by many (including my own mother!) that I shouldn’t have been so fortright about my situation if the company doesn’t inquire about my future plan. So the question leads to a logical next: What if they don’t know that I would most likely leave? Would they give a more fair consideration over a job offer?

I tried this other approach with a company, knowing all along that I would tell the truth only after I have gone through the whole selection process and made the pass. And I did. Last week I was offered a very enticing position, and the company wanted a one-year contract. So I told them about the contingency of my plan to go back to school – which resulted in the company wanting to think things over, a fair move I feel comfortable with but anxious about at the same time.

So, here I am, still jobless, and questioning the whole notion of truth and lies.

Do you think honesty is the best policy? Why or why not?
When would you lie? Are there any circumstances that would justify a lie? What are they?

ADDED

This seems to perfectly exemplify what Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works (1997) defines as behavior:

Behavior is the outcome of an internal struggle among many mental modules, and it is played out on the chessboard of opportunities and constraints defined by other people's behavior (Pinker, 1997: 42).

On Dreams

It's not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
…
So just give up

Wise Up, Aimee Mann (Magnolia, 1999)

More than five years ago, when I decided to return to Indonesia and focus my work in the field of education, I read a book that inspired and captured the essence of what I thought I would love doing. The book, “One Day, All Children …”, was written by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America.

Teach for America is a teacher corps inspired by the Peace Corps. It recruits the best of recent college graduates in the United States and places them as teachers for two years in some of the worst public schools in inner urban and rural America to help improve the quality of education in these schools.

Over these past few days, I reread the book, and went over the sentences that I underlined five years ago which, in retrospect, still rang true at present. As I was reading it, I could still feel a fire burning inside me – mixed with a regretful pang that I am nowhere near where I envisioned myself to be. What went wrong?

Kopp started out the organization at 21. Like most recent college graduates, she was idealistic, ambitious, and full of energy. And she started big: her aim was to raise USD 2.5 million, recruited 500 graduates from top universities, and placed them in several parts of America within a year. She poured her life to realize her vision. The reality of realizing a dream, like most of us know through experience, is far from easy. But she persisted, found the supports she needed, and made it.

Starting big was the one thing I didn’t do. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t get anything. On the contrary, I learnt and experienced a lot. Most of the time, I had been happy and content with my small dreams. But now I am drained of any energy to even continue my small dreams. So I have decided to wise up, and give up my small dreams. I will start plunging and paddling myself to realize my bigger dream. I hope the course of life would not stray me into the comforts of small dreams again.

Reality wears down small dreams.

ADDED:
What's your dream? And where are you in respect to that dream? What do you think is the biggest hurdle in realizing your dream?

The Miseries and Pleasures of Toilets

Fear the Chinese, declared my sister upon the conclusion of our recent trip to Western China. Not because they are the growing, massive, hard working nation to watch out for, but because of their ability to endure harsh, unsanitary lives on a daily basis.

As I do a quick run over the internet on Chinese toilets, it becomes apparent that many people have written about their experiences in China specifically because toilets seem to make a visit to China most memorable. And memorable it is. As I am flipping through the images I found online, the inner of my stomach squirm, and the vision and stench of the last few public toilets I forced myself into spring up unrepressed, regardless of the fact that I did stuff tissues on my face and tried to intake as little air as possible.

Against my initial inkling to publish some pictures along with this entry, I have decided to spare us the more explicit visions and my own verbal but very graphic description of my experience. Instead, here is a highly sarcastic, hilarious entry – albeit the fact that the writer should consider himself lucky not to have encountered some of the much more horrible ones these.

I can’t help wondering why so little attention is given by the Chinese to the hygiene of their toilets, although I should note that the government seems to be making some efforts by giving stars to cleanliness of public toilets, and contrasting it to the very memorable passages from Junichiro Tanizaki on the same subject:

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in mediation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, ‘a physiological delight’ he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quite so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons.

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1977, Harper T.J. & Seidensticker, E.G., Trans., 1991: 13-14.

Now I have never been to Japan to check whether or not its public toilets are as sanitary as Tanizaki mentioned, but his passages, which I first read while studying architecture and laboriously attempted to achieve in my designs, impressed upon the importance of cleanliness to create such a pleasurable, sensual, and phenomenal toilet experience twice.

Why such difference in appreciation towards the act of exerting our bodily waste?

The Will of the Mind

Happy New Year everyone! I have been away these past few weeks, reading Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, and came across this following passage, which only confirms my previous posting on “The Fittest of Human”:

Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives. Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banal observations that natural selection designed women in part for growing and nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexual sex. They see in those observations the sexist and homophobic message that only traditional sexual roles are “natural” and that alternative lifestyles are to be condemned. For example, the novelist Mary Gordon, mocking a historian’s remark that what all women have in common is the ability to bear children, wrote: “If the defining quality of being a woman is the ability to bear children, then not bearing children (as, for instance, Florence Nightingale and Greta Garbo did not) is somehow a failure to fulfill our destiny.” I’m not sure what “the defining quality of being a woman” and “fulfilling your destiny” even mean, but I do know that happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this I am no hypocrite, even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake” (Pinker, 1997: 52).

The Dawn of Corporatist Education

Opinion, The Jakarta Post, 1 December 2007
Published as "The Rise of Privately Funded Education" *

The delivery of education in Indonesia has long been operated by private educational institutions. But more recently, with increasing cost of running an educational institution and funding its programs, and decreasing government subsidies to support such costs, most educational institutions have to rely on private corporations to fund its educational programs. Even public universities have started to become privatized, while more and more corporations have established private educational institutions.

This article attempts to explore the social and cultural cost of privatization of education and the possible danger this may bring to the development of the society. The case of single corporations founding and funding private educational institutions will be discussed in more depth due to its mushrooming growth and especially alarming repercussions.

With the expansion of free market and its campaign for privatization, Indonesia is not the only country that faces the challenges of funding educational institutions. Even universities in the developed countries have to seek funds from the private sectors. Naomi Klein, in “No Logo” (2000) warns that researches being funded by private sectors can compromise the integrity of research findings. She cites a study that “found that companies maintained the right to block the publication of findings in 35 percent of cases, while 53 percent of the academics surveyed agreed that “publication can be delayed”” (Cohen, Florida, & Goe, as cited in Klein, 2000: 112-113).

In Indonesia, private corporations not only fund educational programs and research projects, but single-handedly found educational institutions, fund its whole operation, and seek profit from providing educational services to the society – creating educational systems that I would call corporatist education.

The term corporate university refers to educational programs and institutions founded by corporations to train their employees in core beliefs, operating and value systems of the corporations. But corporatist** educational institutes, the private corporations in Indonesia, go beyond this sphere to form and deliver main stream educational content to those who can afford their ‘services’.

While many of these corporations may found educational institutions out of sincere desire to contribute towards improvement of the quality of education in Indonesia, others may do so for more practical reason that rises from the simple equation of market demand. Still others attempt to bring in more fundamental vision to the kind of community and future generation they seek to form: the ones that would conform to their corporate beliefs and extend their reaches to more fundamental facets of our lives.

These latter corporatist educational institutions run the operation of their educational institutions very similar to the way they would run corporations – with cost benefit factors, marketing surveys, and the running of marketing and management of the institutions by professionals who may or may not have interests in the value of educational and academic quest for development of knowledge. In these institutions, students and their parents are customers whose demands must be met regardless of academic integrity.

Some of these corporatist educational institutions manage their educational institutions the way corporations would manage their offices and commercial areas: highly secured, gated, exclusive communities with their own privately run food courts, parking lots, and students’ dormitories. Every now and then, these institutions would run sponsored and marketing events where other corporations could promote their latest products to students. Some of them even look and feel like the malls, where people who ‘don’t belong’ won’t have access to the educational compound.

In describing the effect of corporate sponsorship to the “re-engineer[ing of] some of the fundamental values of public universities,” Klein mentions that “[m]any professors speak of the slow encroachment of the mall mentality, arguing that the more campuses act and look like malls, the more students behave like consumers” (Klein, 2000: 109).

To make matters worse, corporatist educational institutions polarize even more the already divided social economical classes of Indonesian society. In his book, “Manifesto Pendidikan Nasional” (National Education Manifesto, 2005), Prof. H.A.R. Tilaar describes the impact of consumerism to education: “… most of [national pluses schools] are very elitist because they are very expensive. This consumerist life style is highly contrasted with the everyday realities of many children on the streets, many of whom are homeless … and have no access to education. [It] has dampened our feelings … towards the poverty that majority of Indonesian society is living in” (Tilaar, 2005: 27).

To illustrate the above point, several weeks ago, I was invited give feedbacks to presentations by fourth-year architectural students from one of the corporatist universities. I was stunned by one particular presentation of a student’s point of view about an urban problem she observed, and was even more baffled by her proposal. She noted that the price of a pack of instant noodle was cheaper at Carrefour than at the (illegal) street vendors. However, the (legal) inhabitants by the railroad of the Mangga Dua area she investigated did not go to Carrefour because they had to take a roundabout walk or take the ojek (motorcycle taxi).

Her design proposal was a building that would bridge over the railroad track into the Mangga Dua Mall so the inhabitants could go directly to Carrefour. Thus, in her reasoning, the legal inhabitants of the area would no longer need to purchase items from the (illegal) street vendors or use the service of ojek – because “by law these (illegal) people would have to anyway be evicted from the area.”

In her argument against corporations sponsoring educational events and programs, Klein stated: “When corporations sponsor an event on a university campus [or school] … they cross an important line between private and public space – a line that is not part of a consumer’s interaction with a corporation as an individual shopper. We don’t expect morality at the mall but, to some extent, we do still expect it in our public spaces – in our schools, national parks and municipal playgrounds” (Klein, 2000: 445).

With the lack of national parks and municipal playgrounds in Indonesia, where social exchanges among different social economical classes could occur, educational institutions have become our last frontiers where ideal form of the society could be envisioned, discussed, debated, and continued to be developed. Yet, with the constant growth and encroachment of corporatist educational institutions, could we still hope for such public arena?

Notes
* This is the original, unedited version.
** Not in the original manuscript: The term corporatist is borrowed from Klein's "Shock Doctrine" (2007):

"Corporatism, or "corporativism," originally referred to Mussolini's model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society - government, businesses and trade unions - all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. ... an evolution of corporatism [can be defined as]: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector - the workers - thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth" (Klein, 2007: 86).

Between Work and Family: A Faustian Bargain?

I recently heard from a friend that someone I know is going through a rough family crisis. He is one of the most curious, driven, insightful, and intense architect and thinker that I know in person, and I have always wondered at what personal cost he does these with.

Coincidentally, I am reading Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” (1994) , and reaching the part where he went through a very rough time in his life, and was about to divorce his first wife. This is what he wrote:

“I wondered – not for the first time – whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one’s ageing mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one’s responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?” (Mandela, 1994: 212).

In “Creating Minds” (1993), Howard Gardner studied seven highly creative people: Gandhi, Einstein, Freud, Stravinsky, (Martha) Graham, (T.S.) Eliot, and Picasso and revealed that in their personal lives and relationships, these otherwise geniuses were treating their families and friends from “disregard to simply sadistic”. Einstein just wanted to be left alone to do his work, whereas Picasso was driving several people into psychological trauma and suicides. (!) According to Gardner, these highly talented, top of the crops human seemed to think that they might not be able to achieve what they had in their lives without the luxury of time and unnecessary ‘distractions’ of normal family and social lives.

But I’m wondering whether certain disciplines are also more prone to what Gardner terms as Faustian bargain than other disciplines of knowledge. For example, people in the business- and economic-related fields seem to have more normal family and social lives in comparison with the disciplines of knowledge covered above (politics, science, arts, language). Or maybe I just haven't heard of it.

Do you think there is such a thing as a Faustian bargain between work and family (or social) lives? If so, do you think this spreads across the disciplinary board? Or, are certain disciplines more prone to it than others? And, to bring up and rephrase Mandela’s question: Is it ever justifiable? Or is work merely a pretext?