Politics

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EEUU: Trump to create $200M grant program for computer education

Noticias

EEUU/September 26, 2017/By: DARLENE SUPERVILLE/Source: http://www.seattletimes.com

President Donald Trump on Monday directed his education secretary to prioritize science and technology education and spend at least $200 million annually on competitive grants so schools can broaden access to computer science education in particular.

During an Oval Office appearance, where he was surrounded by students from local schools, Trump said more than half of U.S. high schools don’t teach computer programming and that nearly 40 percent don’t offer physics.

He said more widespread access to such instruction will help students develop the skills they need to compete and win in tomorrow’s workforce.

 “Who likes to win?” Trump asked the students. “Who likes to lose?”

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior White House adviser on the workforce issues, told reporters during a telephone briefing earlier Monday that it is vital that students, especially girls and racial minorities, learn how to write computer code and study computer science.

 She said exposure in grades K-12 is vital.

“Today represents a giant leap forward as we think about aligning the skills that are taught in the classroom with the skills that are in demand in the modern economy,” Ivanka Trump said in the Oval Office before the president signed a directive instructing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to act.

 Money for the grants has been appropriated by Congress, officials said. Trump’s order asks DeVos to prioritize high-quality STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – education along with computer science education under an existing grant program that schools and districts have access to.

Ivanka Trump said she would visit Detroit on Tuesday with private sector officials as they announce pledges in support of computer science education.

Source:

http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/trump-to-create-200m-grant-program-for-computer-education/?utm_source=RSS&utm_medium=Referral&utm_campaign=RSS_all

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Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

Henry Giroux

By. Henry Giroux

Ignorance is a terrible wound when it is self-inflicted, but it becomes a dangerous plague when the active refusal to know combines with power. President Trump’s lies, lack of credibility, woefully deficient knowledge of the world, and unbridled narcissism have suggested for some time that he lacks the intelligence, judgment and capacity for critical thought necessary to occupy the presidency of the United States. But when coupled with his childish temperament, his volatile impetuousness and his Manichaean conception of a world—a reductionist binary that only views the world in term of friends and enemies, loyalists and traitors—his ignorance translates into a confrontational style that puts lives, if not the entire planet, at risk.

Trump’s seemingly frozen and dangerous fundamentalism, paired with his damaged ethical sensibility, suggests that we are dealing with a form of nihilistic politics in which the relationship between the search for truth and justice on the one hand and moral responsibility and civic courage on the other has disappeared. For the past few decades, as historian Richard Hofstadter and others have reminded us, politics has been disconnected not only from reason but also from any viable notion of meaning and civic literacy. Government now runs on willful ignorance as the planet heats up, pollution increases and people die. Evidence is detached from argument. Science is a subspecies of “fake news,” and alternative facts are as important as the truth. Violence becomes both the catalyst and the result of the purposeful effort to empty language of any meaning. Under such circumstances, Trump gives credence to the notion that lying is now a central feature of leadership and should be normalized, and this serves as an enabling force for violence.

For Trump, words no longer bind. Moreover, his revolting masculinity now stands in for dialogue and his lack of an ethical imagination. Trump has sucked all of the oxygen out of democracy and has put into play a culture and mode of politics that kill empathy, revel in cruelty and fear and mutilate democratic ideals. Trump’s worldview is shaped by Fox News and daily flattering and sycophantic news clips, compiled by his staff, that boost his deranged need for emotional validation.

All of this relieves him of the need to think and empathize with others. He inhabits a privatized and self-indulgent world in which tweets are perfectly suited to colonizing public space and attention with his temper tantrums, ill-timed provocations, and incendiary vocabulary. His call for loyalty is shorthand for developing a following of stooges who offer him a false and egregiously grotesque sense of community—one defined by a laughable display of ignorance and a willingness to eliminate any vestige of human dignity.

Anyone who communicates intelligently is now part of the “fake news” world that Trump has invented. Language is now forced into the service of violence. Impetuousness and erratic judgment have become central to Trump’s leadership, one that is as ill-informed as it is unstable. Trump has ushered in a kind of anti-politics and mode of governance in which any vestige of informed judgment and thought is banished as soon as it appears. His rigid, warlike mentality has created an atmosphere in the United States in which dialogue is viewed as a weakness and compromise understood as personal failing.

As Hofstadter argued more than 50 years ago, fundamentalist thinking is predicated on an anti-intellectualism and the refusal to engage other points of view. The “other” is not confronted as someone worthy of respect but as an enemy, a threatening presence that must be utterly vanquished—and in Trump’s case, humiliated and then destroyed.

Philosopher Michel Foucault elucidated the idea that fundamentalists do not confront the other as “a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. … There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer instinct as possible.”

Trump is missing a necessity in his fundamentalist toolbox: self-reflection coupled with informed judgment. He lacks the ability to think critically about the inevitable limitations of his own arguments, and he is not held morally accountable to the social costs of harboring racist ideologies and pushing policies that serve to deepen racist exclusions, mobilize fear and legitimize a growing government apparatus of punishment and imprisonment. What connects the moral bankruptcy of right-wing ideologues such as Trump and his acolytes—who embrace violent imagery to mobilize their followers with the mindset of religious and political extremists—is that they share a deep romanticization of violence that is valorized by old and new fundamentalisms.

The current crisis with North Korea represents not only the possibility of a nuclear war triggered by the irrational outburst of an unhinged leader, but also a death-dealing blow to the welfare state, young people, immigrants, Muslims and others deemed dangerous and therefore “disposable.”

Trump has replaced politics with the theater and poison of nihilism. His politics combines spectacle with vengeance, violence and a culture of cruelty. Trump’s impetuous and badly informed comments about North Korea represent more than a rash, thoughtless outburst. Rather, they contribute to rising tensions and the increased possibility of a major military conflict. Trump’s dangerous rhetoric is symptomatic of the death of historical consciousness, public memory, critical thinking and political agency itself at the highest levels of governance. Under such circumstances, politics degenerates into dogma coupled with a game-show mentality symptomatic of a perpetual form of political theater that has morphed into a new kind of mass mediated barbarism. This is how democracy ends, with a bang and a whimper.

Source:

Trump and the Politics of Nihilism

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Sexuality education for Kenya’s youth: When the evidence is on the wall, but politics gets in the way

Noticias

Kenya/July 11, 2017/By: Diana Warira* /Source: https://www.standardmedia.co.ke

The need to provide sexuality education for Kenya’s youth has been the subject of discussion in Kenya’s development circles for decades. Whether sexuality education has a critical role in improving the sexual and reproductive health outcomes of youth, or not, is no longer the debate. Why? One may ask. Well, research evidence already shows that sexuality education reduces risky sexual behaviour among youth. This means that when youth are well-informed about their sexuality, then the likelihood of engaging in risky sexual behaviour reduces. Those who are abstaining from sex continue abstaining, and those who are already having sex practice safer sex. This means that sexuality education has potential to reduce teenage pregnancy, unsafe abortions, and HIV infections among other negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes in Kenya.

However, despite the strong evidence supporting the need for sexuality education for Kenya’s youth, the momentum the government had gained over recent years towards incorporating sexuality education in the formal education curriculum seems to have waned, drastically. To quote one development practitioner, the ‘matter was shelved.’

We have an enabling policy environment, right?

More puzzling is the fact that the government has a policy outlining the need for sexuality education for Kenya’s youth, adolescents to be precise. The Ministry of Health’s National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) Policy of 2015 outlines contributing to increased access to ASRH information and age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education (AACSE) as one of the policy objectives. The Policy goes on to outline that it shall “Strengthen ASRH information and AACSE programmes for out-of-school and in-school adolescents.”

Further, in order to ensure the policy recommendations are implemented, the Policy stresses the use of a multi-sectoral approach cutting across various ministries and state agencies. Top on the list of ministries to be involved in the Policy implementation is the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST). The Policy stipulates that MoEST shall implement sexuality education, AACSE to be precise, in-line with the Education Sector Policy on HIV and AIDS of 2013. Other areas of involvement for MoEST as outlined in the Policy are: facilitating provision of information to parents on the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents within the school set up, and strengthening partnership with the Ministry of Health (MoH) to provide ASRH information and services in schools.

That said, it is clear that the question of whether we have a policy framework, or not, within which to implement sexuality education is no longer valid. Several groups of stakeholders, including a technical working group on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, have convened in order to deliberate how to move the policy recommendations into action. However, all these efforts seem to have hit a snag.

While the mandate of ensuring good sexual and reproductive health outcomes among youth falls on the MoH, implementation at the school level lies with MoEST. A good point to note is that we have a National Curriculum Policy of 2015, which outlines various education reforms driven by the Second Medium Term Plan of Kenya Vision 2030. The Policy seeks to ensure life-long learning and steer learners towards achieving their full potential.

Ensuring that youth have good sexual and reproductive health outcomes is a major determinant as to whether youth achieve their full potential or not. However, the glaring absence of any mention of sexuality education (or the more salient option, family life education) in the National Curriculum Policy as part of the curriculum reforms is evidence to the disconnect in commitments between the various state agencies charged with steering the ASRH Policy and other policy frameworks forward. The 2015 National Curriculum Policy was an excellent opportunity for MoEST to take up some of the recommendations of the 2015 ASRH Policy in order to ensure joint effort towards improving the sexual and reproductive health of Kenya’s youth. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the ASRH Policy was published a few months ahead of the National Curriculum Policy hence there was room to incorporate these elements in the latter.

A middle ground perhaps?

The lack of collective political will within government therefore, is the greatest hurdle standing in the way of realising sexual and reproductive health among Kenyan youth. It is widely known that a notable proportion of adolescents in Kenya are engaging in sex. The 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) reported that half of women and men begin having sex by age 18. Moreover, 15 percent of women and 22 percent of men aged 20-49 had sex by age 15. Opponents of sexuality education have pointed out that this type of education, if implemented in schools, will lead to moral decadence, spike curiosity among adolescents to experiment with sex, among other issues. However, shouldn’t the government, parents, teachers and other stakeholders be working collaboratively to ensure these young ones have the right information regarding their sexual and reproductive well being? The ASRH Policy is very clear on the emphasis on ‘age-appropriate’ sexuality education. This means that information shared with a 10 year old is very different from that shared with an 18 year old. The fixation on the ‘comprehensive’ bit of sexuality education has led many to throw out the entire agenda. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

While the arguments against sexuality education may be hinged on genuine fears, it is time we separated the evidence from the myths and opinions. It is at this point that the government agencies charged with steering this matter should step up to provide guidance on the best way forward. Sexuality education, comprehensive or not, is a critical remedy to the runaway morals we are witnessing among our youth, and a long-term fix to the declining sexual and reproductive health outcomes. If nothing is done, we shall not only miss the sustainable development targets on improving the health and wellbeing of Kenyan youth, but also the Vision 2030 goals. Therefore, a key question for us to answer is – should we let go of what the evidence says because the reality makes us uncomfortable, or should we all find a middle ground and save our youth while we still have the chance? 


*Diana Warira is a Communications Officer at the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP)

Source:

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ureport/story/2001246878/sexuality-education-for-kenya-s-youth-when-the-evidence-is-on-the-wall-but-politics-gets-in-the-way

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