Examined

The Country of the Blind

I had started this post in May this year and it had remained in  a draft state ever since. The topic I intended to cover has been covered in the post I made in reply to Ritwik today, so there is no  reason to complete this one. But I liked the start I had made. Here it is, broken links, outdated information and all. 

The saying goes that “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.   To contest the saying, H G Wells wrote a  short story titled “The Country of the Blind“. It  describes the travails of a sighted man who stumbles into a valley of blind men and tries to use the advantage his eyes give him.  He fails because the country has been organized in such a way that his eyes give him no advantage at all.

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In Which I Avoid a Trap Set By Nilu

Nilu says that I do not address a certain argument in favour of government schools. The argument has something to do with poor people having the vote. If that is supposed to mean that the poor can vote themselves better schools, Nilu should know that it is nonsense. One vote every five years is simply inadequate as an attention-getting tactic, when citizens have a hundred issues on which to draw their rulers’ attention. Presumably Nilu does know that, so he modifies the argument with something else that is still nonsensical.

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The Real Lesson of Kendriya Vidyalayas

A couple of years back, at a blog meet, I was having a discussion with Anand, who used to blog at locana. He was trying to defend government schools. His defence went: “Not all government schools are bad. I went to one myself. Ok, it was a government school at a campus that was filled with professors, but still…”

I sputtered a bit but never got a chance to complete my response in the din of the meet. This post at Nanopolitan reminded me of that conversation. This is as good a time as any for a response, I suppose.

People argue that private schools will serve only the rich and never provide the same quality to the poor. When faced with evidence that government schools also provide good quality only to the rich and neglect to serve the poor, their views undergo a fascinating inversion. The success of private schools for the rich is evidence that they will serve only the rich. The success of government schools for the rich is evidence that hope is on the way for the poor.  

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