There is also need to address the issue of competition and comparison in education. Are we getting knowledge in the schools? Or just information to become consumers for this present system of economic growth, which is going to fail. We are already in recession you can’t have unlimited economic growth when the natural resources are limited. Until when we keep on encouraging our kids to consume more and more and more..
Knowledge and literacy are two different things, our ancestors might not be able to sign but it does not mean that they were not educated.

The connection between education and agriculture is so important. Bill Clinton now admits that outside interference in Haitian agriculture which pressured people to grow food for export rather than for local consumption has vastly contributed to poverty and hunger in Haiti. The UN now admits that traditional ecological agriculture for local consumption is a better path to food security than industrial chemical-intensive agriculture. And yet Bill Gates is now promoting GMO’s as the only solution to the problems of world hunger. The assumption that the knowledge and “expertise” of outside “educated” development professionals is superior to the local knowledge of people who have been living sustainably on the land for many generations is at the root of much suffering.

I thank you from the core of my heart to make such a wonderful movie. The very concept of educating a natural being with a curriculum limited by human understanding and shortsightedness is a crime against human civilization. I think the biggest enemy of human beings are human beings themselves. Profit at the cost of consumer’s life is an economics beyond my comprehension.

If this is progress and development, then we urgently need to redefine the fundamentals of life.
Production is not for consumption, it is only for profit making. The green revolution in India had prompted farmers to use Genetically Modified seeds, Pesticides, Insecticides, and all sorts of carcinogenic chemicals to have maximum yield. There were immediate financial results but the impact of green revolution on human life is surfacing slowly. In northern province of Punjab where green revolution had maximum impact, people in Bhatinda and nearby villages are dying of cancer. A train from Bhatinda to Bikaner (Rajasthan) is named as Cancer Express. As this train is full of cancer patients going to a Charitable Cancer Hospital in Bikaner daily. Samples of blood and mother’s milk show extremely high percentage of pesticides.Is this progress?

I have been talking to students in the university about this movie. I think we really need to screen this movie at schools and colleges in India. The only problem I see is that it’s in English. I would love to contribute in case you decide on Hindi version of this movie.

I live in the ‘developing’ world. I wonder what we are developing towards? Is time linear? What has the ‘developed’ world developed into? Is it the benchmark? This is the question that underpins your work, I believe.

I believe formal classroom and examination based education for all which is homogenised and which produces scores of graduates with nothing meaningful to do is wrong, very wrong.

But as a person from the colonised world, I believe that my people and our culture have also had our part to play in arriving at this situation. In our culture too there is a strong history of valuing education especially in certain strata of society – not the everyday education – that you receive at your parents’ side – but where you go away to live and learn with teachers. Teachers are revered and so formal/westernised education found a fit. Our cultures colluded with each other to put undue value on ‘being school/university educated’.

Now the solutions you suggest have to come from the people not just involve them; if solutions come from outside I fear a repeat of the same mistake in another garb – another wave of people with another good idea to sell.
I write this with all respect for those who come to this from their hearts; but let not undoing the mistakes of the past be a new crusade – one of unburdening the white man.