What Is Education?

What Is Education?

Three gears that characterize education: the meaning and purpose to promote knowledge; an anxiety with surroundings; and definite principles. Education is prospect leaning; it is about growth and enlargement even when we are revising the history. In consequence, as educationalists, the facet of thinking, we are likely to center upon is knowledge. A grand deal thought is ordinary - it goes on all the time, frequently without our being conscious of it. Education leads us into the cognizant world. It engages activities that are proposed to excite views, to cultivate and encourage learning. We embark to assist another person to grow, or to learn something ourselves (a progression of self-education). Both can happen at the same point. We learn as we educate. In tête-à-tête we gain knowledge about people and society and also discover the dexterity of informal education.

Suspended Sovereignty and Foreign Occupation

The cognition of “suspension of sovereignty” is not recent in the legal and political dissertations in international affiliations. It has been applied chiefly to elucidate exciting, dramatic and extreme circumstances in which an understandable outbreak is recognized between the legal suggestion of internal sovereignty and the social and political realities. A conspicuous instance has been the case of foreign occupation.

Suspended sovereignty has raised new outlooks about its function and role in international politics. It is the result of international developments defining an evolution of international political power. Thus, the likely future formation of such a concept in international law should be seen and investigated more as a favorable circumstance to advance the clarity and responsibility of international changeable legislations; and less as a chance to reinstitute hierarchical relations in international politics.
Suspended Sovereignty describes legal and political international situations in which the internal aspect of sovereignty was seen as an empty legal suggestion not corresponding with social realities. The matching claim has mainly been that in such situations sovereignty is no longer an applicable legal concept. Such cases include foreign occupation, the Mandate and UN Trusteeship systems and cases in which states or territories were placed under interim international administrations either as the result of international agreements or due to UN Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter V ii of the UN Charter.

Most usually the concept of suspended sovereignty is affiliated with cases of foreign occupation. Under newfangled international law, foreign encroachment does not lead to the annihilation of a state. However, a state under profession is incompetent to accomplish governmental power in its domain. States have historically had diminutive problem in identifying that the application of sovereign rights may be transiently delayed due to war or foreign occupation, as the occurrence of the Second World War most prominently illustrates. The implicative assumption behind this attitude has been that, with peace, sovereignty will be rebuilt through a final decision.

At present the position of international law is that while illegal seizing of power (as a result of foreign invasion), will not terminate a State, it will, however, accommodate its occurrence of statehood within a part or the whole or its own domain. While the legal personality of the state under occupation is not invalidated, its sovereign rights are suspended. In this sense, the legal continuity of statehood is limited. This means that the illegal dictator or power during the period or occupation effectively replaces the legal sovereign in international legal relations, at least with respect to the legal responsibility of sovereignty such as state responsibility or other contractual obligations it may assume in connection with its activities as the real sovereign.


Lastly, it appears that the legal rule of suspended sovereignty serves the intention of adjusting law with reality in expectation of a final decision. In this sense, it primarily aids as a legal account of a political reality that has created an aberrant legal status. The concept of suspended sovereignty also implies the effort of the international legal system to guarantee both, the rule of law and the determination of international legal relations in the case of suspension of internal sovereignty due to illegal foreign occupation.

Facebook Investigation Ensuing Law Students Filing the Statement of Disagreement

In recent times, the Canadian authority has initiated an inquisition on Facebook pursuant to University of Ottawa law students complained that the site contravenes the law by revealing private facts to forerunners without acquiring suitable consent. The complaint asserts in a discontent that the faddish social networking site has effectuated twenty two contraventions. One of the students responsible for the accusation enunciates that there are few convincing deficiencies with Facebook's privacy settings and with its competence to guard the users. Under the Canadian law precepts, news in conjunction with the address, sexual preference, birth date and school attended cannot be made public outside the user's agreement. Facebook users must expressly alter their settings to keep that dossier personal.

If a youngster in Toronto decides to join Facebook, and decides to join the Toronto network, do he/ she actually discern that everyone on that network, by failure, will have ingress to his individual learning? The pupils drew up the expostulation after juxtaposing the company's policies and practices to Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Facebook discredited the claims, as they discount essential aspects of the company's protocols. Facebook chief privacy Officer Chris Kelly emphasizes that Facebook data is voluntarily disclaimed by users. The criticism also misconstrues PIPEDA in a way that would effectively embargo voluntary online sharing of intelligence. Facebook has worked with the Ontario information and privacy commissioner to actualize a brochure and video that will enlighten users about the site's confidentiality controls. A speaker for the Canada federal privacy commissioner's office said that the organization takes such complaints very seriously; and will analyze that Facebook is compliant with the law.

The student asseverates that Facebook bamboozles users about its incursion into aimed advertising. They claim the company does not get authorization from the user to exhibit exclusive private information, and further reveals to its users information to its users about who is viewing their profile. Additionally, the jeremiad affirms that the generality conceives the Internet a dash uncertain, but because it's Facebook, it bestows some believability. Though Facebook has currently accepted few impressions to redo its concealment order, the predominant business has been to ameliorate principles of art. Under Canadian law, the privacy commissioner has up to one year to reconnoiter the complaint and make approbations. The plan is to launch a web site to indoctrinate the youth about solitude on the Internet.

Choice and circumstance

Choice and circumstance - One day, recently, I decided to browse at the bookstore near my house. I was both surprised and pleased to find many books on single mothers, on one of the shelves. And I began wondering at the many transformations this could represent. Is it because famous Publication Houses, which have a wide reach in the market, publish these books? Are 'single moms' an important part of todays reality? Has the women's movement created a space for thinking about issues in new ways? Or is it merely that the titles of these books are eye-catching? Whatever the reason, it is good to know of feminist contributions in emerging facets of life.

These books entail experiences of single mothers, as they cope with multiple emotions and challenges in a world defined by the nuclear-extended family, which is regarded as the norm in India. Even in the post-globalization, market oriented, consumerist metropolitan India, the family (as shown in advertisements), is the nuclear family plus dad's mother and father on the one hand, and couple on the other. The single mother phenomenon is an aberration in such situations and there are almost no institutional supports available for women to mediate their difficulties.

The experiences of single mothers constitute a series of stories of women from different social locations. The women are drawn from different communities, regions and professions. There are stories of extreme fragility - of survival, of choices denied and others consciously made, of anger and bitterness at betrayals, and of pleasure gained at achieving autonomy. No two stories are similar, even as there are many common threads.

There are many other issues that the individual reader can relate to, or draw out from the richly woven tapestry of experiences that women recount as they generously let you into their lives, their difficulties, their sorrows and their fears as well as their dreams and hopes. These stories seem very honest accounts - of anger and rage, and a sense of betrayal at the break up of a marriage. There are equally honest recognitions of ex-partners’ - that they are not villains’ but rather another person with his own needs and shortcomings.

There is also a stage, where the women see their selves as part of a flow of people, work, music and laughter, of being able to finally relish their own space and freedom. Not all the stories are about reaching some kind of resolution to difficulty. There is an implicit understanding that there is considerable insecurity in their lives. But equally, there is the insight that security usually goes along with economic dependence, and accepting arbitrariness as an aspect of the relationship with a partner.

As a famous author puts it, the price of security could also be the condition that "no home is forever". And when that home breaks up - through death, abandonment or choice - you could be left feeling that as a single woman there is no one for you. Or, that although it's been a long, tough journey, you have created your own secure kind of place. Single mothers face problems and overwork, yet they also preserve autonomy and independence. – A choice made in a circumstance.

* Vidhi Agarwal
* Courtesy: Uma Chakravarty

Abortion – Dharma, Law or Justice

Change - a fact of human life. We may not be aware of it in our day to day experience but it continues to affect us in one way or the other. A hundred and thousand years might be a moment in the life of rocks and mountains but in human society, changes take place in the course of merely a generation or two. Dharma, law and justice; are constitutive of change and the self-identity in India. A situation which may be coined as a ‘pluralism of ideologies’. The focus is on the concept of law and justice with Dharma in Indian thought.

- Justice, like just about everything else in ancient India, has been a much debated topic since time immemorial. Justice is positive and its realization depends on law; however justice is not the same as law; and they have a means to end relationship.

- Dharma is the foundation of legal ordering in India. Often best be translated as 'justice,' though dharma also means law, rightness (as opposed to wrongness), religious ethics, and simply the way things ought to be or even the way things truly are. Dharma is different from mere traditional law which was a coexistence of justice largely isolated from each other.

- Legal ideologies which have brought a new sense of selfhood to all communities in India, determine the meaning-content and goals of life in society; a basic factor in justice.

Abortion is a thorny issue in the economically advanced western countries even today. In spite of scientific outlook and 'modernity' there is no consensus solution. Though I myself, in my own period and culture, violently oppose abortion. If I were a law-giver nowadays, and were to enter our contemporary debates about abortion, one can imagine the sort of stance I would take.

- Can every woman choose whether or not to have an abortion? This would be relativistic, at least to the degree that it acknowledged different ideals for different individuals.
- No woman can have an abortion? This would be univocal.
- Or both – ‘Every woman can choose whether or not to have an abortion’ and ‘No woman can have an abortion’. This would be contradictory.

A woman who already has three children and is over thirty can have an abortion, and a woman who has no children and is under thirty cannot have an abortion' (influenced by the infinite varieties of the human conditions). But what about, a woman over thirty with no children; or that of a woman under thirty with three children?
Despite the relativity of Dharma, its context is sensitively, however, paradoxically guards Indians from the dangers of true relativism. In any given circumstance, there is only one thing to do – Change.

Judicial Activism as Judicial Creativity or Liberal Interpretation

Two sides of the same coin - The modern judge of the common law, in India, is controlled in any temptations to activism. The judge's boldest ambitions are held in check by opportunity, need, inclination and the judicial method. The community expects honesty, integrity and learning, of Judges. Increasingly, it also expects efficiency, timeliness and attention to case management. Prejudice and partiality have no place in the judicial function. The people have a right to expect the judge to be calm, objective and neutral.
Society is slowly and somewhat reluctantly coming to realize that the "fairytale" of the declaratory theory of the judicial function is false and always was. But there is no clear divide which marks off the limits of judicial creativity and activism and liberalism. Our communities have come to understand that some measure of "judicial activism" is not only permissible but is traditional in our system of law. Moreover, it is beneficial to the noble cause of justice under the law. The challenge for modern judges is to find where the line lies in a particular case, at a particular time and place. Each judge knows that limits exist.
A weak society leaves all or most of its hardest decisions to the courts. The burdens which society casts on its judges are greater today than ever before. The judges are the servants of the law and of the societies. They must continue to find the sources of our discipline in legal authority. But when new problems arise, when the common law has no exactly analogous decision or where (as it so often the case) the Constitution or the legislation is ambiguous, they must also look to legal principle and legal policy.
Judges do not usually have the privilege to decline the obligation of decision. Sometimes they will err, for that is inherent in the human condition. But if they search for the solution to the particular case with the illumination of legal authority, legal principle and legal policy and are sometimes called "judicial activists", one must accept that appellation with fortitude. Our activism has limits as every one of us knows. But in a real sense the common law itself is the product of "judicial activists". The most they can hope is that they are successors, worthy in their time, to the great spirits who have preceded them. It is not always possible to declare law in real life situations. Liberal Interpretation penetrate, slowly but steadily!

Therefore, there is a need for a midway to define the judge’s role. Judges may declare law by making it while discovering it within the domain of legal world. However, “Judges ought to remember that their office is ... to interpret law, and not to make law." "To know how ordinary people ... think and live.... You must have mixed with all kinds of people and got to know them.... If we are to remain a democratic people those who try to be guided by public opinion must go to the grass roots." To conclude I would like to conclude by stating,

Justice Stephen Breyer, was reported as saying that a "bright line" between permissible and impermissible judicial creativity did not exist not did liberal thinking. – Two sides of the same coin!!

Compatibility - Reason for Marriage or Divorce?

It’s simple – if compatibility is one of the reasons why people commit themselves into marriage, then why can’t incompatibility be a reason (ground) to seek a divorce (in India). No, I am not discussing about the various reasons for the failures of marriages today and nor am I giving my opinion about why is the divorce rate increasing or how to save on to your marriage. Does one need a degree in psychology, counseling, or social work to understand the compatibility ratio or does one need a marriage counselor?

In several western countries there are more than 15 reasons (incompatibility being one of them) considered sufficient grounds for divorce. Adultery, cruelty, desertion, impotency and chronic disease (5 reasons) are the categories for initiating divorce proceedings in India.

Marriage as a closure should be enabling, not constricting. Marriage, for various reasons seems it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives. The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages. Smita and Jay were childhood friends. They grew up together, went to the same college, same friends, parents were happy, etc, etc. They married each other. Reasons could be - social acceptability, or sexual favors or the logical or “right” thing to do at that time. But - people change because they grow up. They grow up because times change.

Smita changed. She is not the same person Jay knew in college. She does not want the same things from life that she thought she wanted at 21. Now she is 28. But Jay has beliefs that he has ever since he remembers and will probably have it for the rest of his life. Does this put either of them on the wrong or bad side of life? Now, they are embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. At best, they have mutual toleration of each other. They are growing apart and living in separate worlds where one shares the business of life, without touching the heart. Why subject oneself to a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days.

Smita decided to seek a divorce. She kept the lawyers at bay by refusing to initiate the divorce proceedings and seeking false allegations on one of the 5 reasons of the Indian Law. Her say – Jay is a great guy and a good human being…just not compatible with her. It is simple!!