A useful reminder from Brookings Institute that laws alone will not improve the uptake of education for girls. We must engage parents (in patriarchal societies, particularly individual fathers), elders, community and spiritual leaders. Brookings link
Colvin and Clarke
It says much about our unfulfilled desire for the honesty, humour and courage of AB Facey in those in public life in Australia that the deaths of John Clarke and Mark Colvin have had such an extraordinary impact these last weeks.
Give me shelter – South Sudan
Click here for an Interactive video
In educating a girl, you educate a nation.
The bargain done with her father by the first Maasai PhD graduate, Kakenya Ntaiya, was unfair and brutal, but contains a hidden lesson that does not seem to have had much air-time. Preteen Kakenya "agreed" to traditional Maasai genital mutilation, in return for being allowed to continue her education. (1) The lesson is that in patriarchal societies…
Nancy Iredale
On Upstanding #3
Hannah Arendt introduced the phrase "the banality of evil", as the subtitle to her book on the trial of Eichmann, one lesson of which was how massive tragedies can mushroom from the banal actions of individuals "just doing their job".[1] She wrote: "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to…
On upstanding #2
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American poet, wrote these lines in 1914. The are just as pertinent now as they were then. PROTEST To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men. The human race Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised Against injustice, ignorance, and lust, The inquisition yet would…
On Upstanding
On the courage required to not be a bystander in the face of wrongdoing.
Recommending the development of an active bullshit detector.
An hilarious short film celebrates a very British on-line club.
il Vecchio 