Festival of Learning – Postcards from Yogyakarta

By Sanjukta Basu, Senior Program Officer

Festival of learning – what a beautiful idea, this idea was the way we concluded the year-long celebration of ASPBAEâs 50th anniversary at the beautiful city Yogyakarta, Indonesia. ‘Weâ as in the long term friends and partners of ASPBAE, one of them being, PRIA.

Opening of the Festival of Learning Conference by the sound of a traditional gong

PRIA has a very strong and old association with ASPBAE. Ever since its inception PRIA has worked on several projects together with ASPBAE; APBAEâs present Secretary General, Maria Khan was introduced to ASPBAE by Dr. Rajesh Tandon; Dr. Tandon have been ASPBAEâs President for two consecutive terms from 1991; ASPBAE used to have their regional office in the PRIA building – the connections are many.

This year ASPBAE completed 50 years. Throughout the year, there have been many events to celebrate this milestone. The Festival of Learning Conference at Yogyakarta, Indonesia was the grand finale of these celebrations. I was fortunate enough that my organization considered me worthy of attending this event. It was clearly an once in a life time experience for me. How many events and occasions do we get to attend where people from such diverse background come together to sing, dance, meet, greet and discuss the future of education post 2015?

Learning to play the Anklung, traditional Indonesian musical instrument

Yes, that was the Festival, it was a festival where we learned to play the Anklung, a traditional Indonesian musical instrument, we danced to the tunes of folk music from Scotland to New Zealand to Fiji, and we discussed and deliberated about new strategies, frame work and agenda for education beyond 2015.

What is special about 2015? The year 2015 is our approaching deadline by which the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All goals should have been met. But most nations, especially the Asia Pacific Countries are far from attaining these goals. So where do we go from here? What are the learning of MDGs and EFAs? How do we, the civil societies, position ourselves in the World Education Forum in May, 2015 at Incheon, Korea, where the global education community would meet and decide upon new framework, targets, indicators, policies etc. The Festival of Learning was a space to find answers to some of these questions and to a platform to deliberate on the overall context and policy climate that define education and lifelong learning work in the region.

I have had several learning experience during the 5 days of the conference and I wanted to share two such learning in particular.

Make education everybodyâs business

We had a session on Regional Conversations where each sub groups were asked to make a list of the pressing issues affecting their regions and the ways to address them. It was asked, which new actor would you talk to? – meaning, which new stake holder would we be working with to address the issues. Various interesting answers came up and it was all summed up brilliantly by the session facilitator Dr. Rajesh Tandon in his concluding speech:

• The civil societies in this region have chased the Asian Development Bank and World Bank for long, time has now come to chase the newly constituted BRICS bank, because it is growing out of our region. The other bank we should work with is the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank and we must demand for investment in education infrastructure.
• It turned out that the one type of stake holders we have never worked with are the fundamentalist groups, the faith based groups, private business owners, corrupt politicians. We must start talking to them because if we donât someone else would. As Dr. Tandon said, "some other folks are whispering in their ears, some are putting hands in their pockets. We must learn to talk to everybody, political leaders, political parties.

"We must make education everybodyâs business.” Dr. Tandon said in the concluding speech and this thought kept resonating throughout the conference. This almost became the Mantra of the FOL – one of the best learning for me from this conference.

Learning exchange at Rifka Annisa

On the second day of the conference the participants were taken to field visit to local NGOs for learning exchanges. I got the opportunity to visit the NGO Rifka Annisa an organization working on issues of gender based violence. In our conversations on gender with the Rifka Annisa team, the word dating violence came quite often. It seems Dating Violence is serious issue in their region. We were told that young children start having relationship as early as 13-14 years of age and there are a lot of violence on young girls by their boyfriends, who are also non-adults. Sometimes, the perpetrators are as young as 6. It is quite shocking how a child of 6 years can learn to commit violence on another child. Parents of young girls think that the solution to dating violence is marriage and as a result there are rampant child marriages in Yogyakarta.

Counselors of Rifka Annisa try to address this problem by talking to men and boys on their understanding of masculinity and being better men.  They try to raise awareness about the root cause of gender based violence and that if there is violence during dating, it is likely to continue in marriage, therefore marriage is not the solution. They also run a womenâs crisis center and legal and psychological counseling center.

It was a strange learning because in India dating violence is not an issue because dating itself is not easily accepted in our culture. Where dating itself is a taboo, any violence during that phase of young girls are likely to get brushed under the carpet.

Talking about legal recourse for gender based violence we realized that so far as laws are concerned India is far more progressive compared to countries like Indonesia, Mongolia or Vietnam. For eg none of these countries have any law against Sexual Harassment at Workplace or Protection of Children from Sexual Abuse. Domestic Violence is also not considered a criminal offence in most of these places. Clearly, India has great laws if only we had good implementation.

Rifka Annisa and Festival of Learning team

The experiences I gathered at the conference are invaluable and it is not possible to write about all of them. I would just let some of my photos speak for it. Just to briefly mention, the other highlights of the conference was the visit to University of Gadjah Mada, the Prambanan Temple and the great cultural performances by traditional dancers. I also found out that Dr. Tandon is actually an ASPBAE rock star. Every time he would be invited on the stage the audience would start to cheer like they do for a rock star, which speaks for his amazing popularity.

Some photos below:

You may be interested to read