150th Birthday of H.G.Wells

             A little more than two months ago, the English writer H.G.Wells would complete 150 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. The wide range of his works always concern the improvement of the world, the fight against injustice and for human rights, and a more productive, full and fair existence. This post is a summary of five articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells, The second was published with the incomplete title above at  https://kcls.org/blogs/post/happy-150th-birthday-to-h-g-wells/. The third was published at http://www.newstatesman.com/node/193726. The fourth was published at http://www.wnrf.org/cms/hgwells.shtml. The fifth was published at http://www.bookslut.com/small_but_perfectly_formed/2005_04_005019.php

               Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) Known as H. G. Wells was a prolific English writer in many genres, including novel, history, politics, social commentary and textbooks. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels  and is called a "father of science fiction, along with Julio Verne. His most notable science fiction works include: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). His later works became increasingly political and didactic. Novels like Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, which describe lower-middle class life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, in 1934, Wells co-funded The Diabetic Association. His father was a shopkeeper and professional cricket player, H.G.Wells was the fourth and last child. When his mother returned to work as a ladys's maid at Uppark, a country house in Sussex. For H. Wells, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classics works. This would be the beginning of H. Wells's venture into literature. In 1880, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, studying Biology. He later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887, thanks to his schoolarship, yet in his Experiment in Autobiography, he speaks of constantly being hungry. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal, a magazine that allow him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction; a precursor to his novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title "The Chronic Argonauts". In 1890 Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London, in the same year he finds a post as a teacher at Henley School. His first published work was a text-book of Biology in 1893.  Some of his early novels, called "scientific romances", invented several themes now classic in science fiction. He also wrote realistic novels, including Kipps and Tono-Bungay. Wells also wrote dozens of short stories. According to James Gunn, one of Wells' major contributions to the science fiction was his approach, in his opinion the author should always strive to make the story as credible as possible. Wells also wrote nonfiction. Wells first nonfiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scienctific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) When serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicity futuristic work. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950 and successful submarines) His bestselling two-volume work, The Outline of History (1920) began a new era of popularised world history. Wells reprised his outline work in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World. Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When the sleeper Wakes (1899).

                   In celebration of H.G.Wells' 150th birthday, we present the list of movies based on his creation available. He was the author of many extraordinary stories that , even today, inspire people. "Visionary' is not a grand enough word to describe him. Many of his books are shelved in our Teen Classic Collection, because a lot of American educators believe they are must-reads for our youth.I know this, because students come to our libraries looking for these titles at the beginning of every school year. These are great pieces of history in the science-fiction genre, written before the genre even existed. In the end of his life, Wells was a strong social activist.

                     At the beginning of the second world war, H.G.Wells wrote a letter to the newspaper Times attached to a draft "Declaration of Rights". The celebrated author called for a set of written principles to clarify what people were fighting for. His point was that fundamental rights were not just legal entitlements, but a set of values, perhaps the only values powerful enough to inspire and bind a nation. Wells called for a great debate on the issue, and the newspaper Daily Herald obliged. It made a page a day available for a month for a discussion of the articles in the draft declaration. The final version of the Declaration was published in February 1940. The declaration was translated into 30 languages. After some further lobbying, this goal was reflected in the founding charter of the U.N. Wells traced a line between the Magna carta, the 1689 and his own vision of fundamental rights. One hundred and fifty years before Wells' efforts, Tom Paine's booklet, The Rights of Man, had endorsed France's newly Declaration of Rights. First published in 1791, it was a bestseller. Virtually the entire democratic world incorporated human rights treaties into their laws.

                 The importance of H.G.Wells to the development of future studies lied not only in what he wrote, but in his influence on later thinkers. Every field of study, like every nation, has its founding fathers and mothers. Figures of history, they help give the incoming generations a sense of identity. they supply standards by which to measure the performance of new practitioners. Examples spring easily to mind. In modern physics, Galileo and Newton; in economics, Adam Smith and the French physiocrats; in history as an academic discipline, Leopold von Ranke. But who 'founded' the study of the future? The answer is unsurprising, yet not as obvious as perhaps it should be. The founder of future studies was the English novelist and journalist 'par excellence' H.G.Wells. The keystone of Wells' futurism is a volume now more than eighty years old. Usually cited as Anticipations, it was the first comprehensive and widely read survey of future developments. Wells' book represented a peak in human self-awareness. Anticipations ranged widely in its subject matter, from the future of transport to the future of world order. 

             A little over a century ago, H.G.Wells began the sort of literary career that just does not exist today. Bouncing over modern genre boundaries, he produced a vast number of books: sci-fic, fantasy, mystery, feminist fiction, political novels, social comedies, etc. Though his later books tended to be more didactic, the majority of his works still deserve to be ready today. It is his role as the founding father of sci-fic for which he is perhaps best known. Wells was the first to properly explore the ideas and ramifications of most of sci-fic's preocupations: alien invasion, journeys to other planets, time travel, biological manipulation, nuclear war, bio-weapons, totalitarian states, and more. If you like Wells, the writer with whom he is most often compared, Jules Verne, is in fact a very different sort, more interested in fantastic travelogues than in mind-boogling ideas. It is also worth reading the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, in particular. Wells' social or problem novels could be fairly compared to those of George Gissing, or  Jerome K. But in many ways, Wells has no peers. He did too much too well for any easy comparisons to be made.

Enhancing Youth Employability

                This post is a summary of the book published in 2013 with the incomplete title above at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---edifp_skills/documents/publication/wcms_213452.pdf

                Skills development is essential for increasing and sustainability of interprises, and improving the employability of workers. In order to secure job as well as navigate in the labour market, young women and men need the technical skills to perform specific tasks as well as core work skills. Employability results from several factors - a foundation of core skills, access to education, availability of training opportunities, ability and support to take advantage of continuous learning. Skills have become increasingly important in the globalized world. The employment situation of young people today is characterized specifically by high unemployment and lower quality jobs and difficult transitions into decent work, which combined, contribute to the detachment of the current generation from the labour market altogether. At the same time as the world struggles with unemployment, paradoxically, it is experiencing a skills shortage. Developing core work skills help individuals to understand the labout market, make more informed choices about their options in education, training, and self-employment. They also help them become better citizens and contribute to their communities. Many young people face difficult in finding a job because of the mismatch between their education/training and labour market requirements. Innovation and market developments have turned the world into a fast-changing environment.  The greatest challenge lies in the technology and knowledge intensive sectors that also have the highest potential for economic growth and employment. Core skills for employability underpin one does - at school, at work and at home. We communicate all the time and use ICT more and more each day. Good quality primary and secondary education, complemented by relevant vocational training and skills development opportunities, prepare future generations for their productive lives, endowing them with the core skills that enable them to continue learning. Secondary school is an important channel through which young people acquire skills that improve opportunities for good jobs. High quality secondary education that caters for the widest possible range of abilities and interests is vital to set young people in the path to the world of work as well as to give countries the educated workforce they need to compete in today's tech driven world. Lower secondary school extends and consolidates the basic skills learned in primary school; upper secondary school deepens general education and adds technical and vocational skills. Given the evidence on the success of innovative quality secondary education and training in transmitting core skills for employability, more needs to be done to get young people into secondary education and help them complete it. For many adolescents the education system is not sufficient flexible to adapt to their needs, and the quality of their basic education is insufficient to allow an easy transition; for others, their families can not afford it. This youth skills deficit is being felt all over the world. In developing countries, unskilled young people are being trapped in poverty for life. In order to address this deficit, disadvantaged youth need good quality training in relevant skills at lower secondary school and the upper secondary school curricula should provide a balance between vocational and technical skills. To improve the opportunities for youth to gain access to good jobs, secondary school has to be more inclusive, offering the widest possible range of opportunities in order to meet young people's different abilities, interests and background. The power of ICT to reach and teach the marginalized has the potential to break down some of existing barriers. Multiple and varied strategies are needed to address complex issues affecting learning for all in the developing world. ICT allows learners to learn inside and outside the classroom, in a greater variety of ways and to be creative. This is a different learning culture, featuring: independent learning, learners producing knowledge themselves, more content available in internet, connection to experts and access to resouces globally, access to learning material, more motivation. The key messages are: 1) The best way to acquire core skills for employability is on the job. But many employers are not prepared to take on new recruits without demonstrated ability in these skills. So individuals and education and training systems must do more. 2) Secondary school is an important channel through which young people acquire skills that improve opportunities for good jobs. High quality secondary school and vocational training that caters for the widest possible range of abilities, interests and backgrounds is vital to set young people on the path to the work. 3) Teaching skills requires innovative ways of integrating these skills into core academic content. 4) Given that innovative secondary education and good quality training can trasmit core skills for employability, more needs to be done to improve access, participation and completion at this level. 5) Improving access to, participation in and completion of secondary education is enhanced by a system that: Improves the quality of primary education, makes more relevant to the world of work, offers technical and vocational training, designs an effective flexible curriculum at upper secondary school, uses hands-on learning techniques and modular course design, combines civic and digital education to empower youth to understand the challenges that face their communites and work together to solve them. offers an online programme for specialized technologies, 

Democratic Reform and Injustice in Latin America: The Citizenship Gap Between Law and Society

               This post is a summary of a report with the title above, published  in 2008  at http://blogs.shu.edu/diplomacy/files/archives/07%20Brysk.pdf

                Latin America is a paradoxical world leader. In the twentieth century, Latin America leads in unjust societies that can not fulfill the promise of universal human rights despite elections and theoretical rule of law. The "citizenship gap" between developed formal entitlements and distorted life conditions, including massive personal insecurity. L.A.'s experience demonstrates how the rule of law can be systematically undermined by displacement of power, as well as incomplete democratization of state institutions. The persistence of injustice demonstrates the interdependence of democratic processes in the public sphere. This essay will argue that injustice in L.A. is a problem of democratic deficits in function - despite the democratic structure of elections and institutions. The citizenship gap is not an inherent insufficiency of democracy for addressing social problems, as some populists claim, but rather an insufficient application of democracy to functional arenas. The democratic deficit in L.A. can be understood as a failure in the indivisibility, universality and accountability of human rights. Indivisibility indicates the relationship between civil and social rights, while universality demands the extension of these interconnected rights to all citizens regardless of class or status. Accountability is the duty of the state to provide rights, which correspond to citizens's entitlement to claim rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights lays the foundation for the interdependence of civil and political rights with social and economic rights, by including civil and political freedoms alongside fundamental requisites of human dignity. Poverty is interwined with lack of access to social rights such as health care and education. Education, in turn, empowers political participation and is highly correlated with access to justice. The remainder of this essay will discuss the dimensions of the contemporary human rights gap in L.A., and assess some measures taken to address it. The discussion will concentrate on the civil and political rights abuses and show how they are influenced by the lack of state accountability and the denial of social and economic rights. Every year, tens of thousands of Latins Americans are denial fundamental rights to life, liberty, and personal integrity by direct government action, indirect state sponsorship, or systematic negligence. The persistence of political murders and disappearances, torture, abusive detention and widespread social violence are symptoms of an epidemic inconsistent with democracy. Murder and disappearances are committed by paramilitaries and are often targeted at political activists, human rights advocates, and civil society leaders. Persisting human rights violations under democratic governments have been specifically addressed by the establishment of national human rights institutions, The national human rights institutions of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru participate in an international network of such bodies linked to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, which encourages capacity-building and directs attention to regional themes such as migration, indigenous people, and disability rights. Another way to gauge policy response is to examine the set of measures taken on a high-risk country or issue basis. Brazil is clearly a hot-spot for numerous types of human rights violations, from indentured servitude to abuse of power, thus in 1996, Brazil launched a National Human Rights Plan. With ongoing persecution of human rights advocates, Brazil then introduced a special Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in 2004, but it has lacked sufficient funding and personnel. What can be done to close the citizenship gap in Latin America and to allow democracy to foster freedom from fear? First of all, we must remind ourselves of the ways in which electoral democracy and rule of law do offer new resources for the defense of human rights. Transition to democracy implies the state's hegemony no longer intrinsically requires physical repression and armed conflict ceases. Even partial rule of law provides channels for institutional redorm and opportunities for social mobilization, hence, the distorted version of citizenship in L.A. has historically offered an avenue for the struggles of dispossessed populations. What institutional democracy without full-spectrum rights can not provide is accountability for the relevant forms of power, such as private and unelected coercive state agents. In an era of globalization, L.A. democracy looks like partially liberalized weak states struggling to cope with rising threats to social control.   The mandated democratic institutions of legislatures and judiciaries lack traction over actors outside the state. They also can not control unaccountable praetorians insulated by the Executive due to its dependency on their repressive services. Contemporary social conditions short-circuit the historic cycle of expansion of citizenship rights that accompained the rise of modern capitalist democracy chronicled by T.H.Marshall, and the extension of liberal human rights to new groups and expansion to new domains. The prospects for effective state-sponsored human rights reform along current lines are tenous at best. Like the coalition that transformed Latin America's dictatorship to democracies, it will take a renewed effort from international and civil society to secure the new human rights agenda of social rights, accountability, and the deepening of democracy. State-sponsored reforms will be most effective to the extent they incorporate citizens, other democracies, and regional networkd, and when they tackle the complex marginality of second-class citizenship. Injustice is a problem of power, and speaking law to power is the unfinished business of real democracy in Latin America.               

120th Birthday of Scott Fitzgerald

              A little more than one month ago, precisely on 24th of September, the American writer Scott Fitzgerald would complete 120 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. Like many realistic writers, his novels contributed to become the world less hypocritical. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald. The second was published at http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/viewFile/44230/26674. The third was published athttp://www.bookrags.com/essay-2005/10/28/12454/461/#gsc.tab=0

               Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the called Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known) and Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald also wrote numerous short stories, many of which treat themes of youth and promise, and age and despair. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, NY. His formative years in Buffalo revealed him to be a boy of unnusual intelligence with a keen early interest in literature. After graduating from the Newman High school in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. This Side of Paradise, a semi-autobiographical account of Fitzgerald's undergraduate years at Princeton, was published in March of 1920 and became an instant success. It launched his career as a writer and provided a steady income. He married with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge from Alabama and they had their daughter and only child Frances in October of 1921. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for magazines, and sold stories and novels to Hollywood studios. Fitzgerald, an alcoholic since university, became notorious during the 1920s for his heavy drinking, undermining his health by the late 1930s. He died of a heart attack in December of 1940 in Hollywood. His work has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication of, The Great Gatsby, prompted T.S. Eliot to write, "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James..." Into the 21st century, millions of copies of The Great Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and university classes.

             Fitzgerald's style is completely his own and perhaps the most incomparable aspect of his prose. He frequently exploited and became famous for his material rather than because of his technical innovations. This paper tries to investigate the influence of three important literary movements: Realism, Modernism and Existentialism on Fitzgerald's creative works. The realistic elements are obvious in all Fitzgerald's works. He best represented the Roaring Twenties with his evocative works. Many authors after the First World War created a new literature that shattered conservative taboos in their expression of physical and psychological reality. This was the beginning of Modernism. Fitzgerald developed a modernist literature that was connected to American traditions but, what all the modernists shred was a belief in literature's significance in the contemporary world, and the need for it to be repeatedly vital. Like realists, the modernists and naturalists focused on changes on society and used symbolism to attack society's problems. What is significant about this author is the influence of European Existencialism on his works. The Great Gatsby focused on the applicability of Nietzsche's philosophies of modern civilization. Like the existencialists, Fitzgerald recognizes the inadequacy of American democracy in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and rejects the capitalistic values, and norms prescribed and reinforced through the oppressive political structures of American culture. For Fitzgerald what are at stake are the individual, the inventive spirit, and the life of the nation and they echoes all the way through his works, a sentiment manifest in their portraits of incapable, lost, aimless, and emotionally unfulfilled characters. Fitzgerald was not a purely objective chronicler of the 1920s and 1930s but instead brought a strong moral perspective to his work. His central characters undergo processes of self-assessment, or they judge others, or they are judged by author himself, who constantly measured the behavior of characters against implicit standards of responsibility, honor and courage. In his novels, Fitzgerald revealed not only the fulfillment of the American dream but also the many ways it could be distorted. His most evocative protagonists, among them Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, share that quality of the idea and willingness of the heart. Although they are frequently disappointed in their quests, it is not finally the dream that fails them but instead something else, some weakness or corruption in themselves or others. In 1940, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to his daughter: "Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not 'happiness and pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." More than any other author of his era, Fitzgerald was conscious about the influence of money on American life and character. As he wrote solemnly about money, ambition, and love, which were undividable in his work, he has been labeled a materialist. Fitzgerald's sense of being excluded from the freedom and opportunities provided by money had been further intensified by his inability to marry Zelda right away because of his failures in New York following his army discharge. Because Fotzgerald's response to wealth was complex, mixing resentment and strong attraction, his fictional treatment of his material is both profound and extensive. Beside, Fitzgerald with his great sense of pattern was trying to find a way through which he could impose order in the chaotic world he was living in. With the book, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald became known as a daring writer primarily because of his themes rather than his technical innovations. His questing young men and courageous young women, who challenged conventional standards of behavior, seemed emblematic of the decade of the 1920s. He was not essentially a modernist, as were many of his contemporaries. He avoided the stream of consciousness, technique perfected by James Joyce and Virgina Woolf. He also rejected the style with short declarative sentences and simple diction of Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald was above all, a story teller who achieved a close relationship with the reader through the voice of his fiction, which was intimate, warm, and witty. Trilling defined this quality as 'his power of love:' "There is a tone and pitch to the sentences with suggest his warmth and tenderness, and what is rare nowadays and not likely to be admired, his gentleness without softness. He was gifted with satiric eye, yet we feel that his morality, he was more drawn to celebrate the good than to denounce the bad... we perceive that he loved the good not only with his mind but also with his quick senses and his youthful pride and desire." Commentators have given much attention to Symbolism in Fitzgerald's novels, particularly his expansion of color imagery into large symbolic patterns, his persistent drawing upon figures and episodes from American history, and above all, his pervasive concern with time and mutability, or inevitable change. Fitzgerald like other late 19th century realist writers, tried to show the diverse manners, classes and stratification of life in America and he created this picture by combining a broad variety of details derived from surveillance and documentation to approach the norm of his experience. Along with this technique, he compared the objective or absolute existence in America to that of the universal truths, or observed facts of life. as a result, the realistc elements are apparent in all his works. Fitzgerald directed the modernistic renaissance by using realistis and naturalistic techniques. He is considered as a romantic writer, but he combined these qualities with realism, meaning precision of observation and characterization. Moreover, what is noteworthy about this author is the influence of existentialism and the depth of the cultural moments he captures in his art.   

               While it is argued that Fitzgerald emulated Shakespeare in his novel The Great Gatsby through his incorporation of tragic character flaws, his incorporation of existentialist ideals is much more apparent. The character Jay Gatsby embodies three  main principles of existentialism: Gatsby is nonconformist individual combatting absurdity and inhumanity; he created a second life for himself in order to win Daisy's love; and he preserved his separateness as an emblem of his independence.