Not just grades: schools that educate differently, Rajeev Sharma, Penguin Random House; Rs.599; Pages 387 The problem about education reform is that everybody has strong views on education and parenting. After all, we have experience of education as children and later in life of parenting. This book is a useful resource for parents, educators, social workers, and policy makers who often get stumped by questions about school improvement and management because of their complexity and inter-connectedness in a rapidly changing social milieu. Prof. Rajeev Sharma is a teacher at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, a seasoned practitioner of how to educate and/or update his readers in a professional manner. He defines the numerous dimensions of this problem and offers “solutions through stories”. These innovative stories written over two decades by Sharma and his colleagues, are presented as case studies derived from IIM-A’s School Leader Development Programme. The book begins with the author’s throwback to ancient India (circa 2000 BCE) when upper caste children were schooled in free-of-charge gurukuls or ashrams where students would spend as many as 12 years inculcating discipline and studying a variety of subjects including animal husbandry, agricultural practices, banking, medicine, philosophy, mathematics etc. But with the advent of official British rule in the mid-19th century, the ‘beautiful tree’ of the gurukul system was uprooted, as described by educationist Dharampal in his eponymous book (1983). The imperial government instituted the system of publicly funded primary-secondary schools which suffered benign neglect because a literate population was inimical to the perpetuation of British rule. Unfortunately, benign neglect of education continued in post-independence India with successive Central and state governments according low priority — and funding — to public primary-secondary education. Despite several high-powered committees (Kothari Commission (1966) and Subramaniam Committee (2016)) recommending that national spending (Centre plus states) on education be raised to 6 percent of GDP, annual education expenditure averaged 3.5 percent of GDP (cf. 6-10 percent in OECD countries) for the past 70 years after independence. The outcome of continuous neglect of public education is that students’ learning outcomes are going from bad to worse. According to Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report 2018, which tested learning outcomes of class I-VIII children of 300,000 households in rural India, 27 percent of children in class VIII cannot read/comprehend class II textbooks, and a mere 44 percent can manage simple three-digits by one-digit division sums. Against this dismal backdrop, in this enlightening book Sharma highlights ten schools scattered across the country which have pioneered progressive practices to provide holistic education, inclusivity, autonomy of teachers, remedial teaching, citizenship education, etc. Interestingly, the case studies include a diverse mix of schools — government, private unaided, private aided, NGOs and several managed under corporate social responsibility initiatives. Among them: Chandrabala Modi Academy, Ankleshwar; Loreto Day School, Sealdah; Nilobray Vidyalaya, Ralegaon Siddhi; Bombay International School; Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Vidyamandir, Jamnagar; Smt. Sulochanadevi Singhania School, Thane; Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Delhi; Parikrma Humanity Foundation, Bangalore; Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul, Hariyala, Gujarat and TVS Matriculation Higher…
