‘I walk ahead, seeing nothing, but nothingness… dense fog’ is the sum and substance of a haiku — a Japanese form of poetry which expresses maximum emotion in minimum words — which bagged Vadodara-based Taha Memon (17) the Katha Grand Prize for creative writing in the senior category (class VIII-XII) of the National Bal Katha […]
In scattered urban and rural habitats across the country, committed educationists in private education and voluntary organisations are ideating pedagogy and process innovations which could revive India’s moribund education system, and enable the nation to reap its much-trumpeted demographic dividend: Summiya Yasmeen
The reality that contemporary India’s early childhood, primary, secondary and higher […]
In the Union Budget 2015-16, finance minister Arun Jaitley seems to have forgotten that contemporary India shabbily hosts the world’s largest population of children and youth (0-24 years) aggregating 600 million. Nor does the finance minister seem aware that the world’s largest child and youth population is the most deprived constituency globally:Dilip Thakore
– Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist
R.K. Puram is a determinedly downmarket neighbourhood in southwest Delhi. It is chock-a-block with government colonies for middle-level bureaucrats, schooled in a cruel education system that strips young people of hope and ideals, and transformed into cynics who have held the economy to […]
Surely everybody, including the country’s purblind and inept politicians across all political parties, is aware that India’s public education system is slowly and inexorably sinking. But no one seems to be willing or able to prevent its steady descent into mediocrity and irrelevance. Myopically, the educated middle class — perhaps because it has emerged out […]
The imposition of a nationwide ban on the screening of the BBC-commissioned documentary film India’s Daughter on March 4 by the Union government, supplemented by its futile efforts to persuade foreign governments to follow suit, is proof of a serious critical thinking skills deficit and reactionary mindset in the top echelons of the BJP/NDA coalition […]
Your cover story ‘Ugly truths about young India’ (EW March) brilliantly reveals shocking truths about the country’s ‘educated’ youth.
That 74 percent of class IX and first year college students don’t know that legislatures enact laws, and 53 percent want military rule in the country is a telling indictment of India’s ossified education system which has […]
Five years after the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 which makes it mandatory for the State to provide free and compulsory elementary (class I-VIII) education to all children between 6-14 years of age became operational on April 1, 2010, several provisions of this hastily drafted law continue to attract controversy.
The validity of the vintage observation that a picture is worth a thousand words was not only proved right, but amplified to a million when a photograph of dozens of parents, friends and relatives scaling the walls of a four-storey building in Manhar village (Vaishali district), 60 km from Patna, to pass notes and chits […]
The brihanmumbai municipal Corporation (BMC) aka Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), the richest civic government in India, presented its budget for 2015-16 on February 5. In the Rs.33,514.15 crore budget, education has been allocated a substantial Rs.2,500.89 crore (7.46 percent) to inter alia promote ten new schools, establish 200 computer labs in the corporation’s […]
Ict (information communication technology)-enabled school education in the western sea-board state of Gujarat (pop. 65 million), projected by the propaganda machine of the BJP as India’s model state because Narendra Modi served there as chief minister for almost three successive terms (2001-2014) before he was catapulted to the prime minister’s office following the BJP’s huge […]
Conterminously with the Supreme Court having struck down s. 66A of the Information and Technology Act, 2000 which allowed police countrywide to arrest individuals for posting any ‘offensive content’ on the internet, the Uttar Pradesh government’s department of secondary education has proscribed interaction between teachers and students on the internet, aka, the social media.
The obstinate refusal of the Congress government, voted to power in the legislative assembly election of May 2013, to accept several verdicts of the Karnataka high court and the Supreme Court which have struck down a 1994 government order making Kannada or the mother tongue the medium of instruction in all primary schools (class I-V) […]
Morale in West Bengal’s once famous academy is at an all-time low following continuous student agitations, institutional mismanagement, political interference and rampant lawlessness on campuses during the past few years.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, which ended 34 years of hegemony of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) over the state in 2011 when it swept […]
Perhaps for the first time in the history of post-independence India, the Union Budget 2015-16 has reduced the Central government’s outlay for education from Rs.82,771 crore in 2014-15 to Rs.69,074 crore in the current year. The rationale advanced for this shocking neglect of the world’s largest population of children and youth is that with the […]
“He was among the tallest leaders of our times. Singapore’s transformation in one generation is a tribute to his leadership… His achievements and thoughts give me confidence in the possibility of India’s own transformation.”
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s tribute to Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder-prime minister who died on March 23 (March 29)
Addressing the Rajasthan legislative assembly after tabling the state budget 2015-16 on March 9, chief minister Vasundhara Raje announced her government’s intent to constitute District School Boards (DSBs) for monitoring the quality of education delivered by government schools statewide. DSBs, whose members will include parents, teachers, civil society and public representatives and […]
The Bangalore-based S.V. EduSports Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2009) which provides sports and fitness education to over 300,000 students in 400 K-12 schools countrywide, launched a new integrated sports education programme on March 4. Christened MILES, the programme is designed to develop the sports, social and emotional skills of children in class VI upwards.
Navi Mumbai-based Shubham Vammali (18) recently dived into the elite league of long-distance swimmers worldwide. He completed two of the most difficult endurance swimathons of the high seas by swimming the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar.
This young ‘merman’ made his debut in the international long-distance swimmers league last August, when he swam the […]
Singapore International School, Mumbai has integrated the enquiry based curriculum of the Singapore education ministry within the framework of IBO’s celebrated PYP programme. Indrajit Dutta
Sited on a ten-acre campus in the Mumbai suburb of Dahisar, Singapore International School (SIS, estb. 2006) is the commercial capital’s first internationally-affiliated co-ed day-cum-boarding school. Affiliated with […]
Ranked among the world’s Top 50 universities worldwide by THE, America’s first public varsity, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has built itself an excellent transnational reputation SUMMIYA YASMEEN
Top-ranked corporates such as TCS, Wipro, Infosys, among others are investing heavily in developing embedded systems and rapidly expanding operations Indra Gidwani
India is slated as the next embedded systems hub of the world. A recent (2015) McKinsey World Institute-NASSCOM survey predicts that jobs in the embedded systems domain will increase tenfold from the current 60,000 professionals […]
Which are the top universities worldwide offering Master’s degrees in ophthalmology, and what are their admission requirements?
Nasreen Shaikh, Bangalore
Several British universities offer excellent postgraduate programmes in ophthalmology. The minimum eligibility requirement is a bachelor’s degree in medicine, biomedical sciences or life sciences. Foreign students, whose first language is not English, also need to submit […]
Recently released authoritative studies — Annual Status of Education Report 2014 and the Young Citizen National Survey 2015 of the Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness — highlight that learning outcomes in school education are rock-bottom.
While it’s easy to blame the ‘system’, the teachers’ community which is an integral part of the system is also to […]
The Union Budget 2015-16 is long on rhetoric but short on vision. Given the ruling BJP’s campaign promises, it was reasonable to expect this budget would rival the 1991 budget in launching the next phase of momentous reforms. Big bang reforms however, are not in the DNA of NDA. At best, it’s an evolutionary rather […]
On the desk of Zeus Rodriguez, the president of St. Anthony School in Milwaukee, a mini Republican primary is under way. A signed photograph of Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, competes for space with snaps of Rand Paul and Jeb Bush — all three of them presidential hopefuls. St. Anthony’s is popular among conservatives […]
An Israeli business school claims to offer its international students some of “the secrets behind ‘Jewish genius’ and Israeli success” as a pre-eminent “start-up nation”. Lahav Executive Education, which bills itself “the leading developer and provider of executive education in Israel”, is a unit of the Recanati Business School at Tel Aviv University, the country’s […]
Millions of Chinese have dreamt of attending Harvard University. Harvard Girl, a how-to manual published in 2000 by the parents of one successful applicant, was a national bestseller. Georgia Institute of Technology, a prestigious university in Atlanta, has enjoyed less name-recognition. Yet this is fast changing: the number of Chinese applicants to Georgia Tech has […]
Higher education companies in Brazil are lobbying the government to rescind new rules on financial aid they fear will stop students from enrolling for privately provided education.
A federal decree quietly published during the Christmas period tightened the criteria for the Student Financing Fund (FIES), one of the federal government’s two key initiatives to support individuals […]
Going into the offices of the National Co-ordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in Oaxaca, a city 350 km south-east of Mexico’s capital, is like entering a world of rebellious teenagers rather than teachers. Graffiti is scrawled on the walls and posters denounce “state terrorism”. The trade union’s radio station, Radio Planton (Demonstration Radio), rails against […]
“It’s all to do with their brains and bodies and chemicals,” says Sir Anthony Seldon, the master of Wellington College, a posh English boarding school. “There’s a mentality that it’s not cool for them to perform, that it’s not cool to be smart,” suggests Ivan Yip, principal of the Bronx Leadership Academy in New York. […]
The NBA (National Basketball Association) commissioner Adam Silver has banned Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald T. Sterling for life from attending or being involved with the management of his own or any other NBA team. Three months after his appointment as NBA chief, Silver took this unprecedented action against one of the league’s longest tenured […]
Mossad by Michael Bar-Zohar & Nissim Mishal HARPER COLLINS; Price: Rs.999; Pages 390
Contrary to the fervid and over-blown imagination of Hollywood movie directors, the lives of spies and counter-spies, intelligence and counter-intelligence agents are nasty, brutal and usually short. The voyage of their lives comprises dangerous clandestine meetings, long hours of surveillance, interrogation, torture, isolation […]
It’s official. Economics Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen won’t serve as the chancellor of the ambitious new Nalanda University (NU) slowly taking shape in Rajgir, Bihar, after his first three-year term ends in June. In a letter written to the board of governors of the fledgling varsity, Sen says he believes the 11-month-old BJP-led government […]
- Reshma Ravishanker The central government’s recent announcement on scrapping ‘no-detention policy’ for classes V and VIII in schools under its jurisdiction has yet again .....Read More
The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday rejected the bail petitions of former West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee and four other ex-public servants in a .....Read More
BJP/NDA’s RK Puram Budget
– Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist
R.K. Puram is a determinedly downmarket neighbourhood in southwest Delhi. It is chock-a-block with government colonies for middle-level bureaucrats, schooled in a cruel education system that strips young people of hope and ideals, and transformed into cynics who have held the economy to […]