EducationWorld February 15

The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth; corgi books; Price: Rs.399; Pages 348
The reckless, cold-blooded murder and mayhem unleashed by jihadists ” fanatic soldiers of Islam ” upon innocent civilians in the US (9/11, 2001), the UK (7/7, 2005) and most recently in France (the Charlie Hebdo murders ” 1/7, 2015) which was preceded by […]

PANEL DISCUSSION
Child safety: A neglected issue in pre-primary education
Against the backdrop of several sexual molestation atrocities visited upon children as young as two and three across the country, the first panel discussion of the EW ECE Global Conference 2015 comprising Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mumbai M. Sanke (ACP); Jacinth Portess (JP), head of […]

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: RENU SINGH
NECCE opportunities and challenges
After decades of hesitation in September 2013, the Congress-led UPA II government approved a National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) policy paper of the Union ministry of women and child development (WCD).
By adopting the NECCE policy draft, the Central government accepted an important principle of […]

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ELLEN BOOTH CHURCH
New dimensions of Early Childhood Education
Those of us in the field of early childhood care and education (ECCE) have always known how important the early years are, but new brain research and studies indicate that the first 2,000 days of a child™s life are crucial for making important synaptic […]

The objective of the 5th consecutive annual EW ECE Global Conference was to impact the critical importance of early childhood care and education on the somnolent Central and state governments, and to provide a platform for international and indigenous experts to share best practices. Summiya Yasmeen

Convened at Mumbais nexgen Grand Hyatt Hotel on January 23, […]

œTo raise new questions, new problems, to regard old problems from new angles requires creative imagination to make real advances ” Albert Einstein
Wherever games and sports are played, there are the inevitable spoilers, people ” often well-intentioned ” who destroy the magic of the games children and youth play. Spoilers tend to be parents, […]

In 1979, when Ken Ross was eight, his family moved from Scotland to France with his father™s job in IBM. The computer firm paid the fees at the English School of Paris, where his classmates were mostly children of expats from Britain and elsewhere: managers, army officers, diplomats and the like. A couple were Saudi […]

The Australian government has begun a second attempt to legislate its controversial university reforms, which would uncap student fees, less than 24 hours after its original Bill was defeated in the country™s upper house.
The Bill was defeated in the Senate by 33 votes to 31 on December 2 after the government failed to win […]

With roughly 55 million students, 3 million teachers and more than 236,000 schools in 500 districts, Indonesia has the world™s fourth-largest education system. But the system doesn™t work nearly as well as it should. The country™s new president Joko Widodo, generally known as Jokowi, hopes to change that with help from his new education secretary, […]

Universities should consider reducing the salaries of academics who fail to impress experts in their discipline, according to a university president who has pioneered the practice.
Abdullah Atalar, rector of Bilkent University in Turkey™s capital Ankara, says his institution has chosen to ignore research metrics when assessing whether an academic deserves a pay rise or […]

Has China™s higher education sector become a hotbed of corruption? The arrest of two professors highlights big issues for the nation around research funding and the commercialisation of research. In October, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China announced that several professors had been arrested over the alleged misappropriation of […]

Through the Erasmus scheme and other mechanisms, thousands of Germans study for a semester or more in the UK every year. In 2012-13,14,500 German students enrolled at UK universities, the largest number from any continental member state of the European Union.
Some German students in the UK write about their learning adventures online. Many of […]

As pupils file into their classroom at Kipp Renaissance, a high school in a battered corner of north-east New Orleans, each one stops to shake the hand of a history teacher. Kipp Renaissance is one of New Orleans™ newer high schools. Since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, only six traditional public schools, directly run by […]

Fourteen years into the 21st century, the debate around the concept of 21st century learning and consequent responses in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and skills continues to be unresolved. According to the Partnership of 21st Century Skills (P21), a Washington DC-based think-tank, œin addition to the core academic skills, students must also learn the essential skills […]

I™m an engineering graduate with an MBA and two years™ work experience. Would an additional degree from a foreign university improve my career prospects?
Navin Chatterjee, Kolkata
An MBA from one of the Top 10 global business schools such as INSEAD, Wharton, Harvard, or Stanford will definitely boost your career prospects. Alternatively, you could sign […]

Careers in big data analytics offer huge opportunities and rewards for qualified professionals who can quantify information and analyse selected data
The exponential growth of the huge and constantly expanding library that is the internet has created an explosive information storage, recall and utility industry known as ˜big data™.
According to Margaret Rouse, who writes […]

An Ahmedabad-based programme which celebrates children who implement socio-economic development programmes in their school neighbourhoods, has ignited the imagination of 1.35 million children and positively impacted 22 million lives in over 30 countries Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen

A NEW CHILD EMPOWERMENT and learning-by-doing movement in primary and secondary education centred in Ahmedabad, is capturing the imagination […]

FOR AN IMPATIENTLY OPTIMISTIC COUNTRY banking on a change in government to improve its fortunes, news that the newly-inducted Narendra Modi-led NDA government has established a dedicated Union ministry for vocational education and training (VET) ” a first in the nation™s history ” is as overdue as it is welcome.
Modeled on the lines of […]

AT THE END OF THIS MONTH, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley will present the first budget of the second BJP-led NDA government at the Centre following the rout of the Congress-led UPA government which (mis)ruled India for two consecutive five-year terms (2004-2014). Although Jaitley presented the Union budget 2014-15 last July shortly after the new […]

THE PINEGROVE SCHOOL, DHARAMPUR (district Solan, Himachal Pradesh), hosted the 75th IPSC Principals™ Conclave to mark the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Indian Public Schools™ Conference (IPSC) in early December. The three-day conclave was inaugurated by Shomie Das, former principal of Mayo College, Ajmer, Lawrence School, Sanawar and Doon School, Dehradun, and Sachin Pilot, president […]

Gujarat
Abysmal TET results
ONLY 20.15 PERCENT OF SCHOOL principals in Gujarat who wrote the Teachers™ Eligibility Test conducted on December 20, passed the exam, confirmed a Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB) official addressing media personnel in Ahmedabad on January 1. Of the 11,121 principals who registered for the examination, 7,770 wrote […]

œMy parents came in search of the American Dream, and they caught it. To them, America was not so much a place, it was an idea. My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans. Not Indian-Americans, simply Americans.
Bobby Jindal, Indian-origin governor of the US state […]

STUDENTS OF KOLKATA™S SHOWPIECE Jadavpur University (JU, estb. 1955) have won a major and improbable victory with the resignation of vice chancellor Abhijit Chakraborty in early January. With the West Bengal assembly elections scheduled for next year and the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party, which ended 34 years of rule in West Bengal of the […]

THE LATEST ANNUAL STATUS of Education Report (ASER) 2014, published by the highly respected Mumbai-based NGO Pratham and released last month ” the largest voluntary data collection and assessment of primary education learning outcomes year-on-year countrywide exercise, conducted by over 30,000 field researchers who covered 577 of India™s 673 districts to test 569,229 children in […]

DESPITE A 28 PERCENT HIGHER budgetary outlay for education (Rs.24,715.19 crore) in 2014-15 and the state government™s commitment to re-building the much-awaited Nalanda University, higher education in Bihar (pop. 99 million) is in the doldrums. All 254 undergrad colleges affiliated with eight state universities are experiencing a severe faculty crunch with most of them making […]

THE POPULAR REACTION IN indian academia and industry to the tenth consecutive Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014, published by the globally respected Mumbai-based NGO Pratham (estb.1994) and formally released in Delhi on January 13, is that the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) northern states of the Hindi belt are depressing […]

ON INDIA™S 66th REPUBLIC day (January 26), the Union government invited public participation on the website http://www.mygov.in to help prepare the long-awaited New Education Policy (NEP). A set of 33 ˜themes™ have been identified ” 20 in higher education and 13 in school education ” for public participation and debate.
According to a note of […]

THANK YOU FOR the brilliant cover story ˜India™s liberal arts renaissance™ (EW January). You have perceptively linked the failure of India™s socio-economic development effort to the continuous neglect of liberal arts education. Over the past six decades since independence, government and private initiatives have focused disproportionately on science, technology and career-oriented education, ignoring the study […]

THE MASSACRE OF 132 SCHOOL children in Peshawar, the daylight murder of 12 Charlie Hebdo satirical journalists in Paris and the open, uninterrupted and continuous atrocities inflicted upon women and children by Boko Haram in Nigeria and in Iraq by ISIS militants claiming to be warriors of Islam, has brought this ancient theology ” once […]

If instead of the cover story in this issue of EducationWorld you first read the special report feature, you™ll appreciate that even the youngest children are endowed with natural intelligence from birth and their brains are almost completely developed by the time they attain the age of eight. But, children™s brains don™t develop automatically; they […]