EducationWorld May 06

Letter from London

Knowledge-skills debate

Debates on education are many and varied as always. The final professed goal of everybody involved in education, is to equip children and young adults with the skills they need to make a living, preferably in an interesting, successful and rewarding manner when they go out into the big bad world. These […]

There’s an old saying that if you visit Burma (now Myanmar) once, you are sure to visit again three times. I have no memory of my first visit, only a sepia photo of myself aged two with my grandmother in Rangoon (now Yangon), the capital of Burma, where my grandfather had established a business in 1890. […]

The sartorially conservative city of Chennai will soon inaugurate its first, internationally benchmarked fashion institute. The Pearl Academy of Fashion (PAF), which has built itself a reputation in fashion and textile education for over 12 years since the promotion of its first New Delhi campus in 1993 and its second campus in Jaipur last year, […]

Your Counsellor RepliesI am an economics graduate and would like to do a postgraduate degree at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Please advise.Priti Rao, MangaloreFor admission into the MA (economics) programme of DSE, University of Delhi, you need to have a BA (Hons) economics degree with at least 50 percent average (in the case […]

With growing global interest in India’s ancient heritage especially in the fields of holistic medicine, natural healing and tourism, the demand for qualified archaeologists is outrunning supply 

If you have an interest in history and antiquity and a penchant for outdoor life, archaeology might be the right career choice for you. With humanities education having re-established […]

“The fact is that 98 percent of all student athletes are not going on to the next level in their sport. But with 18, 22 and 23-year-olds, sometimes education is only a backup plan” — Darin Meeker,athletic counsellor at Ohio State University

When I was a kid, one of the sports I played was baseball. As a […]

Union HRD minister Arjun Singh’s proposal to decree a 27 percent quota for OBC students in IITs, IIMs and Central universities has provoked widespread indignation countrywide, and campus India is bracing itself for a festival of student protests. Dilip Thakore reports

For the great majority of India’s students constitutionally barred from availing quotas and reservation in institutions of […]

Rows of students with bored faces, struggling to absorb yet another method of calculating HCF which the maths teacher is trying to explain. Many of the children silently wondering why they have to learn it in the first place. That’s a typical classroom scenario.

Cut to another scene nearby. Students running around in a playground, […]

The great majority of India’s visually challenged population whose number is estimated at 14 million nationwide, are inhabitants of the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. One of the major problems of visually challenged students of the Hindi heartland is that they aren’t able to write their school or college […]

A large number of middle class Indians tend to exult in the statistic that the country hosts the world’s third largest technical work force. The fact is we probably have the largest number of plumbers, carpenters, masons, welders, house painters etc. Yet as any home owner will swear, the quality of plumbing, carpentry, masonry or welding services […]

Although it was granted university status as recently as 1992, this new university has earned an enviable reputation for academic excellence
Sited in Britain’s picturesque midlands region and granted university status as recently as 1992, the University of Wolverhampton (UoW) has quickly earned an enviable reputation in the international higher education market for its contemporary […]

The jewel of the Salesian congregation which administers 306 institutions across the country, Don Bosco is among the commercial capital’s most well-known education landmarks

In Matunga, a neighbourhood in Mumbai dominated by Tam Brahms (Tamilian Brahmins) and sundry other communities from peninsular India, there is a sylvan spot that’s forever Turin. On a small patch of […]

The Bangalore-based Sun Microsystems India announced the roll out of its second edition of the Sun Matching Grant Program, on April 26. Under this initiative, Sun will provide a series of hardware, software and web-based training materials, which will allow an unlimited number of Indian educational institutions and students to benefit from Sun’s technology. The […]

They said it in April”A donkey is like a housewife. In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents‚ home, you‚ll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master.” — Excerpt from a class IX-X Hindi-language textbook of the Rajasthan state education […]

Tamil Nadu

Skills shortage paradox

Every year India’s 1,300-plus engineering colleges churn out an estimated 500,000 engineering graduates to feed the manpower needs of the booming IT-ITES (information technology and information technology enabled services) industry (annual revenue: $36 billion or Rs.162,000 crore). Yet, paradoxically the IT-ITES industry is suffering a severe shortage of manpower because only […]

Kudos to your cover story ‘Union Budget 2006-07: Lip service to education’ (EW April). The cover story was a revelation, because while the rest of the media was inclined to take finance minister P. Chidambaram’s claim that Budget 2006-07 gives “primacy” to education and health at face value, you have examined the issue in great detail and […]

The ouster on March 20 of octogenerian Dr. Verghese Kurien from the chairmanship of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) following withdrawal of confidence in him by constituent members of GCMMF, marks the end of a momentous success story in the history of post-independence India’s failed national development effort. Regrettably the reams of comment […]

The interests of social justice, fair-play and equity demand that special provision is made for the access of citizens from historically deprived castes and communities into top-rung institutions of professional education. When as a consequence of graduating from excellent institutions members of socially and educationally backward castes enter and excel in government service, the professions […]