EducationWorld October 14

Citation: Schooled in the UK and an education alumna of Victoria College, Melbourne, Lina Ashar began her career as a secondary school teacher in Australia in 1987. Four years later, while on a year-long sabbatical in India to re-connect with her roots, she accepted an offer to teach in a primary school in suburban […]

Lt. Gen (Retd.) Arjun Ray
CITATION
SINCE 2008 WHEN THE ANNUAL educationworld india School Rankings assumed their current shape and form, the Indus International School, Bangalore (estb. 2003) has been ranked #1 among all international schools on the parameter of leadership/management quality, for five years consecutively. The consensus is that this extraordinary achievement of the […]

Shomie Ranjan Das
CITATION
THE BOAED OF DIRECTORS AND Editors of EducationWorld are especially proud that we have prevailed upon the globe-trotting Shomie Ranjan Das, a consultant to 76 schools, education foundations and corporations in several countries around the world, to be with us here tonight to accept the EducationWorld Lifetime Achievement Award 2014 for […]

In a filled-to-capacity chandeliered auditorium in The LaLit Hotel, Delhi, Education World felicitated and celebrated top-ranked schools nationally and in states and cities as per the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2014 league tables published in early September
THE ANNUAL EDUCATIONWORLD INDIA SCHOOL Rankings Awards Nite staged in New Delhi™s The LaLit Hotel on September 20 […]

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, I WAS ALWAYS among the first in the school yard because I wanted to be in the first group of players on the basketball court. I recall my days in class ” yearning for a break after 45 minutes, although I was a serious, top-ranked student.
After an hour of classroom instruction, […]

A US ACADEMIC CLAIMS THAT AN INSTITUTE AT a Singaporean university where he used to work is a œveneer for government and industry research. Robert Bianchi, who until April was visiting research professor at the Middle East Institute (MEI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), says he was dismissed after speaking out about problems […]

WARY OF COMPETITION WHEN IT COMES to global markets, the French embrace it wholeheartedly in classrooms. As school pupils enjoy the end of their summer holiday, few will relish a return to their harsh grading system. Termly reports in secondary schools record pupils™ marks, in Cartesian fashion, to the nearest two decimal points. Every child […]

LIKE MANY RURAL TEENAGERS, Yan Jingtao, the son of a watermelon farmer, did not have quite the stuff for a standard upper-secondary school. Last September, encouraged by his teacher, he and three classmates enrolled instead at a vocational school on the edge of the central city of Kaifeng to study computer animation. By November, he […]

FEW INSTITUTIONS ARE AS CLOSELY associated with the massive open online courses (Moocs) movement as Stanford University. But could monetising Moocs, particularly in professional development courses, be the next step for the California-based institution? Two of the best-known US Moocs platforms, Coursera and Udacity, were conceptualised by Stanford professors, and the university™s location in the […]

ALTHOUGH THE IMPACT OF THE RECENT rain and flood fury which has devastated the northern state of Jammu & Kashmir, is still being assessed, this disaster is certain to take a heavy toll on the education sector ” particularly K-12 education. Indeed it™s arguable that the heaviest price of this essentially man-made disaster will be […]

After completing my B.Com degree programme next year, I want to apply for an MBA degree programme in the US or UK. Please advise.
Avinash Raghavan, Bangalore
To qualify for admission into an MBA degree programme in the US or UK, you need minimum two years work experience. Therefore you should start working immediately after […]

With a diabetes-related death occurring every 10 seconds, this silent epidemic has transformed into a global healthcare emergency
Alarming but true! According to the World Health Organisation, of the 220 million people afflicted with diabetes worldwide, 30 million are Indian citizens. With a diabetes-related death occurring every 10 seconds, this silent epidemic has transformed into […]

The silver lining of the dark cloud looming over India™s sliding higher education system is the emergence of private universities from the shadow and peripheries of the system

UNAPLOLGETICALLY DESCRIBED AS THE œsick child of Indian education by the late unlamented Union HRD minister Arjun Singh, India™s government-dominated higher education system comprising a seemingly impressive 720 […]

Several private sector VET providers have sprung up across the country and are providing excellent vocational education and placing hitherto unemployable youth in well-paid jobs
ONE OF THE MOST POSITIVE developments in Indian education during the new millennium, has been the establishment™s discovery of vocational education and training (VET). Although several educationists such as the […]

Another welcome development in K-12 education in the new millennium is an emerging consensus that extra-curricular education ” sports and music ” is an intrinsic and important component of the education experience of children
BIB-BANG HIGH POTENTIAL initiatives such as curriculum enrichment and cognitive development programmes apart, another overdue and welcome development in K-12 education […]

Fortunately for progressive parents and school managements, a rising number of edupreneurs have developed supplementary and experiential education programmes to enrich school curriculums and develop cognitive skills
IF FOUNDATIONAL EARLY childhood care and education in contemporary Indian education is in its infancy due to sustained government neglect, the primary education scenario is not much better, […]

A growing number of private sector edupreneurs have started adapting global best practices in early childhood care and education
FOR ALMOST HALF A CENTURY after independence, early childhood education if not care, was the blindspot of India™s education establishment and omniscient pundits of the Delhi-based Planning Commission who assumed the mission-impossible burden of centrally planning […]

Despite official discouragement and experiencing the thousand unnatural shocks and constraints that entrepreneurs are heir to, a growing number of determined edupreneurs have promoted businesses and launched innovative initiatives to improve learning outcomes in all sectors of Indian education
WELL INTO THE SECOND DECADE OF THE 21st century, the world™s largest child and youth population […]

IN JULY THE OBSERVER Research Foundation, Mumbai released a study titled Whither Science Education in Indian Colleges? Urgent Reforms to Meet the Challenges of a Knowledge Society, based on a qualitative survey of top-ranked science colleges in Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi. The report was released by eminent scientist Bharat Ratna Dr. C.N.R. Rao. A summary […]

THE CULVER CITY, USA-BASED XPRIZE Foundation ” a non-profit education organisation committed to solving the œworld™s grand challenges by designing and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivised competitive events ” launched a $15 million (Rs.92 crore) Global Learning Xprize competition on September 22.
Xprize Foundation chairman and CEO, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, launched $15M Global Learning Xprize […]

Odisha

Patnaik™s Teachers Day message
THE STATE GOVERNMENT PROPOSES TO gift all class X students, irrespective of economic status, bicycles free-of-charge. This announcement was made by chief minister Naveen Patnaik while felicitating 75 teachers in Bhubaneswar on Teachers Day (September 5).
œThe state government has taken a number of steps to raise the standard of education […]

œIf we do nothing, it will take 75 years or maybe 100 before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. 15.5 million girls will be married in the next 16 years as children. And at current rates, it won™t be until 2086 before all rural African girls can […]

EVER SINCE MAY 2011 WHEN THE Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress party was voted to power in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) bringing 34 years of rule by the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government to an ignominious end, the state has been generating media headlines for all the wrong reasons including shut-down of […]

EVEER SINCE THE SUPREME COURT™S judgement in Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India (2012) exempted private unaided minority schools from the applicability of s.12 (1) (c) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009, which makes it mandatory for all unaided private schools to admit 25 percent of children […]

STIFF RESISTANCE FROM THE southern states ” and Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa in particular ” forced Smriti Irani, former television soap opera star appointed Union HRD (human resource development) minister in the newly-elected BJP/NDA government, to ˜modify™ her ministry™s circular dated June 30 to all 15,000 schools affiliated with the Central Board of […]

THE SOUTHEM LITTORAL STATE of Tamil Nadu (pop: 72 million) boasts 99 percent enrolment in government primary schools and prides itself on its mid-day meal and other welfare programmes. However a recent survey of the country™s 1.20 million government schools conducted by the Union ministry of human resource development and based on District Information System […]

IT’S DOUBTFUL IF B.B. CHAUHAN, education inspector of Mumbai (south zone) in the Maharashtra state government’s education ministry, is aware of the provisions of Article 30 (1) of the Constitution of India which confers a fundamental right upon all linguistic and religious minorities to “establish and administer educational institutions of their choice”. Nor is he […]

ON SEPTEMBER 24 THE bjp-led NDA government in New Delhi withdrew the National Commission for Higher Education & Research (NCHER) Bill, 2011, which proposed the establishment of a supra council for higher education subsuming the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
In […]

Words of appreciation
CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU AND your entire team for the comprehensive EW India School Rankings 2014 (September) issue! The quality of the magazine is continuously improving, with its reach increasing across the country and internationally. The new design and layout gives EducationWorld a much needed contemporary elegance. The magazine is rich with content […]

THE DEVAATATING RAIN and floods which swept Jammu and Kashmir (pop. 12.5 million) last month, taking a toll of 280 lives, 5,000 injured and destroying property valued at Rs.6,000 crore, leaving an estimated  2 million households destitute and at the mercy of a thoroughly inept, callous and corrupt state government,  has brought this troubled north […]

Aperceptive but forgotten monitor of post-independence India™s national development effort, observed that whatever™s true about India, the opposite is also true. In politics, the economy, and society, numerous stories of despair, deprivation and rank injustice abound, but there are as many stories that inspire. This is also true of Indian education. While the big picture […]

AFRICA HAS A POOR REPUTATION FOR scientific innovation. But when South Africa jointly won a bid in 2012 to host the world™s largest science project, for a radio telescope called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), it hoped to foster a new image. œIt™s changing the way the world sees us, as somewhere for cutting-edge science […]

Sanjit (˜Bunker™) Roy
CITATION
A MERE  80 MINUTES BY ROAD DOWN THE new four-lane NH 8 from Jaipur towards Ajmer is Patan, a small town, the point of departure into the scrub and gravel roads of rural India, one of which leads to the village of Tilonia (pop. 4,000).
In 1972, 25-year-old The Doon School […]