Education Notes

Uttar Pradesh AMU rebuffs Yadav SAMAJWADI PARTY chief Mulayam Singh Yadav who was slated to address a seminar at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on February 24, cancelled his visit after widespread protests led by university faculty on the AMU campus. Yadav had been invited to address the seminar organised by the Sir Syed Movement, a social organisation. AMU Teachers Association secretary Aftab Alam welcomed the cancellation and said the university™s community is anguished by the callous manner in which the UP government  handled last year™s riots in Muzaffarnagar. œWe are also upset by Yadav™s opposition to the Communal Violence Prevention Bill. We had always looked upon the Samajwadi Party as a champion of secularism and we™re taken aback by the recent events, he explained. Gujarat Embarrassing textbook howlers CHIEF MINISTER Narendra Modi who is the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party anointed candidate for the PMO (prime minister™s office) and who holds out Gujarat as a model of socio-economic development, has been embarrassed by egregious factual, grammatical and spelling errors in a social science textbook produced by the state government for class VI-VIII students. According to this text Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on October 30, 1948; Japan launched a nuclear attack on the United States during World War II; After Partition, a new country called ˜Islamic Islamabad™ came into being with its capital Khyber Ghat in the Hindukush mountains and all south Indians are ˜Madrasis™. Despite these blatant errors, Gujarat State Board for School Textbooks (GSBST) executive president, Nitin Pethani, has declined to withdraw the textbooks issued to 50,000 English-medium primary school children. œThere™s no major issue but only mistakes of translation. A two-member committee has been appointed to study the books. Once the committee™s report is ready, we will release errata, he informed media personnel in Gandhinagar on February 26. New Delhi Jindal-Queen Mary concordat TO INREASE educational interaction between India and the UK, the Delhi-based O.P. Jindal Global University (OPJGU) and Queen Mary University (QMU), London have signed an academic exchange and co-operation agreement. Under the accord, both universities will promote initiatives for collaborative teaching, research, and faculty and student exchanges in the humanities and social sciences. The agreement was signed in London by OPJGU  vice chancellor C. Raj Kumar and Simon Gaskell, president of QMU, on February 14. œUK-India higher education cooperation is a central pillar of relations between our two countries in the 21st century. Academic collaboration with QMU will open new vistas in joint programming and research in the humanities and social sciences within the Commonwealth context, and offer a new model for globalisation of higher education, said Kumar in a statement. Meghalaya Dalai Lama lauds missionaries ADDRESSING OVER ONE thousand members of over 13 different religious groups at the U Soso Tham auditorium in Shillong on February 5, Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama deplored religious conflicts arising out of differences in ideology and philosophy. In particular, he lauded the work of Christian missionaries for promoting education and providing healthcare in remote areas worldwide. œI believe…