Unlike most girls her age, Mahalakshmi Mugunthakumar (14) doesn’t hang out with friends, watch movies or play outdoor games. She is content spending time honing her skills in the mind game of chess, which has won her an impressive string of national and international titles.
Recently (April), this class X student of Velammal Matriculation Higher Secondary […]
The puppy-under-motor car analogy drawn by Gujarat chief minister and BJP’s national election committee chief Narendra Modi whose prospects of becoming prime minister following the 2014 General Election are improving by the day, reveals a dangerous mindset. Responding to a question by a Reuters correspondent on whether he experienced remorse over the massacre of 2,000 […]
Dr. PA Fazal Ghafoor, President, Muslim Education Society, Kerala
Where would you place education on your national list of priorities?
At the very top. Because illiteracy and under-education are the greatest impediments to national development.
How best to modernise madrassa schools?
Add secular syllabuses and curriculums to round off and complete religious education.
Thinker/philosopher you […]
The Way of the Knife: The Untold Story of USA’s Secret War by Mark Mazzetti; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.499; 379 pp
“No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has become a killing machine, an organisation consumed with manhunting… Prior to the attacks of September 11 […]
Malala Yousufzai’s birthday (July 12) was declared Malala Day by the United Nations.
In October 2012, when a lone gunman shot a teenage girl in the head in Pakistan’s Swat valley, he couldn’t in his wildest imagination have known that the life he meant to snuff out would come back to haunt him — and those […]
Officially released on May 13, the Khoj (search) study is the outcome of interviews with 1,482 teachers and 18 principals of 100 schools across four cities (Delhi, Chandigarh, Pune and Chennai). Its objective was to assess on-the-ground impact of the continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) system, implemented in 14,358 schools affiliated with the Delhi-based Central Board of […]
In July 2009, then Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal announced a series of populist school reforms to reduce the burden of academic stress which students are reportedly suffering countrywide. One of them was to replace the periodic and particularly ‘sudden death’ final examination with continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE). This suggestion was accepted with unusual […]
Four years after the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation schema was adopted with surprising alacrity by the Central Board of Secondary Education and introduced in all 14,358 CBSE-affiliated schools, the CCE experiment is floundering in a sea of confusion with school principals and teachers struggling to switch from the traditional examination system. Summiya Yasmeen reports
Although on the […]
For eight months I have been rising at 4 a.m to sit at my computer and dredge the depths of memory, as I write what will surely be my last book: Changing the Game. The book is part memoir, part life lessons, and ultimately an introduction to my latest project, A-Games.
A-Games is a programme for […]
Youths in northern Nigeria’s Borno state, where many members of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram (BH) have been arrested in recent weeks, are increasingly joining vigilante gangs to pass on the identity of BH members to the military-police Joint Task Force (JTF) following a string of deadly attacks on schools, according to vigilante groups […]
Five pioneering international students who risked life and limb to reach England before going on to become the architects of modern Japan, are being celebrated by a University College London (UCL) event.
The story of the so-called ‘Choshu Five’, a group of Japanese noblemen who studied at UCL 150 years ago, is testimony to the transformative power […]
Both relief and tears greeted the results of France’s school-leaving baccalaureat exam on July 5. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country’s exam papers were corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy […]
Jiao Yizhou, a 17-year-old student at Jiangsu College for International Education in Nanjing, hopes to study environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. Like many applicants to university, however, he is anxious about the entrance tests and essays involved. He says he knows that some Chinese students cheat on their applications, […]
Western universities based in Qatar are not expecting any major shake-ups under the country’s new emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, despite what is said to be his preference for Arabic — rather than English-language — instruction at university level.
Tamim was handed power over the gas-rich Gulf state on June 25 by his 61-year-old father, Hamad […]
For the second consecutive year, South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology heads a list of the world’s top 100 universities under 50 years vintage. The UK’s “plate-glass” universities have lost ground.
Founded in 1986, Pohang — better known as Postech — retains its top spot in Times Higher Education’s second annual 100 Under 50 Rankings, comfortably […]
The Maharashtra Secondary School Certificate (SSC) results declared this year marked a major milestone for Manjushree Patil, founder-director of the Aatman Academy, Thane, (estb.2011), a first-of-its-kind specialised institution for children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. The school’s first batch of seven students, who wrote the class X SSC exam of […]
Chennai-based Gita Wolf is the founder-editor of Tara Books Pvt. Ltd (estb. 1994), which began as a children’s book publishing house but has gradually expanded its range of 15 titles per year to cover adults. Wolf’s interest in experimenting with book forms and innovations has given Tara Books a unique identity as a pioneer of handmade books, […]
Chandigarh-based Jaiprakash Singh Hasrajani is the co-founder and CEO of Taaleem Academy Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2009), the holding company of Taaleem India, a skills development enterprise providing learning management system (LMS) packages to education institutions and corporates, and the Taaleem College of International Studies (TCIS), Chandigarh which offers business management study — including MBA — programmes.
Newspeg. Taaleem Academy recently […]
Gorsi Parekh is the chairperson and managing director of the Gandhinagar (Gujarat)-based Arraycom (India) Ltd. Arraycom is a well-known name in the telecom integrated broadcast systems and seismology industries in Gujarat and beyond.
A family and child welfare postgrad of the reputed Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, Parekh intended to build a career in social […]
Ashwin Ajila is the promoter and managing director of the Bangalore-based iNurture Education Solut-ions Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2005), a company which specialises in developing and delivering industry-specific educational content designed to improve the employability and productivity of youth streaming out of the country’s colleges and universities. iNurture, which has a headcount of 250 — most comprise […]
The deluge of ninety percenters that routinely follows in the wake of class X and XII board examination results declared in May, highlights an urgent need for close assessment of India’s school system. Having had the privilege of studying in India and in the West, of becoming a schoolteacher by choice, and of teaching in […]
After completing my Plus Two (science) in 2014, I want to enroll in a design degree programme. Please advise me.
Bhaskar Rao, Chennai
The National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, offers seven undergraduate and 17 postgraduate degree programmes. Specialisations include industrial, communication, textile, lifestyle accessories, apparel, IT and retail design. The National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), […]
A heavy and onerous responsibility of drawing up detailed blueprints for the construction of new towns and cities has devolved upon professionally qualified urban planners, writes Indra Gidwani
With India’s urban population slated to increase from 350 million currently to 580 million by 2030, and the number of urban households predicted to rise from 22 million […]
One of the paradoxes of K-12 education in India is that while the overwhelming majority of the public — including parents within the socio-economically deprived households — is desperate to provide their children with English medium or at least high quality English language education, several state governments or more accurately neo-literate politicos and bureaucrats within […]
One of the few and perhaps most valuable upsides of almost 200 years of British rule in the Indian subcontinent during which the GDP growth rate was less than 1 percent per annum, is that it introduced the English language to the people of India. Modernisation ideals and the ideas of national freedom and democracy […]
The start of the new academic year marks the culmination of a season when parents are obliged to pull every string and use their influence with politicians, bureaucrats, high court judges and even media personnel to put in a word for admission of their wards into the country’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools. Dilip Thakore […]
A team comprising Jyotirmoy Guha, Arka De and Aditya Gupta — students of the private sector Heritage Institute of Technology (HIT), Kolkata — has won the TI Analog Design Phase I (TI ADC) contest 2012-2013. The trio of final year students reading electronics and communication engineering, were awarded the first prize of Rs.10,000 in the contest […]
High cut-offs demanded by the country’s best colleges and the mad annual scramble for school and college admissions are enough proof that the demand for high quality arts, commerce and science as also professional education by far exceeds supply.
Encouragement and spread of distance education (DE) offer a practical solution to this problem. But shortsighted bureaucrats […]
A seven-time recipient of the times higher education awards, University of Leicester, UK’s four colleges offer a wide range of undergraduate, postgrad and doctoral programmes to 23,000 students
Founded in 1921 and awarded a royal charter in 1957, the University of Leicester is consistently ranked among the Top 20 universities in the UK. […]
Within a short span of 14 years, SSPM College of Engineering, Sindhudurg has succeeded in impacting technical education and industry in the Konkan belt of Maharashtra in a big way
Sited in the picturesque town of Kankavali (pop. 14,625) — a buzzing seaside town in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district, 460 km from India’s commercial […]
The Symbiosis Institute of International Studies, a constituent school of Symbiosis International University, Pune, has scheduled an international relations conference titled ‘India and Development Partnerships in Asia and Africa: Towards a New Paradigm’ on December 14-15 at Symbiosis’ Lavale campus in Pune.
“The conference will provide a platform for academicians, researchers, corporates and policy makers to […]
Bihar
First BLISS graduates
The Bihar state government felicitated 120 teachers trained in English teaching under the British government-spons-ored Bihar Language Initiative in Secondary Schools (BLISS) project, at a ceremony in Patna on July 3.
Speaking on the occasion, Bihar’s education minister P.K. Shahi said: “We have a staggering 20 million students in classes I-X to […]
“I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists.”
Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani teenage education activist, addressing UN Youth Assembly (July 13)
“Modi says we “hide behind the burqa of secularism”. Preferable, surely, to the khaki shorts of intolerance and hatred that he now tries to hide?”
Shashi Tharoor, Union HRD […]
The world over the process of admission into colleges and universities is simple. Students complete admission forms, provide required documentation, submit to interview and/or entrance exams, agree to pay prescribed fees and are admitted or rejected by college/university managements. But under Indian-style socialism distinguished by disrespect for property rights and driven by government need to […]
Messing with English language learning in West Bengal has cost this eastern seaboard state (pop. 91 million), which right until 1970 was commonly acknow-ledged as the country’s most literate and well-educated, dearly. From the mid- 1960s when Marxist fever spread through West Bengal’s famous colleges and universities, the state’s education system has been in decline. […]
The tragic death of 23 children of the Dharmasati Gandaman School, Chhapra, in Saran district, Bihar, after consuming the pesticide-contaminated school mid-day meal on July 16 and numerous scary stories of this type, suggest the rot in India’s school mid-day meal scheme — the world’s largest, covering 120 million children — is systemic. Two days […]
Are students in Gujarat losing interest in professional (engineering, business management, etc) education, or is the country’s industrially fastest growing state experiencing a glut of professional education institutions?
State education department officials are keeping their fingers crossed as the admission process for professional courses in Gujarat moves into the final stages amid fears that the vacancies […]
The latest Annual School Census 2012-13 report of the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning & Adminis-tration (NUEPA) for Maharashtra indicates that 93 percent schools in the state are deficient of infrastructure mandated by s.19 and Schedule of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Only 7,355 of 103,625 schools fulfil all […]
The Delhi state government is set to finalise a historic decision to allow recognised private unaided schools in the national capital to run two shifts. Addressing media personnel on July 5, education minister Prof. Kiran Walia said a government-appointed panel has drawn up rules and regulat-ions for the citys top-ranked private schools to double their […]
Thanks for your insightful cover story ‘Indias most respected non-IIM B-schools (EW July). Your analysis that the huge reputation the IIMs enjoy is because they attract the countrys best graduates, is bang on. Only the top 2 percent who score 98-99 percent in the Common Admission Test qualify for admission into the IIMs. These are […]
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