Some political pundits interpret it as a grandmaster’s move on the political chessboard of the country in the final run-up to General Election 2019. But in your editor’s ’umble opinion, the conferment by the BJP-led NDA government of the Bharat Ratna — independent India’s highest civilian award — upon former President Pranab Mukherjee has devalued […]
Sobering data for reflection on Republic Day (January 26 when this note is being written) is provided by the UK-based charity Oxfam International which released its Global Inequality Report 2019 on January 20, to coincide with the start of the five-day World Economic Forum 2019 convention in Davos, the annual meeting point of the world’s […]
Although your editor has been in the media business for over four decades, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to retain respect for the schizophrenic, illogical and partisan pundits and journos crowding the print, television and social media. On the one hand, many of them tend to be drum-beating hyper-nationalists proud of the illusory achievements of this […]
The EducationWorld Promising 21st Century India Preschool Awards were introduced last year to felicitate below-the-radar and/or emerging preschools which have introduced contemporary pedagogies and practices in early childhood care and education (ECCE).
To shortlist and select newly-promoted progressive preschools countrywide, we invited nominations from educationists, individuals and schools themselves supported by evidence of best practices in […]
The 5ws (what, where, who, why and when) and 1H (how) is a favoured formula in journalism for writing complete stories. Therefore in journalistic style, let’s examine the 5Ws and 1H of the biggest bugbear of Indian K-12 education — teacher professional development. While it’s commonly acknowledged that teacher quality and training is essential for […]
To develop children’s literacy, it is important to encourage deep reading from early childhood. A competitive case study of two young children is revealing. One is very familiar with tech devices, using phones and iPads often. The other is experienced in the print medium, having been read to and having interacted with books regularly.
Is one […]
At the recent g20 summit held in Buenos Aires (Argentina), heads of the world’s leading economic powers including the United States, China and India gave their unequivocal support and commitment to prioritising early childhood development. There’s increasing awareness worldwide that early childhood education is critical for children to derive the full benefit of school and […]
When i started my journey as an education entrepreneur, I did not follow the teachings of business gurus. I did not think big, nor did I have success as my goal. I didn’t want to conquer the world. All I had was a deep love for children, hatred of rote learning and knowledge of how […]
Loris malaguzzi (1920-1994), the Italian pedagogist and designer of the Reggio Emilia early childhood approach to education, wrote in a poem titled ‘No way. The hundred is there’ that every child has a hundred languages and hundred ways of thinking, playing and making sense of the world, i.e, each child is different and learns differently.
Early […]
EW’s 9th Early Childhood Education Conference convened in Bangalore on January 19 attracted over 350 early childhood care and education professionals, academics, principals and teachers from 70 cities across India – Summiya Yasmeen
Despite massive disruption of flight schedules due to heavy fog enveloping Bangalore’s Kempegowda International Airport, which delayed dozens of outstation arrivals, EducationWorld’s 9th […]
Although India’s school education system is severely criticised in national and international surveys, these indictments are not applicable to the country’s estimated 310,000 licensed private unaided schools. Leaders of India’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools offer valuable advice on good management and best practices – Dilip Thakore
At the fag end of the five-year term […]
Reekrit Serai, Director & Dean, Satluj Group of Schools, Panchkula, Chandigarh
Where would you place education on your national list of priorities?
At the top together with public health.
How best to upgrade government schools and colleges?
The key word is accountability. If accountability is demanded as in other countries, things will improve.
Thinker/philosopher you admire the […]
Dilip Thakore interviewed Mansoor Durrani, vice president of the National Commercial Bank, Bahrain and promoter-chairman of the Eastern Public School, Bhopal (estb.2003) by telephone and email. Excerpts:
The Eastern Public School (EPS), Bhopal has developed into Madhya Pradesh’s first wholly international school providing the PYP, MYP and IB diploma programmes of the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate and […]
Chroniclers of the diasporic Indian experience are many — Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Meena Alexander and Chitra Banerji Divakaruni. Despite this crowded field, that Indian Australian writer Roanna Gonsalves’ debut collection of short stories Sunita De Souza Goes to Sydney and Other Stories, manages to stand out is a testament to the author’s mastery of […]
Concern about corruption in South African higher education has mounted in the aftermath of the murder of a senior scholar who tried to blow the whistle on academic fraud. Gregory Kamwendo, dean of arts at the University of Zululand, was shot and killed outside his home in May last year. Two men appeared in court […]
A US-style controversy over freedom of speech on campus has gripped Germany after a philosophy professor invited two far-right speakers to give talks as part of a seminar series. Marc Jongen, an MP and culture spokesman for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was set to speak at the University of Siegen on December […]
Students who attended single-sex schools feel more anxious and stressed when participating in mixed-gender activities at university, according to a study. The research, based on an analysis of students at a co-educational college in Hong Kong, has led to suggestions that universities should introduce specific support for learners who attended all-male or all-female schools.
The study, […]
Academics worldwide are facing threats of secret recording and denunciation online by their own students, a sign that tactics used by far-right activists in the US are being adopted more widely.
In the US, websites such as the Professor Watchlist — which purports to challenge those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in […]
Good preschool education helps get kids from poor families ready for school proper and do better in standardised tests, but it is expensive. Average preschool per capita spending in the US in 2017 was about $5,000 (Rs.3.5 lakh), a drop in real terms compared with 2002. Seven states had no government programme at all.
Early childhood […]
Leaders of the US ‘free college’ movement are hoping to ride a wave of grassroots reforms to put the issue at the heart of the national debate ahead of the next presidential election.
With total student debt in the US totalling $1.5 trillion (Rs.105 lakh crore), the large Democratic field of potential challengers to Donald Trump […]
In my January despatch in which I expressed cautious optimism about the UK’s secondary education reforms that are at last tackling the disastrous exam grades inflation of the past three decades, I noted that nothing is being done about similar problems in higher education, and the desperate financial situation of many British universities. These two […]
– Sivaramakrishnan V. is the Delhi-based managing director of Oxford University Press, India
The relevance of education in today’s world is possibly far greater compared to most aspects of human development. Arguably, this was insufficiently understood for several decades in post-independence India, until the correlation between education and socio-economic upliftment became apparent. This is perhaps […]
One of the great stories of higher education worldwide is the rise of China’s universities in global esteem. In 2004, only five mainland China universities were ranked in the Top 200 WUR (World University Rankings) when the London-based higher education rating and rankings agencies Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education published their first league table […]
This 27-year-old varsity, University of East London (UEL) is ranked among the world’s Top 200 ‘young universities’ by THE with its school of architecture ranked #2 and civil engineering #3 in London
Sited on three campuses across London — a global hub of finance, fashion, culture and education — the University of East London (UEL, […]
Disappointed with the poor quality of K-12 education provided to children in small town India, in 2010 IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-Ahmedabad alum Arghya Banerjee promoted a model greenfield school named The Levelfield School, in the tier-III town of Suri, West Bengal – Baishali Mukherjee
Sited in Suri (pop. 67,864), a small tier-III town 200 km from […]
Mumbai-based teenager Pingla More had an extraordinarily joyous Children’s Day (November 14) last year when she discovered that the world’s most popular search engine Google displayed her creative doodle on space exploration on its home page, to mark Children’s Day celebrations countrywide.
One of twin daughters of Rupali, an ayurveda doctor, and Rahul More, a corporate […]
A postgraduate student of international business at the city’s PSG College of Arts and Science, sharpshooter Gaayathri Nithyanandam, senior national champion in the 50 m Rifle 3 position (3P) in 2016 with a rich haul of over 100 medals thus far, has been shortlisted to represent India at the prestigious International Shooting Sport Federation […]
Bangalore, January 18. The Bangalore-based The Teacher Foundation (TTF, estb. 2002), a nationally reputed not-for-profit which has trained over 75,000 teachers during the past 16 years, launched its Indian Social and Emotional Learning Framework (ISELF), a curriculum for developing social-emotional competencies in children of the 6-18 age group.
“There are no existing well-researched and articulated standards […]
Itanagar, January 6. Seven Central government promoted Kendriya Vidyalaya primary-secondaries will become operational in the state this year, says an official communique issued after Arunachal Pradesh governor Brig. (Retd.) Dr. B.D. Mishra met with Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar in New Delhi.
The governor also requested the minister to sanction three Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (Central government-promoted […]
“Can a woman give birth to 100 children in one lifetime? Mahabharata says, 100 eggs were fertilised and put into 100 earthen pots. Are they not test tube babies? We had hundreds of Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell research and test tube baby technology. It happened a few thousand years ago. This […]
After almost a quarter century, a major politician in Karnataka has taken the powerful Kannada language lobby in the state head-on.
The state’s ruling JD (S)-Congress government, which was sworn in on May 23, 2018, is determined to provide English-medium education in 1,000 government elementaries to stop the steady exodus of children from the state’s 44,000 […]
With general election 2019 just a few months away, in a major show of strength Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee convened a massive ‘united opposition rally’ in Kolkata on January 19 to highlight the “misrule” of the Bharatiya Janata Party which is in office at the Centre and 16 […]
There’s an unwarranted self-congratulatory mood within Maharashtra’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly in the education ministry, following the national release of Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 on January 15. On several metrics children in rural Maharashtra’s 42,000-plus primary schools performed better than the national average. While the national average for children in […]
The 13th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 — the labour of love of 30,000 volunteers (mainly college students) mobilised by the globally-respected Mumbai/Delhi-based NGO Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994) — released in New Delhi on January 15, has caused a storm in the teacups of the small number of academics, intellectuals and media pundits […]
The academic credentials of faculty members of O.P. Jindal Global University are very impressive (EW January). It’s heartening to see an Indian varsity according high importance to internationalism. Highly-qualified international faculty provides a global outlook and exposure which helps prepare Indian students for international trade.
These are early days for JGU. Hopefully it will live […]
The latest initiative of the ruling BJP/NDA government legislating the Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill 2019 which amends Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution by insertion of an additional 10 percent reserved quota — i.e, in addition to the 22.5 percent reserved for the historically oppressed scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, and 27 percent for […]
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 released in Delhi on January 15, confirms the worst fears of your editors that under the indifferent watch of the neta-babu brotherhood at the Centre and in the states, the country’s vitally important primary/elementary (classes I-VIII) education system is going from bad to worse. Although the credentials […]
As a former editor of two business magazines who switched tracks to focus on the country’s failing education system by co-promoting EducationWorld on the eve of the new millennium — a year of great hope and expectations — I was struck (and remain struck) by the near total disconnect between industry and academia. In particular […]
Popular games that originated in ancient India India has been the land of many globally renowned inventions such as Yoga, Ayurveda, Zero etc. The country’s inventions are ... 
Indian teens bag prizes in International Debate Championship Jyena Surya and Sanvi Pyasi from Mumbai and Jabalpur respectively recently bagged two titles at the second volume of PlanetSpark's ... 
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Canadian International School students raise 60 lakh funds, distribute to two NGOs Students of Canadian International School in Bengaluru put a smile on the faces of students from the Government Higher Primary ... 
Undistinguished term in Prime Minister’s office
Rajiv Desai is chairman and CEO of New Delhi-based Comma Consulting Pvt. Ltd and Congress party spokesperson
As the BJP/NDA government at the Centre and prime minister Narendra Modi near the end of their eventful but unproductive, even disastrous terms in office, it may be worthwhile, even imperative, to take stock of their records, especially of […]