Although it’s derisively referred to as the idiot box for the shallow, ephemeral infotainment it provides, the power of television news channels to expose ground realities in some of the country’s hidden areas of darkness cannot be matched by the print media.
A case in point is CNN-IBN’s excellent multi-episode documentary titled No Country for Children […]
The TOI Story: How a newspaper changed the rules of the game by Sangita P. Menon Malhan; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.350; 261 pp
Of the four great estates of post-independence India — legislature, executive, judiciary and the press — the one that has most substantially fulfilled the expectations of the founding fathers of the Constitution is the […]
As more people around the world start to study Mandarin, China’s education ministry has revealed that much work still needs to be done teaching the language at home. Last month it announced that 400 million Chinese, nearly a third of the population, are unable to communicate in Mandarin, and that many more cannot speak it […]
At a time when you might have expected to hear the youth of Brazil chanting about the nation’s football team, they called out “vem pra rua” — “come to the street” — an invitation to protest against corruption, police aggression and poor public services. At the peak of the Confederations Cup competition in June, a […]
Just months after Quebec had at last emerged from waves of violent student protests over higher education funding, the prospect of another divisive row looms after the provincial government announced plans that would force secularisation on staff working in higher education. The separatist government of Pauline Marois — whose election as premier last year finally […]
Students in countries affected by the Arab Spring are failing to get a proper university education because they still feel unable to challenge their tutors. Speaking at the annual conference of the European Association for International Education (September 10-13) in Istanbul, Khaled Fahmy, professor of history at the American University of Cairo (AUC), said the […]
Thousand of international students may be shunning the US, UK and Commonwealth countries in favour of continental Europe, where a growing number of courses are being offered in English. A total of 6,407 taught Masters programmes in the language were offered in continental Europe in June this year — a 38 percent rise on the […]
Several US projects launched this autums are expanding the availability of free electronic textbooks using open educational resources (OER), as commercial publishers scramble to make more of their own titles available digitally.
The activity comes in response to the mounting cost of textbooks — up 812 percent since 1978, much faster than even tuition fees, […]
Power among the world’s leading universities has shifted further eastwards, with mainland Europe suffering the worst losses, show the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-14.
In general, this year’s tables are marked by their stability: the California Institute of Technology holds on to top spot for the third year in a row; the same institutions make up […]
The need for education systems dispensing globally accepted knowledge and skillsets is too well-known to bear reiteration. The emergence of a global marketplace for high order critical thinking, analytical and communication skills, the blurring of national boundaries in relation to life-and-death matters such as terrorism and environmental degradation, rapidly rising standards of educational achievement around […]
Can you tell me, Socrates — is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice. Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else? — (opening question in Platos Meno)It has become normative for leaders and coaches to focus on the […]
I want to pursue a career in design after completing my B.Com degree next year. However I’m confused whether I should sign up for a course in web or graphic design. Please advise.
Shalini Jagannath, Bangalore
Graphic design is the better option as it prepares you for production and layouts of newspapers, magazines, journals, corporate reports and […]
Contrary to conventional wisdom, venture capital firms aren’t run by wealthy financiers who magnanimously fund start-ups, but by professionals who study, analyse and assess capital mobilisation proposals submitted by entrepreneurs
If you believe you have the ability to spot a good business opportunity and aspire to fund the dreams of entrepreneurs who can create jobs and […]
A.K. & Sanjay Agarwal
MDN Edify Education, Hyderabad
Both commerce graduates of Osmania University, siblings Anjani Kumar (AKA) and Sanjay Agarwal (SA) are directors of the Hyderabad-based MDN Edify Education Pvt. Ltd. Since the company was incorporated in 2009, it has signed content and curriculum provision and management contracts with 164 preschools and 16 K-12 schools […]
Although only the intellectually honest — and this excludes the vast majority of the country’s Left intellectuals who dominate the academy — will admit it, Indian education is steadily and inexorably being privatised. While post-independence India’s fast-expanding middle class seceded from the public/government school education system several decades ago, of late even aspirational lower middle […]
A dozen shining stars of the co-ed, CBSE-affiliated Lakshmipat Singhania Academy, Kolkata (LSA, estb.1996), a K-12 day school (ranked #14 in the latest EW India School Rankings in the city of joy), won the 20 Settlement Design Competition of the Johnson Space Centre, Houston, Texas, held between August 2-5. Earlier in February, the LSA team […]
On education seminars and workshops circuits in India and abroad, the new buzzwords are 21st century, new millennium, and communication and soft skills learning. Even in India, theres been a sudden shift in favour of developing critical thinking, analysis and problem solving skills. In particular, theres a new and welcome awareness that contemporary education requires […]
As digital age technology becomes increasingly integrated with the daily lives of people around the world, teachers will be working with a new generation which has been ‘born digital’ — a population of young people who use technology intuitively. Consequently schools will have to match the pace of change and teach students by using 21st […]
– Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest, Indian Express and Khaleej Times
In the latest THE (Times Higher Education) World University Rankings 2013-14 published in October, none of India’s 33,000 colleges and 659 universities are ranked among the Top 200. As usual, the THE league tables are headed by American and British universities — California […]
Following the proclaimed success of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘education for all) primary education programme introduced in 1999, the government of India has recently set its sights on rapidly expanding — indeed universalising — secondary education under its Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) programme. Given the nations massive population of 480 million children below age […]
Set in the heart of one of the world’s most famous and dynamic cities, New York University (NYU), USA is a top-ranked private research higher ed institution with an enrollment of over 50,000 students mentored by 3,100 full-time faculty. Founded in 1831 by Albert Gallatin, who served as secretary of the treasury […]
Named after American missionary Miles Bronson who published the first Anglo-Assamese dictionary in 1867, Miles Bronson Residential School, Guwahati has come a long way from its rented premises in Jyotinagar
Sited on a spacious 26-acre campus abutting the international airport in Borjhar on the outskirts of Guwahati, the CBSE-affiliated Miles Bronson Residential School […]
The University of Chicago (UoC) is set to inaugurate a new academic centre in the central business district of Connaught Place, Delhi, next spring (March-April). The varsity’s Delhi centre will be a base for research and education for UoC faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates working in India and South Asia.
Expressing the opinion that education is the most important investment for development and progress of society, Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio said the state government has established private colleges in almost every district. Addressing the All-Nagaland College Students Union’s 16th biennial confer-ence at Phek district on October 3, Rio said the state […]
“I will run RJD with my son, like Congress is run by Rahul-Sonia.” Rabri Devi, wife of former Bihar chief minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav after he was convicted in the fodder scam case (India Today, October 14)
“Innovation and creativity are a part of the American culture, a natural trait of an immigrant society. […]
A performance audit for the year 2012-13 of the Central government-sponsored Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS, estb.1975) in Gujarat tabled in the legislative assembly on October 3, has embarrassed the three-term chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s officially anointed 2014 prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In his audit report, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) […]
An unforeseen silver lining to the dark cloud of partition hanging over the south-eastern littoral state of Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84 million), is the sudden awareness of student leaders, who have been at the forefront of the agitation for and against bifurcation, that English language proficiency is essential for airing their opinions in the national […]
Over 80,000 high school teachers of 20,000 state government and government aided secondary schools in Karnataka are all set to strike work in mid-November to force the six-month-old Congress state government led by chief minister M. Siddaramaiah, to raise their pay to the Sixth Pay Commission scales of Central government schools. At a meeting organised […]
The overwhelming majority of Indias 1.40 million schools — especially 1.30 million govern-ment primaries — are bleak, uninviting institutions defined by crumbling classrooms, insanitary conditions, corporal punishment and chronic teacher absenteeism. The countrys 200,000 fee-levying private schools which host almost 40 percent of all school-going children are relatively more inviting. But getting to school — […]
With the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on October 3 approving Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA), a Central government-sponsored scheme for upgrading the higher education system in India’s 29 states and seven Union territories, new hope has risen in official circles that the “sick child of Indian education’’ — the tertiary education system as […]
Your cover story ‘Few takers for grudging invitation’ (EW October) has accurately anal-ysed why foreign university managements are not jumping with joy, following the HRD ministry’s ordinance allowing foreign education institutions to establish campuses in India. The slothful bureaucracy, corruption, and archaic rules and regulations are so cumber-some to navigate that the best-intentioned foreign varsities […]
On October 7, the first shot of what promises to be a protracted war for the hearts and minds of the Indian people was fired at a sparingly attended media conference at the Press Club, Bangalore. The Children First Party of India (CFPI), registered by the Election Commission of India […]
For the Central and state governments, and the judiciary which abhors the “commercialisation of educationâ€, they are hate figures. Even the middle class which can’t do without their services and prefers to entrust the future — indeed the lives — of their precious children to them, has been brainwashed by the country’s confused socialist intelligentsia […]
An incident of ragging, where a junior student was harassed has come to light in Kerala’s Kariavattom Government College, Thiruvananthapuram. A first-year biotechnology student was .....Read More
— Ashwini Chandrashekhar, Manager, computational thinking at Educational Initiatives, Bengaluru When taught mere coding students are trained to write basic instructions but not develop the .....Read More
Schools by other names
– Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest, Indian Express and Khaleej Times
In the latest THE (Times Higher Education) World University Rankings 2013-14 published in October, none of India’s 33,000 colleges and 659 universities are ranked among the Top 200. As usual, the THE league tables are headed by American and British universities — California […]