EducationWorld November 17

That the public schooling system is tragically broken hardly needs proof — the massive abandonment of government schools (despite their providing free tuition, books, uniform and mid-day meals) and migration to fee-charging schools, even by children of poorest households, is proof enough. The Union HRD ministry’s District Information System on Education (DISE) data show that […]

Vamsi Krishna (34) is CEO and co-founder of the Bangalore-based Vedantu Innovations Pvt. Ltd (VIPL, estb. 2014), an edtech company which offers class VI-XII CISCE/CBSE students after-school supplementary learning solutions, including test preparation for admission into top-ranked engineering colleges. 

On its patented software app which can be downloaded on any Android device, Vedantu tutors deliver course content […]

Despite rising tuition and residential accommodation fees in foreign countries — especially the US, UK, Canada and Europe — the annual outflow of students from India who venture abroad for quality higher education shows no sign of decreasing. 

However, it’s a mistake to believe that colleges/universities abroad are accessible by all who can afford the tuition and […]

Any sentence containing the phrases “Donald Trump” and “campus sexual assault” could reasonably be expected to conclude with the word “outrage”. Yet when President Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, announced her intention to “revoke or rescind” directives to universities on handling sexual assault issued by the Obama administration, the move was quietly welcomed by […]

Germany remains way ahead of other developed nations in terms of the share of new students who choose to study STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects, the latest data show.

According to the Education at a Glance report published by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 40 percent of new higher education entrants […]

India’s universities aren’t the only ones experiencing stress and turbulence. Scholars and students worldwide face a “continuing global crisis of attacks” driven by an “anti-democratic fear of universities” as bastions of free thought, according to an international network that promotes academic freedom.

Figures released by Scholars at Risk reveal that global higher education was subject to […]

Australia’s education minister has promised to be “pragmatic” in his bid to get controversial funding reforms over the line, but maintains that the package of spending cuts and tuition fee increases will not damage universities’ teaching and research.

Higher education institutions remain strongly opposed to the Liberal-led administration’s plans to cut sector funding by 2.5 percent, […]

Catalonia’s referendum has brought into sharp focus the potential benefits of independence for science in the region, but it has also highlighted the potential pitfalls that researchers could face if relations between the separatist region and Madrid sour further.

Catalonia is one of Spain’s richest regions, providing 19 percent of Spain’s gross domestic product. It’s home […]

Days before the start of the new school year, Merve, a class VIII science teacher, is flipping through the pages of her old biology textbook. A picture of a giraffe appears, alongside a few lines about Charles Darwin. Teaching evolution in a predominantly Muslim country where six out of ten people refer to themselves as […]

New Zealand and Canada have been singled out as countries that best prepare students for the future, in a major study assessing the “effectiveness” of education systems. The Worldwide Educating for the Future Index, produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit for the Yidan Prize Foundation, evaluates education systems in 35 economies across 16 indicators, which […]

Of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments held around the world, Wimbledon is the most prestigious. The other three, the Australian, French and US Open, pale in comparison. Wimbledon isn’t only the oldest of them all, it combines tradition and glamour – Rahul Singh

This summer was green and pleasant because despite the odds being against […]

How Pakistan got divided, Rao Farman Ali Khan, OXFORD university press; Rs.1,150, Pages 298

Rao Farman Ali Khan’s book under review is of interest because, as the Pakistani newspaper Dawn noted when he died in January 2004, he had been a “key player in the East Pakistan crisis”.

Commissioned in the Artillery regiment in 1942, Rao Farman Ali Khan served many […]

The Allahabad high court’s belated (as usual) ‘not guilty’ verdict in the Aarushi murder case of 2008 seems to have been taken as a personal setback by popular television news anchor Arnab Goswami. For those who have been living under a rock, 14-year-old Aarushi was murdered in her Noida home nine years ago, and her […]

Shabdasharan Tadvi, Gujarat’s minister for tribal welfare, formally inaugurated the Birsa Munda Tribal University in the tribal-dominated town of Rajpipla in the Narmada district of Vadodara. Addressing the media on October 14, the minister said the university will function from the premises of Adarsh Nivasi Shala for a temporary period, and later shift to its […]

An open, continuous and uninterrupted tragedy is unfolding within Indian Railways (IR) with none so poor to find solutions to end the daily carnage on the metal rails of this public sector monopoly’s runaway killer trains. Twenty-nine train accidents were reported in the first six months of this calendar year which killed 57 people and […]

In a quasi-literate country where political parties thrive on opportunism and cheap populism, offering the public free water, electricity, schooling, food etc, one can’t single out the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which in a totally unexpected counter-wave to the BJP shortly after the latter swept General Election 2014, won the Delhi state election with an […]

I am a regular attendee of the EducationWorld India School Rankings Awards ceremonies and I must say it gets better each year. It’s a great forum for school principals to meet and network. For us at the Jodhamal Public School, Jammu, it was a great feeling to be ranked the #1 school in Jammu & […]

Among the major recommendations of the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2017-18 released on October 24 in Paris by Unesco, are a call upon governments to design accountability systems for schools and teachers that are supportive of children and avoid punitive mechanisms especially those based on narrow performance measures, allow for democratic participation, respect media […]

Maharashtra’s state education ministry has softened its stance on private agencies conducting extra-curricular competitive tests and talent search exams  for primary-secondary students. On January 7 (2017), the government had imposed a complete ban on schools from participating in such competitive tests/exams. However, on October 4, through a revised GR (government resolution) it issued new guidelines […]

An October 3 government circular asking private schools in the state to disclose salary payments made to their teachers, has sent the managements of Karnataka’s 19,593 unaided private K-12 schools into a tizzy. A decade after the state government made it mandatory for unaided private schools to pay their teachers a minimum monthly salary of […]

The West Bengal Government’s much-hyped education hub, which was announced in February 2015 and promised at least 30 educational institutes concentrated in Rajarhat Town on the eastern fringe of Kolkata, has started taking shape. The hub has been allotted 150 acres in the township to establish higher education campuses. Equipped with a football ground, sports […]

“The debate between public and private schools has raged for long. This is a false hiatus. Societies with rising aspirations need both equity and excellence. Seeking inclusiveness while ensuring acceptable outcomes is invariably challenging. Public policies must be designed to harmonise a possible asymmetry.”

NK Singh, former member of Parliament, on how the RTE Act and bias […]

An alumna of the top-ranked Jodhamal Public School and currently a first year humanities student of Jammu’s Government College for Women, Nandini Kapoor (19) made her debut in playback singing in regional producer Surinder Manhas’ Dogri film Doli, set for release next month.

Christened Jammu’s ‘nightingale’ by her growing legion of fans, this 19-year-old is elated […]

This 230-year-old university is ranked among the Top 10 US research varsities by the Center for Measuring University Performance, Arizona

Founded in 1787, the University of Pittsburgh (aka Pitt) is one of the most respected research universities of America. Though a privately managed institution, the university is a member of Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth System of Higher Education […]

There’s growing concern in academia about checking quality deterioration in higher education. New initiatives, innovations and research require urgent attention. One of these initiatives was announced by prime minister Narendra Modi while addressing the centenary celebrations of Patna University on October 14. He promised an allocation of Rs.10,000 crore to 20 universities — equally distributed […]