Tag: Education

One hundred and fifty years after Maria Montessori’s birth, tens of thousands of teachers around the world still hail her innovations and educational philosophy. One...

By legitimising privatisation in the education sector, the NEP 2020 is scripting a new India with varied imaginations and trajectories.

From duties in Covid surveys to being stationed on roads to impose fines on those without masks, government school teachers are compelled to do everything apart from teaching in a post-pandemic India.

From reduction in homework and the burden of textbooks to eliminating the compulsive carrying of heavy school bags, a new government plan may bring some respite to school children. 

In a remote district where child marriage was a rampant practice, educator Ranjitsinh Disale’s efforts for bringing poor tribal girls to school in Maharashtra is indeed inspirational. 

Low funding in education has costed Bihar a lot and unless it prioritises school education and its democratisation under the RTE, it is bound to remain educationally deprived.

A story of life long commitment inspires generations to walk on the same path and convert dreams into realities. 

This program is about how the widespread insistence on online teaching-learning in what is being called the 'new-normal' must be contested and challenged because it doesn't take into consideration the socio-economic locations of a majority of Indian students who come from economically disadvantaged sections and have no access to regular educational opportunities let alone dedicated technology or the internet for accessing online teaching-learning. It becomes clearly established that an already exclusive/elitist access to education becomes an even distant dream for lakhs of Indian students amid the pandemic giving way to issues such as forceble drop-out, discontinuation of academic pursuit, premature entry into the workforce or being entrapped into child trafficking or being forced into early marriages. The digital-divide is sure to have deep and long-term implications for the domain of education and we have ample evidence to show that it is resulting in suicides, mental anxieties and sheer desperation in students, the latest among such cases being the suicide of an LSR student in Telanagana who didn't get her fellowship money, couldn't afford to buy a smartphone to access her online classes and thus took her own life out of helplessness and a sense of being left out. The coronavirus pandemic has only accentuated and underlined the inherent hierarchies/cleavages and walls of separation within the Indian education system.

This case study presents the exemplary leadership of a head teacher who leveraged upon community support to transform the school infrastructure and learning environment of the Gadgaon primary government school.

In a society embedded in socio-economic hierarchies, access to online education is limited to the privileged and leaves behind a large section of those coming from marginalised backgrounds.