Year: 2021
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Schools: Anand Niketan
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This is the fifth post in a series on alternative learning spaces. The original article appeared in the Teacher Plus magazine and is available here. I don’t think Gandhiji will be pleased to see what they have done to his ashram at Sevagram. Everything is manicured and tourist-ready and there is a souvenir shop. To…
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Schools: Manzil
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This is the fourth post in a series on alternative learning spaces. The original article appeared in the Teacher Plus magazine and is available here. I met Ravi Gulati, the founder of Manzil, at a learning conference in Delhi where he was one of the speakers. The gentleness and wisdom that shone through his words…
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Schools: Indus World School
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This is the third post in the series on alternative schools. The original article appeared in the Teacher Plus magazine and is available here. (Note: The article was originally written in 2017 and many things have changed at the school and its parent company, but the radical experiment that the article chronicles is worth implementing…
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Schools: Aksharnandan
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This is the second post in the series on alternative schools. The original article appeared in the Teacher Plus magazine and is available here. Hope you like it… “I would have our young men and young women learn as much of English and other world languages as they like, and then expect them to give…
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Schools: Muni International
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I visited many alternative schools and wrote short articles about them as part of a fellowship I had with Wipro Applying Thought In Schools (WATIS). These articles were later published as a regular column in the Teacher Plus magazine. I will post some of these articles here to highlight the variety of experiments going on…
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Hind Swaraj: M K Gandhi
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Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works — writings, speeches, letters, interviews and telegrams — have been meticulously compiled with appendices of relevant background material by the publications division of the Government of India. The collected works runs into 100 volumes of some 500 pages each. The people who have read through or sampled these writings say that…
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On Education: J Krishnamurti
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The following are three excerpts from chapter 1 of ‘On Education’ by J Krishnamurti. The full book is available for download here. Excerpt 1: Education is not only learning from books, memorizing some facts, but also learning how to look, how to listen to what the books are saying, whether they are saying something true…
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The Renaissance in India: Sri Aurobindo
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The following are three excerpts from the long essay ‘Renaissance in India’ by Sri Aurobindo. I hope that these excerpts add to your understanding of education and modernity in the Indian context. Excerpt 1: An ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and…
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The history of Bharatvarsha: Rabindranath Tagore
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“The kind of unity that the European Civilization has opted for is discord-centered; the kind of unity that Bharatavarshiya Civilization has opted for is concord-centered.”– From ‘The history of Bharatvarsha’ by Rabindranath Tagore The article from which the above quote is taken reminds us to stay grounded in an Indian perspective when we try to…
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Microschools: Networks
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The current schools seem to contain the following components: – The area of land on which the school stands– The classrooms, labs, library etc., the academic infrastructure– The playground, swimming pool etc., the sports infrastructure– The office and other administrative infrastructure, the engine that runs the school Except for sitting in the classrooms for most…
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Microschools: The future of education?
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I wrote a blog post titled ‘The educational institution of the future: A fantasy’ in January 2009. Some days ago I discovered that the idea put forward in this post became what are now being called microschools. And Wikipedia tells me that the name microschools was put forward for the first time in February 2010.…
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If education has to happen?
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(This Monday’s post is a slight twist on a short story written by my favourite author – Vaikkom Muhammad Basheer. The story is called ‘Yuddham avasanikkanamenkil?’ or ‘If war has to end?’. I replaced ‘If war has to end’ with ‘If education has to happen’ and made some other trivial changes to get the story…