Author: Arun Elassery
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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…
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The cheerful pandit: Kapil Kapoor
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“In Patanjali’s words, all great thinkers of India were Shishtas, cultured people. A cultured person in our tradition is one whose worldly goods are constituted by a jar of grain. And without motive or purpose a Shishta devotes himself to a branch of knowledge and excels in it. Today he will be called a moorkh.”–…
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A mathematical genius: C.K. Raju
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“Education today is unfortunately seen as a process of learning to ape the West, a la Macaulay, so math is taught from a purely Western perspective. This way of teaching math retraces the European experience of learning math: so the historical difficulties experienced by Europeans are replayed in the math classroom. The solution to this…
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A radical spokesman of Tradition: A.K. Saran
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“Knowledge is, paradoxically, a knowledge of the Unknowable, a thought of the Unthinkable, a vision of Things unseen, an audition of Sound unproduced. It is ultimately knowledge of That which shines forth when we see or hear or think, and is then alive in us, being the only seer, hearer, thinker – itself unseen, unheard,…
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The towering genius: Ananda Coomaraswamy
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In an article written in 1915 titled ‘What has India contributed to human welfare’, Ananda Coomaraswamy says: ‘If we regard the world as a family of nations, then we shall best understand the position of India which has passed through many experiences and solved many problems which younger races have hardly yet recognized. The heart…
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Gently reminding us of who we are: Dharampal
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I think that someday all Indians will know about Dharampalji, one of the great scholars of modern India. His collected writings that runs into five volumes has the potential to shift our entrenched perspectives about who we are, to change our self-image built on colonial lies. However, this week I am going to focus on…