A friend with young school-going children was recently talking to me about education. Some ideas came up in the conversation that I thought were worth sharing here as this week’s blog post. Imagine a classroom with many children working on some set task and an adult sitting in the classroom busy with some work of…

(I recently came across an interesting paper on British education written in 1947 by Dorothy Sayers. I thought that the paper had many insights that are relevant to our current Indian education system. Take a look at the excerpt below and download the full article here if you get interested.) Is not the great defect…

You may be surprised that child-centred education is what the national policy documents on education advocate. Take a look at the following inspirational quotes from the National Curricular Framework (NCF), 2005, document. The fact that the government recommendations do not get implemented is probably because of the inertia of the system. “Education is not a…

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me… I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader…

If we look at our modern educational journey all the way from nursery to a PhD, it looks like what is not outright wasteful is all focused on preparing us to earn a livelihood. I was talking to a Sanskrit scholar who was telling me that in our tradition the focus has always been on…

I am just back from a trip to IIT Kharagpur, the institute where I got my engineering degree 34 years ago. With its 2100 acre tree-filled campus, 40+ departments, 15000 students and 800 faculty members, IIT Kharagpur is the largest IIT in India. Like everyone who passes through residential colleges, the time I spent on…

In these series of posts (part 1 and part 2 here), we have talked about problems with the modern schooling system and have tried to look at the paradigm of modernity inside which the system functions. In this final post in the series, we will try to talk about a tentative way forward with school…

In last week’s blog post (linked here), we looked at some problems with the current education system and why it seems so difficult to effect any school reform. This week let us zoom out a little and look at the broader perspective, at the paradigm inside which the modern education system is situated. We can…

When well-meaning people start questioning the way current school education works, they run into a fundamental problem. You see, our entire experience of education is from within this deeply flawed system. So when we try to think of making things better, we are unconsciously trapped within the limits of the existing system. A little bit…