[Reader-list] Pedagogical Faultlines workshop

[Gora Mohanty]

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 12:49 +0530, V Ramaswamy wrote:
[...]
> Let me put my views in a nutshell. If we look at the "education system" in
> India, we have a perfect "apartheid" system. Millions upon millions of
> children are condemned at birth to a severely bounded life. And that is even
> if they make it to school and also complete schooling.
[...]

This is undoubtedly true. Schooling is bad enough in supposedly
fancy urban schools, where we still by and large value rote
memorisation even in the experimental sciences. In rural areas,
it is heartbreaking to contrast the eagerness of the students
with the facilities that greet them. There are few things more
worth doing at this moment in India than educational reform.

However, the problem is so endemic, requires so many resources,
and is so vulnerable to social, economic, and worse yet,
political pressures, that one scarcely knows where to start.
If people are not aware of it, please look up a project called
Ekalavya, and the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Project. In a
truly democratic country, this should have been the equivalent
of the spur to the US educational system that came from the
post-Sputnik reforms. Instead, it fizzled and died.

So, by and large, I have preferred doing smaller, achievable
things, and have consciously refrained from getting involved
in educational reform. In order to start this, I strongly
believe that we need a real vision of what is to be achieved,
a broad outline of how to achieve it, a cohesive, and capable-
enough team, and perhaps most importantly, someone to be the
driving force behind it. How to put this together is another
question.

Regards,
Gora