It seems to be the season for focusing on education. I will do the conjecturing below but first here are a bunch of articles on what’s going on in education in India.
Continue reading “Mr Kapil Sibal: Abolish the Human Resources Development ministry”
Category: Education
Unwelcome Competition in Education
An addendum to the previous post on “Education and Corruption.” Here’s a story that I recently heard which illustrates the engineering of scarcity in education and the resultant bribes and low quality. No names are mentioned because the people involved are powerful people in the government.
Continue reading “Unwelcome Competition in Education”
Education and Corruption
The Indian education sector is in distress. How does one explain the lack of outrage among the population at something which affects them so forcefully? Could it be because they are not aware of how dysfunctional the system is? That must at least partly explain the apathy. Perhaps they know but accept it with the fatalistic resignation of the type that accepts corruption among public officials? Perhaps they mistakenly consider pervasive corruption as normal. But how can they not see that government control of education, the rampant corruption, and the crippled education system are all of a piece?
Here’s a news item which reports that medical post graduate studies involve bribes of up to Rs 2 crores (around $ 400,000.)
Continue reading “Education and Corruption”
Lynching is too good for them
There are some topics that make me see red. In that state, I cannot even think rationally, leave alone write coherently. I am so angry that this is not going to read well for sure. But this has to be said. Those who are ultimately responsible for the violence against the Indian students in Australia should not be lynched. Lynching would be too good for them. I am not talking about the red-necks and skinheads (or whatever their Australian equivalents are) who attack foreign students. I am talking of the Indian politicians and bureaucrats that have brought about the conditions that force Indians to go abroad looking for a decent education to places where they are viciously and mercilessly attacked.
Continue reading “Lynching is too good for them”
On Massive Education Interventions
Much of the benefits of modern life we enjoy and take for granted arises from scale economies in manufacturing — the larger the quantity manufactured by a firm, the lower the average cost. But there is a countervailing effect. Up to a certain size, the overheads of managing a firm goes down as the size increases. Beyond that point, the costs of managing go up with size. That limits how large firms can get. The market weeds out firms that grow too big because the inefficiencies show up in higher cost of production. That process is not unlike Darwinian natural selection in the biological world. There are creatures of all sorts of sizes but there are natural limits to how large even the largest can become. Become too large and you get sorted out.
Continue reading “On Massive Education Interventions”
Keeping Afloat in a WWW-world
I received an SMS just moments ago: “A thirteen-year old’s day in Surat: school 7 to 2. Daily tuitions 4:30 to 7:30. Saw ICSE standard 8th textbooks. Detailed and depressing. What a state!”
No surprise to me as I have observed the same sort of insanity in the case of the children of friends and family.
Continue reading “Keeping Afloat in a WWW-world”
Arun Shourie on the Indian Education System
The greatest scandal and the greatest failure of the Indian governments (all of them, and practically all of them have been Congress) has been in education. A great economy and a great education system go hand in hand — though it almost always starts with the education system supplying the fuel that powers the engine of growth and development. Any dispassionate observer of the Indian education system (and I am one of many) cannot but conclude that it is one of the most distressed. It has never been very good but successive assaults on it by the government has reduced it to a wreck that cannot do anything else but act as a road block to development.
Continue reading “Arun Shourie on the Indian Education System”
Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Schools
I am a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson and have been so since I first came across his talk on TED of Feb 2006 (which I had blogged in September 2006). Here’s a treat for those who have not watched that performance — and I say performance advisedly as he could be a stand-up comic any day of the week.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
One of the many important point he makes is that the current school system kills creativity. In a more recent talk, he goes into how the current school paradigm needs change. That topic is of enduring interest of this blog. So below the fold, you will find the video (hat tip, Nihar G.)
Continue reading “Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Schools”
“Tuitions” Cost
Tuitions cost, and how! Rediff reports that industry body Assocham has found that “middle-class spends a third of their income on kids’ tuitions.” (Hat tip: Reuben.)
This is one of the most potent signals of a broken educational system. Continue reading ““Tuitions” Cost”
The Future of Education and Technology — Part 2
In the previous post, “The Future of Education and Technology,” I wrote that technology will have a disruptive influence on the present education system. But that is par for the course since the influence of technology on education has always been disruptive, rather than incremental. One could say that the education system in general has long periods of stasis punctuated by some technology-driven disruption.
In the following I will argue that the system is ripe for another of those disruptive events that will push the system from its current state to a qualitatively different higher state. As this is a personal view, my argument boils down to a lot of hand waving and no data. I will also introduce an analogy to explicate the changing role of the level of skills required in the production of education. I will use the manufacturing system — specifically automobile manufacture — as an analog.
Continue reading “The Future of Education and Technology — Part 2”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 