education system

Imagine you joined a course without knowing that the instruction was in Russian. You would understand nothing. In a poignant scene from the Hindi movie, Taare Zameen Par, the parents of Ishaan, who is dyslexic, are asked to read Chinese and learn. They struggle and fail. This is what happens to thousands of Indian…

The Karnataka Commissioner of School Education on October 19 issued a circular, allowing school monitoring committees to collect Rs 100 or more every month from each parent as a donation to the school contingency fund.

This was…

As a part of the project, “Technology Integration for Inclusive Education (TIIE)” of IT for Change, a baseline study was conducted with an aim to understand the contexts and learning needs of students in grades 6 and 7 in government higher primary schools in…

The government is fiddling, as children are losing foundational literacy and numeracy. The Karnataka government has opened schools fully for grades 9-12 and partly for 6-8. However, lower primary schools (LPS) consisting of grades 1-5 remain closed and may have a zero year (a year of no school). Most states seem to favor keeping LPS closed.…

IT for Change has drafted a statement, endorsed by a group of educationists and social work organizations, about the urgent need to open all primary schools to avoid a crisis of learning. Read it below:

1. The Karnataka education department has opened schools selectively. Classes 9-12 have regular classes, and 6-8 have intermittent…

IT for Change put out a press release on January 26, 2021, about the urgent need to reopen all classes across all schools with local hygiene precautions in place. The statement, endorsed by a group of educationists and social work organizations, was covered by the New Indian Express. 

The day after the release of the statement, the…

A virus may be apolitical but our response to it reveals biases and inequities in our systems. As we all adapt to the new “normal”, it is critical that we look at the stated and unstated assumptions, and implicit and explicit changes being made to our social welfare systems, which impact people differently.

Millions of children have been…

The recent proposal of the Karnataka government to open English medium sections in 1,000 primary schools has attracted criticism. Primary Education Minister N Mahesh has highlighted the step as a response to declining enrolment in government schools. Parents prefer private schools because they offer instruction in the English medium. Several…

In this article for the Deccan Herald, Gurumurthy Kasinathan expresses concern over the increasing trend of government schools being "adopted" by CSR initiatives. Under the guise of introducing ‘efficient’ practices and improving infrastructure, he argues, the fundamental nature of the public school system is shifting.