Category: Editorials

Many years ago, at one of India’s well-known boarding schools in the Nilgiris, it was customary for housemasters to write a personal letter to the parents of every student in their house at the end of each school term. There were no templates, no standard comments and certainly no software that generated report card remarks…

There is an increasing worry across the world that students are completing school and reaching college without being prepared for the academic demands of higher education.  This is not merely the old complaint that “students were better in our time”. Universities are increasingly reporting that many first-year students do not have the reading, writing, numeracy,…

The annual examination season has once again come and gone, leaving behind its familiar trail of anxiety, celebration, disappointment, controversy and debate. Across the country, millions of students and parents spent months preparing for board examinations, while newspapers and television channels devoted endless hours to discussing pass percentages, cut-off marks, admission prospects and counselling schedules….

Educational reform cannot happen only through policies written in government offices. Sometimes reform begins when a teacher walks into a classroom somewhere else in the world — and returns home seeing education differently. When the Andhra Pradesh government recently announced that 37 government school teachers would travel to Singapore for specialised training, it attracted attention…

Let government school teachers teach. Across India, government school teachers are routinely pulled away from classrooms for election polling, Booth Level Officer (BLO) work, census surveys, SIR exercises, and other administrative duties. While these tasks may be important for governance, the question is simple: at what cost to education? This problem affects mainly government school…

One of the simplest education reforms that schools can introduce today is also one of the most powerful: a daily newspaper reading slot. In an age of short attention spans, viral misinformation, and endless scrolling on mobile phones, the habit of reading the news carefully and critically has almost disappeared among young people. If schools…

Government schools still educate the majority of Indian children. They remain the most powerful instrument India has for social mobility, national integration, and economic growth. The recent figures of decline in government school enrollment are not a verdict. They are a warning—and an opportunity. Since the release of the latest UDISE+ data and its subsequent…

Each year, when examination results are declared, schools across India repeat a troubling ritual. The faces of children who have scored the highest marks are displayed prominently—on school websites, hoardings, brochures, and sometimes in full-page newspaper advertisements. What should be a private moment of academic achievement is turned into a public spectacle. The intention is…

Learning time: a simple reform schools can implement People come into teaching for many reasons. For most, it is a job that pays the bills. For some, it offers stability. For a few, it is a calling. Yet teaching is different from most other professions in one important way: at its heart, it is meant…

A child spends nearly fifteen years in school — from the age of four until seventeen or eighteen. These are the years when the accumulated knowledge of past generations is passed down through lessons in mathematics, science, and literature. But these years are also meant for something deeper: learning how to live among others, how…