Archive for the 'Education' Category

Oldest university on earth is reborn after 800 years

Published on August 4, 2010 in Culture, Education, Heritage, India and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Nalanda, an ancient seat of learning destroyed in 1193, will rise again thanks to Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

Ruins of Nalanda University, Bihar.

During the six centuries of its storied existence, there was nothing else quite like Nalanda University. Probably the first-ever large educational establishment, the college – in what is now eastern India – even counted the Buddha among its visitors and alumni. At its height, it had 10,000 students, 2,000 staff and strove for both understanding and academic excellence. Today, this much-celebrated centre of Buddhist learning is in ruins.

After a period during which the influence and importance of Buddhism in India declined, the university was sacked in 1193 by a Turkic general, apparently incensed that its library may not have contained a copy of the Koran. The fire is said to have burned and smouldered for several months.

Now this famed establishment of philosophy, mathematics, language and even public health is poised to be revived. A beguiling and ambitious plan to establish an international university with the same overarching vision as Nalanda – and located alongside its physical ruins – has been spearheaded by a team of international experts and leaders, among them the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen. This week, legislation that will enable the building of the university to proceed is to be placed before the Indian parliament.

“At its peak it offered an enormous number of subjects in the Buddhist tradition, in a similar way that Oxford [offered] in the Christian tradition – Sanskrit, medicine, public health and economics,” Mr Sen said yesterday in Delhi. More:

India’s Islamic university students demand lecturers wear burqas

Published on July 29, 2010 in Education, India and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

AP reports from Calcutta:

Students at an Islamic university in eastern India have refused to allow a female lecturer to teach unless she wears the burqa, the teacher said.

The student union has told all female students and all eight female lecturers at the small Calcutta campus of Aliah University to wear the burqa.

Sirin Middya, who described herself as a devout Muslim, said she was appointed in March but has not been allowed to teach her classes since she refused to wear the garment.

“The students have threatened us and have put up banners saying those who oppose the burqa rule can go back home,” Ms Middya said. More:

Another report here

India unveils prototype of $35 tablet computer

Published on July 23, 2010 in Education, India and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

India announced on Thursday a US$35 (Rs 1,500) computer for students of colleges and universities. “This is our answer to MIT’s $100 computer,” human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said.

The price of the device is expected to gradually drop to $20 and later to $10. .

The device, which is no bigger than a conventional laptop, will have all elementary features, including internet browsing. It is a single unit system with a touch screen and a built-in keyboard along with a 2 GB RAM memory, wi-fi connectivity, USB port and powered by a 2-watt system to suit poor power-supply areas. The low-cost computer will be available for students by next year. More here

Recalling an old school

Published on June 12, 2010 in Education and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in The Telegraph:

A country’s future cannot but be bright if its citizens prize education so highly as to commit crime for its sake. But one wonders whether qualifications are not bound to be flawed if there’s a backdoor into school and college and a bribe overcomes the hurdle of examinations. No wonder Singapore derecognized Indian medical degrees.

Media reports about my old school prompt both thoughts. Yet — faint ray of light in the engulfing darkness — I know for certain of one recent instance of La Martiniere for Boys admitting only on merit a Bengali child without money or influence. This heartwarming news mitigated to some extent the shock I received 18 years ago when a respected private tutor told me she couldn’t coach my son — not even a teenager then — because she did not take pupils from schools for “moneybags”. Her objection was not ideological. Nor communal though she did identify “moneybags” in ethnic terms. Her point was that scholarship had to take a backseat in institutions so awash with money.

It was a shock because the school I remembered was anything but rich. Most pupils were poor Anglo-Indian boarders supported by the church or private foundations. No shame attached to being a foundationer. That was the purpose of Claude Martin’s philanthropy. The Armenian boys also received help: the school prayer extolled their benefactor, Paul Chater.

The scattering of full-blooded non-Christian fee-paying Indian day scholars who went to school by bus or tram were admitted under gentle government pressure. The art master was the only non-Christian Indian on the staff, and he was not invited to the last British principal’s farewell party. I could understand it when the owner of Park Street’s best restaurant, an old boy from before the Second World War when the school moved to Lucknow, told me he felt no attachment because “they didn’t really want us”. More:

IIT alumnus named Harvard B-School dean

Published on May 5, 2010 in Business and Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

A chemical engineer from IIT (Bombay), Nitin Nohria has just become the first Indian-origin dean of Harvard Business School. The 48-year-old Nohria, who has been a faculty member at HBS since 1988, will take over from Jay Light on July 1.

Read more here, here and here.

In the Boston Herald, Nohria tells Thomas Grillo that business has a greater purpose

Nitin Nohria was named the new dean of Harvard Business School yesterday .

The 48-year-old management professor and ethics expert’s appointment comes as the nation’s faith in financial institutions has been shaken. Nohria acknowledged the challenge of rebuilding the trust that’s been lost. more

Finally, check out a list of published articles by Nohria here.

Not AMU alone

Published on April 15, 2010 in Education and Sexuality. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

You would imagine that Indian universities would ferment liberal thought and a more tolerant attitude to queer sexuality. But Srininvas Ramachandra Siras’s tragic death — murder, suicide or natural causes yet to be determined — highlights that universities, unfortunately, tend to be the stomping ground for bigotry. Georgina Maddox in The Indian Express.

It is perhaps both tragic and ironic that Aligarh Muslim University professor Srinivas Ramachandra Siras went from virtual anonymity to being certain to be remembered — but not as the exemplary teacher of Marathi that he was, but as the man who may have died because he was caught on camera having sex with a rickshaw-puller. As we wait on the judgment whether his death was a suicide, a murder or had ‘natural’ causes, there is widespread and bitter outrage among the gay community across the Indian subcontinent. more

Tired of grading all those student papers? Outsource to Bangalore

Published on April 8, 2010 in Education, India and Innovation. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA’s can. More:

Lunch with the shoeless boy in Class I

Published on April 4, 2010 in Education, India and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Aakar Patel in The News on India’s India’s education Right to Education law under which all children between the age of six and 14 will get free schooling:

Next June, a strange thing will happen in private schools across India. One in four children in Class I will be poor. It will be a new experience for the children from middle-class families, because they have always been insulated from contact with the poor.

This is a strange thing to say for a nation in which half the population hasn’t enough to eat. But for those of us who live in the city, poverty is what happens around us and we aren’t ever directly touched by it. Indians are trained to ignore it on the street, and none of the people one studies with or works with or knows well is poor, because in India social segregation is total. The rich girl marries the boy from the slums only in Bollywood, and not even there these days.

This change in schools comes from the Right to Education bill that has been legislated by Manmohan Singh’s government. It is a law making education compulsory for all children between six and 14, or up to the age of Class VIII.

Some of the law is addressed at government schools and within three years, meaning by 2013, the government guarantees to build additional schools so that there is one within specified distances in all villages and city neighbourhoods. More:

India’s exam season: A test of endurance

Published on March 25, 2010 in Education and India. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

From The New York Times:

New Delhi: Sadhvi Konchada took her fifth and final high school board exam this week. She was nervous, if not inexperienced, having already taken 11 board exams, pre-board exams or pre-pre-board exams since January, with more tests to come. By the time she enters college, Sadhvi will have taken 22 board or college entrance exams.

Sadhvi, 17, a senior, has daily tutorials, studies constantly and considers her schedule ridiculous. But it is not uncommon. At her middle-class apartment complex, testing is an obsession for families of high school students. Parents gossip about scores, anguish about them and pray over them. Tutors publicly display practice-test results and update parents with text messages comparing the scores of their child against those of others. Students spend months preparing for tests, or worrying about them.

“We have to keep them under pressure,” said one mother, Jaya Samaddar, whose daughter is studying for the national exams administered in the 10th grade. “We have no other choice.”

India has one of the world’s youngest populations, often called its “demographic dividend,” yet as the middle class has steadily grown, so has the cutthroat competition for the limited slots in the country’s system of higher education. More:

In light of Nalanda

Published on March 4, 2010 in Culture, Education and Heritage. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Modern-day Nalanda / Photo: Namit Arora

The ruins of one of Asia’s great centres of learning still inspire travellers. Namit Arora in Himal Southasian:

Nalanda University arose in the early fifth century, during the reign of Kumara Gupta, though references to precursor sites associated with teaching and learning go back another thousand years, to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. Between Xuanzang and Yi Jing, we have a compelling portrait of the university’s curriculum, the life of the monks, the buildings and the general features of the community.

Nalanda was more like a school of higher learning than an undergraduate college. Prospective students had to be at least 20 years old, and submit to an oral exam for university entrance. They had to demonstrate deep familiarity with a host of subjects, and with old and new works in many fields. Only around a quarter of prospective students were admitted, and even they were promptly humbled by the calibre of their teachers and co-students. When Xuanzang visited Nalanda, there were 8500 students and 1500 teachers in 108 residential monasteries, which often had two or more floors. Excavations have revealed exquisitely carved temples and a row of ten monasteries of oblong red bricks directly across from a row of stupas in brick and plaster. Rooms typically had chairs, wood blocks, small mats and utensils stored in wall niches. Yi Jing approvingly wrote that each year before the monsoon, the best rooms were awarded to the eldest members in the community.

Some of the best teachers not only taught but also composed treatises and commentaries, much as Xuanzang himself did later in life. Many acquired great fame, and a Nalanda education held serious cachet among the public. Teachers lived among the students in the monasteries, common features of which included a podium for lectures, a communal brick oven, bathrooms and a water well (often in octagonal cross-section, supposedly inspired by the Eightfold Path, one of the Buddha’s central teachings). Water clocks guided daily routines, and gongs were used to signal the start and end of events, services and ceremonies. “There are more than ten great pools near the Nalanda monastery,” wrote Yi Jing. “Every morning a ghanti is sounded to remind the monks of the bathing-hour.” For their daily exercise, the monks went for walks in mid-mornings or late afternoons. Their dinner typically included bean soup with butter, rice and vegetables, perhaps also ghee, honey, sugar or a seasonal fruit such as mango. More:

3 Idiots and the real IITs

Published on January 15, 2010 in Education, Entertainment, India and Movies. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

3 Idiots’ portrayal of the IIT education system is both grossly unfair and untrue. Sandipan Deb in Open:

I cannot help but have my views on 3 Idiots coloured by the fact that I am an IITian. Call it Imperial College of Engineering, call it whatever, but what is obvious is that the film is a comment on the IIT system. And it is a grossly unfair comment.

I went to do engineering because at that time, if you were a middle-class boy and you were good in studies, it was either engineering or medicine that was fore-ordained. There was no other option you even entertained. A native dislike for Biology pushed me towards IIT, and there I went, quite happily. Within days, I discovered that engineering did not interest me in the least, and I spent the next years putting in just enough effort to survive. Professors either reviled me or despaired of me. But I have never had so much fun as I had on that campus.

Yes, our boys and girls are still rammed into the IITs by their parents, whether or not they have any interest or innate talent. Coaching classes turn aspirants into rote-monsters, and often, they end up without any life skills. In the IITs, you encounter characters like Chatur Ramalingam, the desperately competitive mugpot in 3 Idiots, but the truth is that such people rarely ever top their classes. More:

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a physicist, a biologist and a Chemistry Nobel Laureate

Published on January 4, 2010 in Education, Leaders, Science and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

In an interview with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk. From The Indian Express:

Tell us about your journey in science — you started off as a physicist.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: I originally thought I might go to medical school. And I got admitted to the Baroda Medical College , but I also appeared for the National Science Talent exam. That was at the encouragement of my mother. I made a deal with my father — that if I got the scholarship, then you shouldn’t force me to do anything. He wanted me to be a doctor. I got the scholarship, and while he was away, I transferred my admission from medical college to study physics. The clerk thought I’d made a mistake, and I actually meant the other way round.

For our generation, the first choice was medicine. Next was engineering. If you failed in both, you went for the IAS.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: One thing that motivated me was that a group of professors, some of whom had come back from the US, had completely modernised the curriculum. 30 years later, my son studied basically the same curriculum at Harvard. So that was a motivation for me to go into physics. Somewhere along the line I realised that I was not going to be a good physicist. I would just be doing some boring calculations and not have any real insight. I believe physics is on a difficult plane, because to make truly fundamental breakthroughs in physics is very hard now. At the same time, molecular biology was blossoming. It seemed every week there was an important discovery being made.  More:

Enid Blyton and the post-colonial world

Published on December 22, 2009 in Education, India and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Amy Rosenberg in The National:

Ram Advani Booksellers sits in the heart of Hazratganj, an upscale shopping district in Lucknow, India. The store opened in 1947, just a few months before Partition, when Ram Advani fled Lahore, in the newly forming Pakistan, and set up shop in his new (old) country. In a city known at the time for its devotion to highbrow culture, aristocratic pleasures, and courtly manners, the place quickly became a destination and meeting point for the intellectual crowd, and Advani, now 88 and still running the business, acquired a reputation as an erudite host, known particularly for hand-picking recommendations for his customers based on long discussions with them.

Advani’s son, Rukun, who spent much of his childhood in the store, remembers the refinement and polish of the place, the neat rows of books, and the near-constant flow of learned patrons seeking to converse with his father. What he recalls most, however, is the single shelf in the children’s section that prominently displayed the work of the British children’s author Enid Blyton.

“I was all of eight and a half years old in 1964, when I took The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage off the shelf,” says Rukun, who now runs Permanent Black, a well-known publishing house in Delhi. “I hadn’t read anything as good as that book before, ever, so I was hooked and read everything else by Blyton that I could lay my hands on for the next three or so years.”

At the time, Blyton’s books were just starting to become widely available in India, though Ram Advani recalls having seen stray copies in the 1940s and 1950s. (“I stocked these books,” Advani says, “because there was a demand, and it was taken for granted that a store like mine, which kept only books in the English language, would have the whole lot of the Enid Blyton series on hand. I confess I never read them.”) More:

One Pakistani institution places his faith in another

Published on December 22, 2009 in Business, Economy, Education, Leaders, Pakistan and Society. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Syed Babar Ali, 83, a veteran businessman who helped create the Lahore University of Management and Science, wants to restore merit to Pakistani society. Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:

Mr. Ali is an institution in Pakistan. He has started some of the country’s most successful companies. But perhaps his most important contribution has been his role in creating the Lahore University of Management and Science, or L.U.M.S., begun as a business school but now evolved into the approximate equivalent of Harvard University in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. A corrosive system of privilege and patronage has eaten away at merit, degrading the fabric of society and making it more difficult for poor people to rise. The growing tendency to see government positions as chances to profit, together with the explosion in the country’s population, has led to a sharp decline in the services that Pakistan’s government offers its people.

“Nobody is bothered about the masses,” Mr. Ali said. More:

Indian Institute Of Idiots

Published on December 19, 2009 in Books, Education and India. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Chetan Bhagat, author of One Night @ the Call Center, in the Times of India:

chetan_bhagatI avoid writing columns on the Indian education system as it is not good for my health. For days, my blood continues to boil, i have insomnia and i feel like hurting someone real bad. The Indian education system is a problem that can be fixed. It affects the country’s future, impacts almost every family, everyone knows about it and it is commercially viable to fix it. Still, nothing happens because of our great Indian culture of avoiding change at all costs. And because change means sticking out your neck and that, ironically, is something we are not taught to do.

Still, with a movie coming on the education system, which came about because of a book i wrote nearly six years ago, it is important to revisit the issues. Soon, all the media will talk about is the anatomy, diet and romantic chemistry of the main actors. While that makes insightful breakfast reading, it is also important to understand the main problems with our education system that need to be fixed or, rather, should have been fixed 10 years ago.

There are two main problems: one, the supply of good college seats and, two, the actual course content and intent behind education. More:

Catholic India running out of would-be priests

Published on December 10, 2009 in Education, Faith, India and Religion. 0 Comments Tags: , .

From the National:

Christian leaders in India agree that young and educated Catholic men are showing less interest in becoming priests.

“Until some years ago, brighter young men willing to join the priesthood were plenty in India. But now, for various reasons, as their preference is changing, it threatens to pose many crises for the community in the future,” said Father Udumala Bala, the deputy secretary general of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India (CCBI), based in Bangalore.

“The number of students in many seminaries has been falling recently and it points to a future crisis. But the number of brighter, intelligent and educated [in general studies] students in seminaries has seen a sharper fall, which is more worrisome,” he said. “We need to set up proper infrastructure at the grass-root level and campaign for the promotion of the vocation across the country … and we have already taken steps in this direction.” More:

Outsourcing homework to India

Published on November 23, 2009 in Education and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Saritha Rai from Bangalore in GlobalPost:

Six days a week in the wee hours of the morning, Saswati Patnaik logs into her home computer.

The homemaker — and tutor for a Bangalore company called TutorVista — rises early to help American high school students write English term papers, prepare S.A.T. essays or finish homework assignments.

Outsourcing, of course, started as a way for American companies to lower costs by shifting work to cheaper locations. After nearly two decades, that practice has become so mainstream that hundreds of U.S. businesses — from Wall Street banks to law firms, architects and others — routinely outsource to India.

But now a growing number of individual Americans are following in the footsteps of businesses — and outsourcing homework.

For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour. More:

A schoolgirl’s odyssey

Published on October 20, 2009 in Afghanistan, Education, Pakistan and Terrorism. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A brilliant, moving documentary by the New York Times that follows a Pakistani girl through a perilous six months as she loses her education, is forced into exile and faces an uncertain return back home in Swat, Pakistan. [via 3quarksdaily]

Bollywood bound

Published on September 23, 2009 in Education, Entertainment and Movies. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

A new acting school in Canada teaches the art of lip-syncing, fake fighting and gyrating. S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:

That millions of people have Bollywood dreams in India comes as little surprise. But Canada?

This month, the Canadian Institute of Management and Technology in Mississauga, outside Toronto, launched the Bollywood Acting Diploma, a four-month course costing $9,000 and targeting students who want to break into the business.

They are people like Dubai-born Maya Noel, 18 years old, who graduated high school in June and was all ready to study drama in college. When she heard about the academy, she reassessed her goals and thought, “I grew up with Bollywood not Hollywood.”

And she signed up.

Her interest is a fitting tribute to the Indian institution that went “global” before that became a buzzword. Indeed, before Benetton and Big Bazaar, there was Bollywood, stealthily offering Indian audiences tastes of the West and nostalgic expatriates glimpses of the homes they left behind. Today, Bollywood has become the ultimate bridge for nonresident Indians, global Indians and everyone in between. While the rest of the world debates protectionism and outsourcing, Bollwood makes room for a new formula: take actors raised and trained in the West and welcome them back home. More:

The Pakistani Eton in the age of terror

Published on August 20, 2009 in Education and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

John Lancaster at the Smart Set:

aitchison_college_lahoreOne morning earlier this year, students gathered for the weekly assembly at Aitchison College, an elite school for boys between the ages of five and 18 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. It was, as always, a dignified affair. Shuffling to their places in an outdoor amphitheater, the boys wore school ties, blazers stitched with the Aitchison crest (“Perseverance Commands Success”) and puglis – starched indigo turbans once favored by native royalty. “Aitchison College, atten-shun!” shouted the head boy, a senior, stamping his foot like a drill sergeant. The principal stepped to the microphone. A tall white-haired man in a black academic gown, he surveyed the crowd with a benevolent but short-lived smile. He glared at one of the boys. “Take your hands out of your pockets,” he snapped in clipped, lightly accented English. “It’s rude.” The youth sheepishly complied.

Aitchison is just a few minutes by car from the busy traffic circle where Islamic militants recently ambushed a bus full of Sri Lankan cricket players, wounding seven and killing six policemen and the driver of another bus. But it feels as if it’s another world. Surrounded by high walls, the 186-acre campus is a lush oasis of cricket fields, flower gardens, riding facilities, and turreted brick buildings that recall Mughal palaces. Some of the buildings date to the late 19th century, when Aitchison was established by the British to educate the future nawabs and maharajahs who would one day run the subcontinent on their behalf. Boys came with their own horses as well as groomsmen, valets, and even cooks (the subcontinent was rife with intrigue and poisoning was a genuine fear). One well-born student lived in his own private “bungalow,” an airy single-story structure with a porticoed entrance and windows in the shape of Moorish arches.

The bungalow has not been used in years, and the princes are long gone. But the musty air of privilege lives on. Today’s “Aitchisonians” are the sons of Pakistan’s contemporary ruling class – generals, politicians, landholders, industrialists, professionals – and about a third of them typically continue their education abroad, most in the United States and Britain. Not for nothing is Aitchison known as “the Pakistani Eton.” More:

Study abroad

Published on June 27, 2009 in Education and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

From The Smart Set, John Lancaster on the Pakistani Eton in the age of terror

jo_lanca_pakis_ap_001One morning earlier this year, students gathered for the weekly assembly at Aitchison College, an elite school for boys between the ages of five and 18 in the Pakistani city of Lahore. It was, as always, a dignified affair. Shuffling to their places in an outdoor amphitheater, the boys wore school ties, blazers stitched with the Aitchison crest (“Perseverance Commands Success”) and puglis — starched indigo turbans once favored by native royalty. “Aitchison College, atten-shun!” shouted the head boy, a senior, stamping his foot like a drill sergeant. The principal stepped to the microphone. A tall white-haired man in a black academic gown, he surveyed the crowd with a benevolent but short-lived smile. He glared at one of the boys. “Take your hands out of your pockets,” he snapped in clipped, lightly accented English. “It’s rude.” The youth sheepishly complied.

more

India seeks to admit foreign universities

Published on June 11, 2009 in Education and India. 0 Comments Tags: , .

From the Wall Street Journal:

India’s new minister in charge of higher education said he will push legislation to let foreign universities establish independent institutions in the country, potentially opening a huge market that schools from the U.S. and elsewhere have been clamoring to enter for years.

“I would hope that come 2010, universities around the world will be sprinting to come to India,” Kapil Sibal, minister of human resources development, which includes higher education, said in an interview Wednesday. He said he wants to open the market because India, despite its 1.1 billion-plus population, has an acute shortage of educated workers that threatens to inhibit economic expansion. More:

Amazing kids

Published on May 29, 2009 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Kavya Shivashankar

Kavya Shivashankar

Kavya Shivashankar from Olathe, Kansas is the eighth Indian kid to win the Spelling Bee.

She’s 13 years old, in 8th grade, enjoys practicing her violin, bicycling, swimming, and learning Indian classical dance. She looks forward to becoming a neurosurgeon.

Kavya spelt the word “laodicean” — which means indifferent or lukewarm especially in matters of religion — to claim the title after her only remaining American opponent Tim Ruiter flubbed “Maecenas,” which means a generous benefactor.

According to a report in the Times of India, some eleven million American schoolkids participated in the US  National Spelling Bee championships this year, and when the final 293 made the cut, there were 32 kids of Indian origin. Read the full story here:

And the words she got right:

1 Round One Test
4 ergasia
5 kurta
6 escritoire
7 hydrargyrum
8 blancmange
9 baignoire
10 huisache
11 ecossaise
12 diacoele
13 bouquiniste
14 isagoge
15 phoresy
16 Laodicean

Here’s the link if you want to know more about the other contestants:

P-R-E-S-S-U-R-E

Published on May 28, 2009 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , .

[Updated on May 29]

It took just nine correct letters for Kavya Shivashankar, 13, to be crowned the new US spelling champion.

Stefan Fatsis on the National Spelling Bee contest. From the Daily Beast:

[Akshay Buddiga faints at the 2004 Bee]

Kids stammer, tug at their hair, and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates let alone a nation of living-room critics, sportswriters, and live bloggers. In 2004, a 13-year-old named Akshay Buddiga famously fainted during a turn. The YouTube video is shocking-not because Akshay gets up and spells “alopecoid” correctly but because not a single person rushes to his side. “Stop the clock,” one judge says in an unalarmed, schoolmarmy voice. When Akshay rises, the judge says-without any way of possibly knowing- “He’s all right.” As if.

If you’ve seen the documentary Spellbound, you know the lengths to which some kids-and, more to the point, some parents-go to prepare for the Bee. The finalists will have spent hundreds of hours-possibly thousands in the case of veteran spellers-memorizing arcane words. They will have been tested via printed word lists and interactive software. They will have been drilled ceaselessly by demanding moms, dads, teachers and coaches. For the top competitors, the pressure is profound. (As the Bee has evolved, it’s grown more difficult. The winning word in 1981 was “sarcophagus.” Not to brag, but my first-grade daughter can spell that.) More:

Also: Fourteen Indian American kids have made it to the semi finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest. At Sify News.

A tale of two school systems

Published on May 27, 2009 in Education and India. 0 Comments Tags: , .

S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:

Last year, as a New Delhi mom desperate to get my daughter into an elite private school, I chose my interview outfits carefully: Boots and blazers for the schools known among the business class. Colorful salwar kameezes for the more cultural and political set. Taking no chances, we brought her artwork, copies of my first book, reviews of my husband’s art shows. We were shameless, stopping only short of outright bribery and jockeying connections–both traits as entrenched in Delhi as sequins and seekh kebabs.

Last week, we completed a whirlwind tour of some of New York City’s best public schools. We gave no thought to our appearance before each of the six tours. Who we were didn’t matter at all, and not so much our daughter either. What got us in the door was her performance on a Saturday morning earlier this year, shortly after we returned to the U.S. In what any parent will recognize as a fluke (what if she had been moody, hated the proctor, wanted eggs for breakfast instead of pancakes?), she scored high enough to qualify for a magnet school. More:

The threat of Pakistan’s revisionist texts

Published on May 21, 2009 in Education and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Historical revisionism is erasing minorities from Pakistan’s school textbooks and fostering religious extremism. Afnan Khan in the Guardian:

Since 2006 I have been following the issues of historical revisionism and religious exclusivism in Pakistan’s state school system, which is responsible for educating about 50% of school-going children (who in turn represent half of all school-age children). What I found was a pattern of cultural and religious homogenisation instilled in children from the time they learn to read, right through young adulthood.

While the authorities seem in no hurry to fix errors and upgrade the syllabus to international standards, they seem very keen to use the textbooks for propaganda purposes.

Some of the mistakes are elementary. A physics textbook for 14-year-olds asks students to calculate the time it would take for a brick falling from the top of a 45ft-high building to hit someone standing below. Since it doesn’t say how tall the person is, the result cannot be calculated accurately. An English textbook for the same age group also has trouble with its punctuation. For example, it asks: “How did Hina fall ill” – without a question mark. More

Pakistan’s Islamic schools fill void, but fuel militancy

Published on May 4, 2009 in Education and Pakistan. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

From the New York Times:

MOHRI PUR, Pakistan – The elementary school in this poor village is easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights, and crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently hit 140, spilling students into the courtyard.

But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.

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Bollywood’s ‘karaoke for the poor’ teaches Indians to read

Published on February 14, 2009 in Education, India and Innovation. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

India’s national pastime of singing along to Bollywood film songs has been turned into a powerful tool to help millions of the country’s barely literate poor to learn to read. Amrit Dhillon from New Delhi in The Telegraph, UK:

The slushy love stories and tales of derring-do depicted by Mumbai’s film industry are lapped up in villages and slums as millions seek to escape their plight for a few hours through the singing, dancing and glamour of their favourite stars.

But now an initiative that has been dubbed “karaoke for the poor” is transforming the lives of those who struggle to read or write.

The idea is the brainchild of Brij Kothari, a 44-year-old fellow of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, who realised that with the simple addition of subtitles to Bollywood’s prolific output, notionally literate Indians would instinctively read the lyrics of the songs they watched on television.

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The woman who could change the world

Published on February 10, 2009 in Education, India, Leaders and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The New Statesman has compiled a list of “ten people who could change the world.”

“We offer a strongly political list of leaders of varying ethnicity and continent, people who will or who already are making changes in the United States, Britain, South Africa and Iran, whether it be bringing the prospect of hope for genuine multiparty democracy to a new nation, vitality to a moribund political movement or the chance for better dialogue in the Middle East, or forcing governments to keep their promises on the environment.”

Among the ten is Dr Regina Papa, Educationalist and social activist “who set up India’s first department of women’s studies at Alagappa University, in southern India, in 1989.”

papaHere’s what the magazine says about Dr Regina Papa:

The small village in Tamil Nadu, India, where she was born in 1943 had no access to electricity, running water, or medical and transport facilities. “I have witnessed the sufferings of uneducated women,” she says. “Many of my childhood friends didn’t go past fifth grade and are helpless victims of dependency in their later lives. My own life bears testimony to the fundamental AUW principle that quality of education brings unbelievable changes.”

AUW is the latest in a long list of projects in which Papa has been involved. One scheme trained uneducated girls from remote villages in non-traditional trades (as electricians, or radio and TV technicians).

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The list includes Bobby Jindal, Republican Governor of Louisiana. Click here to read about Jindal,”Saviour of the Republicans”

India’s $10 laptop a load of…

Published on February 4, 2009 in Design, Education, India, Innovation and Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A few days ago a top Indian official proudly announced that the government would unveil a $10 educational laptop that will have 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, expandable hardware, and operate on just two watts of power. This, they added. would be India’s answer to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop. The promised “laptop” was to be unveiled in the temple town of Tirupathi on Tuesday, February 3. [Read that story here]

This photo of the "laptop" was projected on a screen. (Courtesy The Hindu)

This photo of the "laptop" was projected on a screen. (Courtesy The Hindu)

Now read the rest of the story:

The Times of India has called it a damp squib:

The much-touted laptop for the masses said to have been built by students of Vellore Institute of Technology that would cost a mere Rs 500 actually turned out to be only a computing device.

Fox News said it’s “as nearly useless brick“:

When is a laptop not a laptop? When it’s introduced by Indian education officials, apparently. The buzz and hype surrounding the Indian Education Ministry’s breathless announcement last week that it would be unveiling a $10 laptop aimed at the poor fizzled out like a wet firecracker Tuesday evening when officials finally debuted the device.

PC World said “it sounds like a bad joke“:

The rest of the laptop remains a mystery, however. Key tech specs such screen size, processor, storage, and battery life weren’t released, and we’ve yet to see an official photo of the vaporous hardware.

And Fast Company has reasons why “it is a load of hype“:

And by touting it as “the world’s cheapest laptop,” the Indian media stirred up a megaton of fuss. Is it even possible that “laptop” was an inappropriately misleading piece of translation?

The Hindu story was headlined “Ultra-low-cost access device introduced”:

The Ministry of Human Resource Development unveiled here on Tuesday what has been tagged as an “ultra low-cost” computing-cum-access device that can “make wonders” in the dissemination of education to the remotest corners of India.

Asian Window wonders who caused the hype, and why.