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Our education system has long been a site of celebration of “merit”, where from the pre-primary stage to the highest degree, we pit students against each other in standardized competitive examinations that judge and decide who gets in and who remains outside the system. There is not much that can be done – for to

The one class in the week we knew we could safely ‘bunk’ was the SUPW period. Among friends, we called it “Some Useful Period Wastage” with little or no knowledge of the actual full form of the acronym: Socially Useful Productive Work. Imagined as a means of allowing school students to participate in community life

The idea of including music, dance or theatre in the classroom often leads to concerns from subject teachers since these are activities that are marked out as extra-curricular, that is, activities that are beyond the scope of regular education. Since traditionally these activities were either done outside class hours, or even at the cost of

What if we were to assess students not based on their performance in relation to their classmates, but in relation to the growth they have shown in the span of an academic year? Sounds idealistic? At a time when our assessment process is bound by institutional requirements of written examinations spread across the year, this

“The end of institutional education is near,” expressed a friend who has been a middle school mathematics teacher for over ten years now. Another one, who teaches English to middle and high school, cuts him off and says, “You are such a Luddite! Just get on the wagon already!” The History teacher was dismissive of

Some of the most joyous moments of my school life were those rare days when the class was huddled into the school parlour (a room attached to the principal’s office for receiving guests) for a screening. The musty red carpet, the pitch-dark curtains, and the giant old television—it meant looking forward to a couple of

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…” No truer words than Dicken’s opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities can be said about he time