Education in India

The case for working with your hands

is the subject of a book by Matthew Crawford titled Shop Class to Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. In an article he wrote in the New York Times, Crawford, a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, describes the insidious nature of his own experience of being a knowledge worker and how and why he chose to switch careers to running his own bike repair shop, very satisfyingly at that.

Ian Jack, writing about Crawford's book in The Guardian, wonders if our rush to embrace higher education has started to become economically destructive.

In this context, I remember an engineering student fresh out of college who had applied for a job, some job, about ten years ago, when I was looking to hire someone for some simple HTML work at Cricinfo. He knew no HTML at all, but said he was willing to learn. I was thinking of giving him a chance to learn on the job and prove himself, but was taken aback by his salary expectation and his justification for it. He wanted a monthly salary of Rs. 8,000. His justification was that even a mason was paid as much. When I pointed out that the mason built something and added value, whereas he knew nothing to start with and had to learn before he could prove he could add value, it didn't cut. His point was that he was an "engineer'.

Crawford, in his New York Times piece, argues for exposing children to some trade or craft involving hands on work, early on in their lives.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

A reality television show for teachers - a game changer?

Imagine the best school teachers from across the country competing on live TV to teach us Algebra & Geometry, The History of the Indus Valley Civilization , Darwin's theory of Evolution, Each and every Indian Language, The Geography of the Himalayas, Newton's Laws of Motion, The structure of the atom, The story of the Indian Independence Movement, The Working of the Human Digestive System and more, in an absorbing and exciting manner.

Also imagine not just school children watching these shows on TV each night, but doing so along with their parents who will also get the benefit of getting an education from India's best teachers.

How can we do that? Consider a reality TV show for teachers that will unearth teaching talent, enable it to bubble up to the top and showcase it to the national audience. Wouldn't that be a game changer?

How would it work?

• Students and school managements submit the names of their best teachers to the TV Production House, for each class from class I to class XII, for each of the school subjects.
• The TV Production House goes from city to city across the country and conducts an audition of the teachers registered from that city. The teachers are invited to come on a specific day for the audition to the studio and teach any concept/topic of their choice in a 10-15 minute slot before an invited audience comprising of students, parents and judges who are experienced educators. The teachers come prepared and the judges evaluate the teachers on a set of parameters and select the best teacher in each city for each class and each subject.
• The best teachers from each city, as chosen by the judges, are then invited to the second level of the competition where teachers from different cities compete with each other. As before, the competition will cover every subject for each class from class I to class XII and cover everything in the syllabus.
• The reality show will culminate in selecting the best teachers in the country for each subject by the end of the school year and give away the Best Teacher awards along with a substantial monetary prize for the winning teachers.
• The teachers can be asked to teach in English and/or the local languages of each of the states to enable the large audience of school going children across both rural and urban areas to benefit.
• The teachers will be evaluated on their ability to bring about conceptual understanding amongst the viewers and stimulate further interest and excitement in the subject.
• This program can run right through the school academic year to cover all subjects for all classes, with a break during the summer holidays.

The benefits of the reality TV show for teachers

• We can discover India's best teachers and offer them national level recognition
• We will enable every teacher across the country to watch from home and learn from India's best teachers in action and strive to improve and do as well as the best.
• We will be providing students and parents across the country, whether in rural areas or urban areas, with a high quality education right in their homes through exposure to excellent teachers. The students and parents will not only end up learning but will also then expect more from their own school teachers, thereby raising standards overall. We often settle for what we have, only because we haven't seen anything better yet.
• We can make the teaching profession sexy. We can change the perception of the teaching profession by presenting it as exciting and rewarding both emotionally and financially, for good teachers. We will inspire today's students to become tomorrow's teachers and attract talent into the profession.
• The best teachers will be courted by the schools who will compete to recruit them to teach their children. Salary levels will rise for the better teachers.
• A huge amount of superb educational content will be created in the process. All of the content can be put up on the Internet and students will have the ability to watch the programs of their choice in future at any time and learn at their own pace and progress step by step. One can always go back to relearn a concept which may not be clear or something that one may have forgotten. This will become a continuing education opportunity for adults too - they can learn things they didn't learn in school.
• We could do the same thing for college and university level education too.

Funding and operationalising the reality show for teachers

• A huge audience of students and parents are likely to watch these programmes. There will be substantial interest from advertisers for this huge nationwide audience, especially since parents themselves will want their children to watch this program. Which other TV programs do parents want their children to watch every day?
• Given the multitude of reality television shows to discover musical talent with no dearth of advertisers, a reality television show for teachers ought to be viable. I'm sure we can find a way to make it work - our television executives are amongst the best in the business.
• The details of the duration of each teaching segment, the structuring of what to teach in each slot, how to link it to the syllabus, the parameters on which the teachers will be evaluated, selection of the judges etc.. will have to be worked out. When multiple channels pick up on this, there will be constant innovation in these operational aspects to try and do better than the others and the innovations that work with the audience will get picked up by the other channels.

This could potentially revolutionise education in multiple ways, if we can make it work.

New ideas for education will flow to the West from the developing world, says Prof. James Tooley

An educational revolution is happening behind (politicians') backs. The Chinese failed to rescue British car manufacturing, but to China we must look to see the future of education. People there talk openly of the "education industry". In China - and India too - private education, whether chains of posh academies and universities, the mushrooming of private schools for the poor, or innovative e-learning for the masses, is becoming big business. As the market progresses, competition will force prices down, and force the pace of innovation.

My prediction is that innovation in education, if freed from the restraints of the state, will mean challenging the grossly inefficient and wasteful systems that governments have set in stone. Once this happens, education can be reclaimed from the "two tyrannies", the state and schooling. Free of the state, the educational market will be free to challenge the shibboleth of schooling. And once the new industry develops in the east, globalisation will bring the new sunrise industry to our shores.

says Prof. James Tooley, Professor of Education and Director of the E.G. West Centre, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the IEA 50th Anniversary Lecture on 20th April 2005 at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. The E.G. West Centre is dedicated to understanding the role of choice, competition and entrepreneurship in the delivery of "Education for All."

Expanding on the above theme, Prof Tooley asks

What will education reclaimed mean in practice? As the market develops, we will wonder how it was possible to believe that all the diverse aims of education –preparation for citizenship, careers and family life, and initiation into the best that has been thought and known – could possibly be realised through schooling. Education will become organically linked again into everyday life, not forced into schools and colleges where young people sink into an alienated youth culture, into compulsory idleness and irresponsibility. And the market will look askance too at the wasteful egalitarian way in which all teachers are straitjacketed. Why, it will probe, are inspirational teachers given not only the same pecuniary rewards, but also the same number of children to teach, as teachers who lacked motivational ability? The market will not tolerate such inefficiency, and will reward those innovators who find more effective and efficient use of scarce teaching resources.

And what will educational institutions look like? Once education is reclaimed, I believe that question will look rather odd. Education will be known to pervade the whole of society. Educational institutions will be family homes, workplaces, sports’ centres, town halls, reading rooms in pubs, debating chambers, bookstores, and so on. There might be some dedicated learning centres where you’ll go when you want to learn – you’ll probably see the distinctive bright orange logo of the “EasyLearn” chain, and the characteristic red “V” of “Virgin Opportunity”. And there would be “places apart”, like monasteries, dependent on subscriptions and patronage, where young and old together can engage in study and research for the love of it. But you won’t see the youth ghettoes we call schools and colleges. They’ll definitely be consigned to the wastebin of history, a state-sponsored experiment that grossly failed.

For politicians, the threat comes from the east. For everyone else, it will be liberation.

Prof. Tooley's vision of the future is quite radical, but not necessarily utopian, I would think. A lot of food to provoke thought.

School children map their neighbourhood in Uttaranchal State

Sometime back, I had suggested a way of tapping school/college students to create local information resources. It turns out that the Department of Science & Technology has initiated a project in schools to get school children to map local neighbourhoods.

Yahoo India carried a story (October 04, 2004) which describes an effort by a group of over 250 school children in Uttaranchal State as part of the Mapping the Neighbourhood Project sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology. The project is being co-ordinated by the Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions. According to the Yahoo report,

A group of 18 children, between 13 and 18 years of age, showed Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal here 20-odd maps of their region sketched with complex altimeters that could be used for development purposes. The maps gave information of the villages, including the occupation of the people, the male-female ratio, water availability and electricity supply.

Maulik Kandpal, a class seven student, presented a map on the natural springs near the township of Almora. "From our analysis, we have found that while some women have to walk just half a kilometre in search of water, there are others for whom water is more than 10 km away." Information is downloaded from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite and interpreted to locate minute details like garbage bins, electric poles, the number of streetlights and even the number of steps. Sunil Gaur, of the Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions - the NGO that trained the children - said they were taught to collect and analyse the information. "After that they were left on their own to make their studies and chart them out."

Fourteen-year-old Dhananjay Mehta, who went around his town while conducting the survey and talking to people about their problems, said the exercise had helped him "understand the problems faced by our state." "This will definitely help us help our village," he said. While a map of Chitai village showed that there were more women than men, tracking the garbage pick-up truck's route in Matena showed the exact locations where the garbage bins were ignored, Dhananjay explained.

V.S. Ramamoorthy, secretary of DST, told IANS: "The mapping system in India has often been criticised for being inaccurate and outdated. Now that the project has shown its results, it is up to the government to implement this system of mapping into the national mode." A visibly impressed minister said: "This mapping is the kind of data we want to put on board for development process.

If the activities involved in mapping the neighbourhood are integrated into the school/college curriculum, the scope of the Mapping the Neighbourhood Project which currently focusses largely on geography, could be expanded to also cover local history, biology and ecology, economy and business, media, health and other issues too.

If every neighbourhood in the country is able to create a local resource of this sort, and all the local resources can be integrated together into a national database, we would have a storehouse of information of phenomenal value to the individuals, businesses, government bodies and NGOs.The students will also be learning valuable skills as part of the process of creating the local resources.

Another important aspect of the project is the potential it has to generate some revenues for the schools/colleges to which the students belong if local businesses and the government bodies see value in the information and insights generated by the students and are willing to pay for it. The students could even undertake customised studies/surveys on request. One such idea could be implemented at the college level to generate revenues for colleges.

Frederick Noronha has more to say on the need to create local content, its relevance and the kinds of local content that can be generated.

FC Kohli's educational experiments

Business Week interviewed Faqir Chand Kohli, former Chairman of TCS, who spoke about his interest in the area of education and his efforts to develop

• A computer-aided adult-literacy program

  [For years,] the Indian government has been spending a lot of money and resources on adult literacy. It has been using conventional methods. While there has been some progress, it's inadequate, considering that about 250 million adults in India are still illiterate. There are constraints: You need 200 hours of instruction for full literacy, and you need trained teachers to teach. If I'm 25 and working in a field or as a housewife, how will I find those 200 hours? As for teachers, we need 500,000 trained teachers to come to 500,000 villages. Where will they come from?

  So I started thinking: How can we learn, recognize images, retain, recall. I found that we usually look at images and icons -- pictures, faces, and words are all icons -- and relate it to a sound pattern. Then it sticks. Maybe someone in the world has tried this out, but not in this manner. The key was, when done with the program, the person should be able to read a newspaper in their own language.

  It needed a vocabulary of 400-600 words. So, starting in early 2000, three or four of us -- three TCS engineers and a linguist -- prepared a vocabulary of 500 words. And we prepared the lessons in a month or so.

  Then we experimented, and the first lesson was in a village called Medak, outside Hyderabad. We upgraded the keyboard in Telegu [the local language]. And we got 20 volunteers for lessons, thrice a week for 1.5 hours each. After 8-to-10 weeks, people started reading the newspaper. Our major experiment was in Guntur, again in the same state. We had the same results.

  We have experimented in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali with the same results. Our experiment was complete. We've told the government to take over. We've shown what we can do with a sampling of 50,000 people in five languages.

  We have a social message: We want people to not just read the newspaper, but read their land records, the political manifestos -- not just hear speeches during election time. People are reading their children's books now.

  More information on the Computer-Based Functional Literacy programme (CBFL) is available here.

• A new model of learning for public schools

  We're now experimenting with the public school system, creating teacher aids, and computerizing the extra coaching classes that all teachers here give. Students will pay money for the coaching program and see the teacher once a week to complete it. And from 8th grade on, everyone must get some vocational training -- it's not necessary for everyone to go to college. There are solutions [for everything], but we have to work on them.

I'd written earlier about another of the Tata Group's initiatives in education to develop a model to provide quality school education at an affordable price.

Affordable, quality education for the masses in a school in Godhra

Indian Express (January 01, 2004) has a story on the Godhra Sarvajanik Shikshan Mandal (GSSM) School run by Sharabhai Shah. According to the story,

Shah is the man behind Godhra Sarvajanik Shikshan Mandal (GSSM) School, which has brought the best of modern education—including computers for each class, LCD projectors, air-conditioned lecture halls, and a software that is now being copied across the state—to a town where few have heard of, let alone expect, such facilities.

And unlike city schools, it charges primary students just Rs 125 per month, and secondary students Rs 50 (this fees has to be kept low as per state government standards).

I'm intrigued to hear of a school that charges such minimal amounts as fees and is yet able to invest in infrastructure as the kind mentioned. This raises a few thoughts in mind and it would be very interesting to find out more about what they are doing and how they are doing it

• Are they a private school? I'm assuming so, but not sure.
• Are the monthly fees for secondary students really as low as Rs. 50 (fifty), lower even than the Rs. 125 per month for primary students or is it a typo in the Indian Express article? I suspect the latter and that the fees for secondary students is more likely to be Rs. 500.
• I don't understand the bit about the fees needing to be kept low as per state government standards. Does that mean the school is getting some support or grants from the state government and so has to toe their line?
• What is the software that is now being copied across the state? I wish the journalist had done a better job of writing about these things with specifics rather than vague mentions. He does refer to some software later in the story, but is still not able to explain what it is clearly.
• While there seems to be a lot of hardware/software available, much more than most other schools, there is no mention of how all this has influenced quality of learing. The journalist seems to have been carried away by the presence of technology without bothering to find out more about how effective the use of technology is turning out to be.

The story goes on to say,

The school was set up in 1910 by Manilal Mehta, but the Mandal took it over in 1955. Shah, who runs a billing business for the electricity board, has been associated with the Mandal since 1956. It was in 1985, however, that he started managing the school and became the one-man army behind its transformation from a small-town school to one with the most modern facilities for its 4,500 students. ‘‘I always dreamt of providing the best education at affordable price, so whenever I went to visit relatives abroad, I’d film the schools there,’’ Shah says. The bright murals at his school are replicated from the ones in Paris, while the idea of locker rooms for students was borrowed from schools he visited in the US. Shah was also struck by the audio-visual aids which have been in use in classrooms abroad for two-three decades. The school now has 13 computer labs with 545 computers linked by a local area network. There are computers and 29-inch television sets in each classroom, lecture halls equipped with LCD projectors and 61-inch television screens, and a library of educational CDs, VCDs and DVDs. The school even has a sound-proof studio for recording and digitising syllabi. Designing the software was a pioneering effort, says Jaswinder Singh, director of Academy for Computer Training (ACT), Ahmedabad. Programmers worked in collaboration with designers from the Designmate group to convert material from textbooks into presentations, in 3-D format wherever possible. The material is accessible on each classroom computer and TV screen, as also in the labs.

The presentations generate interest in studies among students, says Sudeep Goel, a higher-secondary physics teacher. ‘‘The software worked out so well that we plan to use it as a model for other schools,’’ informs Singh. ‘‘Already, similar software designed by us is in use in 40 schools in the state.’’ The parents are more than happy. Itesh Darji, whose two children study in the school, says: ‘‘For the fees they charge the school is very good—and considering that it’s available in a town like Godhra.’’ Sometimes carrying on with the fees the school charges becomes a bit of a stretch. But Shah is in no rush to hike it. Instead, the trust relies on other means to raise money—donations, rent from properties and profits from businesses. Recently, some alumni settled in the US donated electronic equipment worth $35,000. The trust also borrowed Rs 1.16 crore from Bank of Baroda, much of which remains to be paid back. ‘‘The idea is why have inequality in education. Why should a child from Godhra fail in competition against a child from Mumbai or Bangalore?’’ Shah says.

It is a huge school by any standards, with its size of 4,500 students. (I have heard that South Point High School in Calcutta has about 13,000 students, which makes my mind boggle!, but most schools that I know have around 2000-3000 students). Managing such a large school would be quite complex and challenging. It would be interesting to know more about how they're dealing with it and the impact of the size on the quality of learning.

The funding options for the school presumably include:

• money from the school fees (which is around Rs. 54 Lakhs per year - assuming an average fee of Rs. 100 per student per month for 4,500 students)
  
• donations from alumni in either cash or kind.
  
• Debt from banks - I'm surprised to hear that PSU banks are willing to lend to schools. From what I had heard, banks were too wary of lending to trusts running schools, let alone to schools starting up. (Aside: A friend who was the managing trustee for a school was innovative at rasing funds after he had built up a sufficent amount of goodwill for the school. He found that parents of the school children were more than happy to lend money to the trust when he offered to pay them interest at savings bank rates.)

I wonder if the school is also doing something to generate some revenue by itself, apart from the school fees, like running computer classes in the evenings for adults or other such activities to put the infrastructure available to productive use during non-school hours.

Community college initiative by the Madras Centre for Research and Development of Community Education

Mylapore Times (dated May 29 - June 04, 2004), a local neighbourhood newspaper in Chennai, interviewed Dr. Xavier Alphonse, a Jesuit priest who set up the Madras Centre for Research and Development of Community Education (MCRDCE) in 1999 to facilitate the growth of community colleges in India. For the last five years, the centre has been actively involved in this process and has, till date, helped to set up 111 colleges.

Dr. Xavier Alphonse, director of MCRDCE, has served as the Principal of Loyola College, Chennai, for three years and currently works in the English Department of this college. He set up the Madras Community College in San Thome in 1996, worked here for three years and visited 18 community colleges abroad, before he decided to set up the centre.

Here's the text of the interview.

How would you define a community college? It is a place that makes people fit for a job. It is an alternative system of education to empower the socially, economically and educationally disadvantaged. Here, we concentrate more on skill development based on each individual. Anyone can join - school dropouts, degree holders who want to learn a particular skill - we even have students from the rural areas. Anyone from the age group of 16 to 47 years can enroll.

What is this 'alternative' system of education?
First, we concentrate on teaching life-coping skills. This covers self-esteem, motivation, time management, dealing with loneliness and failure - a complete attitudinal formation of the individual. Second, we have a dynamic relationship with employers. So far, formal education and industries have been like a railway track, they never met. But with community colleges, they are very much a part of the process. Internship is a must for everyone, because we believe that hands-on experience is invaluable. Here, we follow a reverse process as compared to formal education. We conduct a complete analysis of the employment scene and see where people are required. We have assured job placement.

Why were community colleges started ?
The movement began in order to give equal opportunities to all. In my experience as a teacher, I have seen that the poor always get eliminated. They needed a space of their own. According to a UNDP survey, there are 550 million people in India without skills, though we are ranked seventh when it concerns information technology skills. Obviously, skills of the day are not reaching the poor.

What is the role of the centre you run?
We are the facilitators. Before we help to set up a community college, we conduct meticulous and extensive research on the community. We approach industries or organisations for help and sponsorship. I design textbooks and the centre also helps in teacher training. We have trained more than 650 teachers so far. Now we are trying to make the projects financially viable, as no fees are charged. In the sense, if they cannot pay, we don't throw them out. Some of the students have been known to pay the institution after they get jobs and they even sponsor the education of some of their juniors.

How is the movement progressing ?
It is a positive growth. For our centre, I believe that we have crossed the first stage of conceptualising and implementation. Now we need to concentrate on consolidation and quality sustenance. Personally, I want the community colleges to go to rural areas as well. We need to set them up there, hone skills in integrated farming, horticulture and tapping native medicines so that they can give back to the community. Another thing we need to concentrate on is the vertical growth of the students - how to induct them into other universities for higher studies. I am trying to link up with open universities for this purpose.

The MCRDCE web site provides some more information.

The Community College movement started in India in 1995. As the Community Colleges were emerging, there was a need felt by the Community Colleges to have a Co-ordinating Agency. To respond to this need, The Madras Centre for Research and Development of Community Education (MCRDCE) was started in January 1999. It is an undertaking of the Jesuits of Tamilnadu Province to help, facilitate and consolidate the Community College Movement. The Centre is the unit of the Loyola Technical Institute Society, Madurai.

MCRDCE is a service agency that helps the various Community Colleges in different aspects of the Community College system. It is not a body of accreditation that gives recognition and approval for the Community Colleges. It performs the functions of helping the agencies to establish Community Colleges, monitor them continuously and evaluate them periodically. It has succeeded in bringing all the Community Colleges for five Consultations during the last two years. It has also conducted two national workshops involving the NGOs in India and existing Community Colleges in collaboration with the HRD Ministry. It has fulfilled the function of net working among the Colleges and sharing of information. It has provided a direction and a focus to the Community College Movement.

For more details, contact
Madras Centre for Research and Development of Community Education
Gokul Villa, 'A' Block, Flat No. S5&S6, 2nd Floor,
No. 250, R.K. Mutt Road, R.A. Puram, Chennai - 600 028. E-mail : mcrdce@vsnl.com

The Promise Foundation is applying psychology towards improving education

I recently came across The Promise Foundation, an interesting Bangalore-based organisation, which is applying psychology towards improve education. According to their web site,

The Promise Foundation is involved in applying the behavioural sciences to promote educational, social and economic development.

The Promise Foundation is deeply committed to systematic and scientific research. We examine aspects of the behavioural sciences that are linked to education and social and economic development. We conduct our own research to test existing theory and develop models relevant to the Indian situation. India presents a situation where the paucity of resources and urgency of need do not allow for the luxury of research that is not directly linked to application. Our attempt is to follow the action research model and the driving force behind our efforts at scientific investigation are to develop applications. Therefore, while we do believe that research must inform practice, we also have learnt that practice could lead and shape research. It is our attempt to translate relevant theory and research into applications that facilitate behavioural change amongst the economically disadvantaged.

Our modus operandi has been to blend direct service delivery by The Promise Foundation's teams, with training other organisations, to replicate these services in their locations. Our programmes are implemented at three levels:

• Direct implementation by our teams in schools, slums and rural areas, through workshops and intervention programmes. We currently work directly in about 55 schools spread across a range of Indian towns and cities.
• Training Programmes for adults working with children and youth from socially and economically disadvantaged homes (e.g. teachers, wardens, non-formal educators, animators, pre-school teachers). Our training courses are skills oriented and are firmly rooted in research findings.
• Consultancy to Government, Non-Governmental and International Organisations for training their workers and developing sustainable systems for programme implementation, assessment and appraisal. We currently work with close to 150 organisations that are involved with children and adolescents.

Most importantly our objective is to function as a Resource Group, that would provide consultancy to other organisations already working for children and youth. It is through our training programmes that we hope to see our interventions replicated on a larger scale.

The Promise Foundation's interventions follow the course of the person's growth and comprise three core programmes across the developmental spectrum.

• Stimulation Intervention Programmes (SIP), focusses on early childhood care and education, for children deprived of quality experiences for social, emotional and cognitive development.
  
• Programmes for Assisted Learning (PAL), is an accelerated learning programme targeting children who are at risk to failing and dropping out of school.
  
• Work Awareness and You (WAY), addresses the career development needs of high schoolers and helps them find answers to questions of planning for fruitful employment in the future.

A list of research papers describing their findings from research over the past decade are available on their site. We need more such efforts to help improve education by systematic study of the many challenges we face.

Gandhi, Aurobindo and Tilak on Education

The National Council of Teacher Education has put together a comprehensive compilation of

• Mahatma Gandhi's thoughts on education. It is available for download as a 169 page MS-Word document (707kb).
  
• Sri Aurobindo's thoughts on education. It is available for download as a 72 page MS-Word document (288kb).
  
• a series of articles on Lokamanya Bala Gangadhar Tilak's thoughts on education

They have also put together President Zakir Husain's thoughts on education, which I couldn't find online.

A list of NCTE's publications are available online.

Chennai NGO runs an open school

In the context of an earlier post which discussed the possibility of working through the National Open school, I came across an effort by a Chennai-based NGO that is trying to do just that.

The Montfort Community Development Society (MCDS) in Chennai - an NGO managed by the Montfort Brothers of St. Gabriel, is reaching out to thousands of families in the urban slums of Chennai and rural centres in the neighbouring Districts through Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) and Integrated Community Development Programmes.

As part of its activities, the MCDS runs the Montfort Open School which "prepares school drop-outs and failed candidates to appear for Std.VIII, X and XII examinations." I have written to them to find out more about their activities and will post details after I hear from them.