Education

We, Natalie Sridhar who has completed her bachelors in psychology from the US, Mohammed Fazil an ex-Cisco employee, and Deepa Mahesh, an ex-Target employee are currently Teach for India fellows, teaching Grades three and four at the Kadugodi Govternment School.  We have been in this system for the last four months and realise there are many things that the school needs support with.  Infrastructure needs Drinking Water: Water supply is an issue because the pump for the borewell keeps going out of order. The school also needs a water purifying system to make the water drinkable for the kids. Toilets: We have…

How many tuition or coaching centres are there in Bengaluru? A simple internet search for SSLC/ PUC or other subject coaching centres in Bengaluru will throw thousands of results at you. No one knows the exact number. Yet, of all these tutorials, only 28 are legal, while the rest are functioning illegally, right under the nose of Education department! Information collected by Citizen Matters from various education departments has revealed that only a handful of tutorials in the city have obtained necessary permission from the department to operate. Majority of the coaching centres that promise to give a bright future…

Jesus is supposed to have said that "Man does not live by bread alone". Whether I eat only bread or other things along with it, though, a lot of the stuff I'm currently learning will be of no help whatsoever in acquiring it. That's what I feel every time I sit down, or, as the case may be, try to keep my head off the desk, in class. My main issue is with the amount we're expected to write - by hand! I'm not expecting to spend much time writing going forward—after all, this is 2015, not 1215. And anyway,…

Canara Bank Institute of Information Technology, a corporate social responsibility initiative of Canara Bank has been providing computer education under both hardware and software streams. The programs it offers are of full time duration and provide an opportunity for educated and unemployed youth to learn computer skills and improve soft skills free of cost. The objective is to bring otherwise expensive computer training within the reach of the common man. The upcoming program on Network Administration will commence on September 26th 2015. Candidates who are above 18 years of age can take the aptitude test which will be held on September 14th 2015 at…

The Right to Education Act has to be amended, to have any chance of succeeding. In fact, almost certainly, without amendments it will do more harm than good, and there is enough evidence of this happening already. Four common-sense steps will help. (a) The regulation of the education sector has to be separated from the Education departments of states. The regulator should be able to oversee the functioning of both public schools and private schools. (b) Unaided schools should be exempt from this law, and instead be brought under a new voluntary-mandatory mix like has been done for CSR in…

It was camp-fire time at Naamadachilume, near Tumkur, Karnataka, school year 1972-73. All manner of sharing, singing, joking, and so on was going on. The Scout Master said, “I know students call me Dappa Ravay (V)unday. I think it is because I am a very sweet person.” In those few seconds, we realized that famous “fortune” line that would appear, decades later, on my Unix terminal: “Remember that secret you had? It isn’t!” DR Vijayendra Rao aka DRV, from a family photograph. Pic: DV Prahlad Generations of students (about 5 or 6 only, at the time) had called him that.…

The new building of Government Higher Primary School, Nallurahalli which has remained unoccupied from last five years. Pic: Murugaraj Swaminathan Even after years of construction, the building of the Government Higher Primary School, Nallurahalli in Whitefield remained unoccupied. Inaugurated with much fanfare five years ago, the school building which is supposed to shelter students, turned out to be a dumpyard for builders. Eight classrooms in two blocks of the school were used by local contractors to dump the cement sacks, concrete blocks and other waste materials. However, the situation is going to change soon. You will hear the chitter-chatter of…

117 children of waste pickers in Bangalore received scholarships worth Rs 2,16,450. The scholarship programme, initiated by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment at the Union Government level, is extended to all pre-matriculation students, who are children of parents engaged in ‘unclean occupation’. When the scholarship programme was rolled out, the government had not included waste picking as an occupation in the eligibility list. The consistent efforts of the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers led to the inclusion of waste pickers as well. Many organisations across India pursued the case of inclusion at both the state and municipal level. In Karnataka,…

A Mathematics teacher at Corporation Malleswaram High School teaching a 9th standard class. Pic: Shamsheer Yousaf What can we do to improve public schooling, tangibly? Ever since the terrible PU results came out showing more children failing than passing, I've got a lot of letters asking what can be done about this. To my understanding, we need to do at least the following three things, to have any chance of intervening swiftly in the lives of millions of children. Increase the funding levels for education I know we are perfectly capable of wasting money, but even so, without proper investment…

PNLIT is delighted by the performance of our three students in the II P.U.C. exams. All of them got over 70% with Deepubai getting 75%, Sadiqa 71% and Ramya 72%.    Living in the hutments on the lake bund, they joined PNLIT's Classes at the Lake program (Teach program) three years ago. Thanks to V.P. Karthik, now pursuing PhD at IIT, Chennai, Anisha Kaul and Swathi Jayakumar, the girls' performances were beyond their own expectations in Std 10 as well.    Our volunteer teachers not only coached them but also encouraged them to dream big. Deepu wants to do engineering and is…