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A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that COVID-19 will increase income inequality in emerging markets and developing countries, “further widening the gap between rich and poor” and increasing the urgency for “investment in retraining and reskilling programs can...
In 2020, exams for the 10th grade conducted by India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) led to impressive results. Of the 1.8 million students who took the exam, 10% scored over 90% and 2.23% scored over 95%. In 2019, a similar number wrote the exam with 13% scoring above 90% and...
In a matter of months, the novel coronavirus has swept across the globe and entirely up-ended our understanding of normality. Now, as the virus continues to rage and signs of a second surge are emerging even before the first has ended, we’re rethinking everything we’d assumed and hoped for at...
In an article on Al Jazeera published on September 1, Kathleen Siddell, a freelance writer and former teacher who lives in Southern California, made a compelling case concerning the question that many parents on the West Coast (and elsewhere) were concerned about at that moment of history. She...
Every good citizen should understand that education is the bedrock of civilization. At the very least, it keeps the children occupied while their parents are outside earning a living. Politicians claim that education is a top priority. But when cornered, they usually admit that budgeting education...
The Advanced Level Certificate (A-level), together with the General Certificate of Education (GCSE), is one of two sets of exams students across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland has its own system) sit in the summer. The GCSE is a ticket to spending two years studying for A-levels,...
Fair Observer’s Atul Singh told me of his own friend, Pankaj, a father of three daughters. Pankaj was concerned that his daughters have been subjected to around three to seven hours a day of online classes, and he felt it was deeply wrong. I was invited by Fair Observer to write an article...
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools closed their doors this spring, impacting the lives of 1.5 billion students around the world and sending teachers and school administrators scrambling to keep students connected to learning opportunities. To do this they deployed a range of old and new...
Every year, on Indian Science Day in February, India commemorates the discovery of the Raman Effect by Sir C.V. Raman. In 1930, Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics and has been revered by Indians ever since. Fast forward to 2019, and the US National Science Foundation placed India third when...
The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a prominent figure in the 20th-century critical pedagogy movement and the celebrated author of the ground-breaking 1968 text, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Freire’s seminal work proposes a dialogical method of teaching literacy that...
Like most other human activities, education has been brutally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The traditional classroom, a place of safety in which the teacher reigned over students and represented a form of political order, suddenly came to be seen as a petri dish of disease threatening not...
