Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality

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After seventy years of independence, the tragic reality is that the schools we attend and the quality of education we receive are influenced by our identity; who we are, where we live, how much we earn and our gender.

In Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality, Vimala Ramachandran explores the contours of a school system that is facing a crisis of legitimacy. While India aspires to march towards a knowledge driven society and economy, millions of young people are left behind. Those who can afford march out of government schools only to realize that the private schools (barring the elite schools) are no better. The schools they attend leaves them with little knowledge or skill, a very low self-esteem and a bleak future.

The inequalities in the larger society are reflected in the school system, and the elite schools to which the majority of the children have no access, stand apart from the rest. The book argues that the struggle for equality in education, in all schools, is ultimately a struggle for quality, both being two sides of the same coin.

Contents: Part I – The Big Picture: 1. Introduction. 2. Equity and quality: two sides of the same coin. 3. The narrative emerging from different data sources. 4. Cumulative burden of exclusion of tribal communities. 5. The intermeshing of gender and equity in education. Part II – Behind the Smokescreen of Data: 6. Segregated schools in an unequal society. 7. What facilitates successful primary school completion? 8. What it means to be a Dalit or tribal child in our schools. 9. The teacher conundrum. Index. References.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vimala Ramachandran

Vimala Ramachandran is Director, Educational Resource Unit, Jaipur and Delhi, a research and consulting group which she established in 1998. She is also a co-founder and Managing Trustee of Health Watch Trust – a network of NGOs, researchers and institutions working on issues related to women’s health, gender, population and development. She began her career teaching Indian politics and political philosophy at a women’s college in Delhi University. Leaving the groves of academe, Vimala Ramachandran worked with the Department of Education, Government of India, from 1987 to 1993 to design an education programme for adult women called Mahila Samakhya – Education for Women’s Equality. She established this programme in Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. Thereafter, Ms Ramachandran has been an independent development consultant and researcher. Besides writing reports and contributing chapters to edited volumes, she has previously edited Bridging the Gap between Intention and Action: Girls’s and Women’s Education in South Asia (1999) and Getting Children Back to School – Case Studies in Primary Education (Sage, 2003). She writes regularly on education in The Hindu and Economic and Political Weekly.

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Bibliographic information

Title
Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality
Author
Edition
1st ed.
Publisher
ISBN
9789383166251
Length
288p.
Subjects