It makes better sense to discuss this question with parents. The discussion that follows could be shared with parents, without any need to edit. We sincerely appreciate this parental predicament – all the hard work and commitment in living up to the schools’ demands and routine are not yielding the desired achievement levels in maths […]
Is there a future for the middleman The changes brought by the WWW In the 90s, the Internet enabled immediate and direct contact between millions of people, eliminated geographic distances, and created a new ‘global village’. It also marked the beginning of the era of disintermediation. The initial industry shakers The sectors impacted first were […]
Schools have not changed much since their global expansion beginning in the 19th century and continue to be organised to deliver prescribed ‘book content’ throughthe teachers in a highly structured ‘classroom settings’.Some of the areas where the schools have unfailingly retained focus are:1. Delivering a ‘defined universal curriculum’ as the be-all and end-all of knowledge […]
The following tabular representation offers a comparison of the school education in 1810s and 2010s. Indeed, schools have not changed at all over the past 200 years on most of the key dimensions and are much unprepared to address the changes in the society!To top it, two of the changes being brought about by the […]
In the previous question we discussed the changes observed in industrial societies between 1810s and 2010s. The tabular representation below captures thechanges needed in the school education system to reflect the changes in the ‘state of the society’. ‘The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it […]
Small businesses will fuel the economic engine of the future Personal computers and the Internet laid the groundwork for new businesses and disruptive business models in the last decade of the 20th century. The growing digital infrastructure reduced the costs of starting and running a small business and opened new markets and industries to small […]
The last decade may be the most ‘happening’ decade ever. Expectedly, we should be prepared for fairly stark contrast between the state of the society in 1810s and2010s and the same is tabled as under: Society has greatly transformed between 1820s and 2010s. Expectedly, the changing social context demands changes in the way schools function […]
It will be sufficient to quote Dr Krishna Kumar from his handbook–‘The child’s language and the teacher’ (published by NBT): Of all the challenges that teachers of young children must face, the challenge of introducing children to reading is perhaps the most difficult as well as the most exciting. No teacher needs to be reminded […]
Entrepreneurship going mainstream Often, discussion about entrepreneurship tends to slip towards large rounds of financing, blockbuster IPOs, and college dropout millionaires. In the last 10 years, the success of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Whatsapp have caught the imagination of our generation and made entrepreneurs superstars. Now, with the increase in the number of startups, we […]
The future Corporations will be shape-shifters A quarter of a century ago IBM was at the pinnacle of success, riding on their success of practically inventing general-purpose computing for business. They boasted of having helped put a man on the moon and counted many Nobel Laureates among their researchers. This evidently changed in 1993 when […]
