:::The Desi Flavor:::

Foreign Universities targets Indian students

What forces hundreds of Indian students to go abroad and seek higher education? Abi of nanopolitan on what could be achieved for a similar amount in India, and an estimate of what education is a student-funded research university would cost. [Global Voices Online]

 

 

Linguist Nicholas Ostler on Sanskrit

A recent interview of Nicholas Ostler, the author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. A native of England, he received his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT. Ten years ago he created the Foundation for Endangered Languages, an organization that works to document and revitalize languages that are on the verge of extinction.

His take on Sanskrit:

Your affection for Sanskrit comes through in your book. What is it about Sanskrit that appeals to you?

Well, the Indian background helps: my parents would never have met if they had not both been sent out to India owing to the Second World War. But Sanskrit has many virtues that attract. Its grammar has been rigorously analyzed, but not in a doctrinaire way – there is room for intellectual debate. The classical Indian culture in which Sanskrit first flourished offers an immense variety of material, from romantic comedy and sensual poetry to epic, massive-word play, political science and philosophy. It embodies a contradiction, that a language, whose literature is so lithe, should be indigenously analyzed as a sort of architectural structure. And I suppose I like the fact that it is so difficult (coming from English, certainly), yet so familiar in another way (coming at it from Latin, Greek and Russian).

Tutoring American kids from India

How teachers in India are helping American kids improve their test scores. The beginning of the offshore tuition market opportunity:

The Karol Bagh centre of Educomp Datamatics could easily be one of them, another teaching shop promising to help students get into the IITs and IIMs.

Step in and you realise the difference. There are teachers, but no stud-ents. There are computers, but no blackboards. Actually, the students are 16,000 miles away at the Franklin School, Santa Barbara, California. Educomp is running a pilot for taking tuitions online for students in the US.

This is education outsourcing. Or, to use the cliché of linking everything sent from overseas as a process, it is being termed as education process outsourcing (EPO). Career Launcher, another Delhi-based teaching company, also has teachers on its rolls who are tutoring American students.

MIT Education wants to be free

Jay Gohil

In 2001, MIT announced that it was going to put its course materials online. Class notes, videotapes of lectures, selected readings -- they'd all be free to anyone able to access them. Two years later, Wired is checking in to see how the program's been working out.

Here's the excerpt:

Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."

Last year 50 classes were online. This year there will be 500. By 2006, the university plans to post about 2,000. The following are some relevant classes that focuses on South Asian economies, politics e.t.c

: Energy Systems and Economic Development

: Democratization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America

: Development Economics: Microeconomic Issues and Policy Models

Languages and Scripts of India

Jay Gohil

Do you someone interested in learning about Indian languges and scripts? This is the most useful and comprehensive information site I know. Click here for more information. It includes Indian language sites, Brahmi Scipt and it's historical development, classical indian languages and texts and much much more.

India has 18 official spoken recognized languages, with each state having it's own language. Examples: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telegu, Urdu. Click here for a brief historic description.

According to Jared Diamond, 6000 thousand languages are spoken today and by the end of the century, we may be down to 200 or so.

Regarding Indian languages, Payal Sampat writes:

India is a densely polyglot country. Estimates of the number of languages spoken there vary widely, depending on where one draws the line between language and dialect. A conservative reckoning would put the number of native Indian tongues at roughly 400, of which about 350 are rapidly losing speakers. The same is true for thousands of other languages all over the world.

A majority of Indians I know can speak at least 2 or more Indian languages. Personally, I can speak Gujarati and understand Hindi (no practice when it comes to speaking, though it may change in the future with the help of a friend) and a few words of Punjabi. Does that count?

Digital Library of India

Jay Gohil

I know this may be old news, but I just came across it. Early this September, Indian President Dr. A.P.K. Abdul Kalam launched the Digital Library of India in New Delhi. On its opening day the library contained about 27,000 open-access books, many digitized from rare and deteriorating ancient originals. In his remarks in launching the library, President Kalam emphasized that the library "gives equitable access, irrespective of place, caste, creed or colour or economic status". The new library is part of the Universal Digital Library project, which seeks to provide open access to one million ebooks by 2005.

Click here for the Digital Library itself. The links in the left sidebar lead to some very interesting material on the background and mission of the library and the Million Book Project.

Here are some related information about the Million Book Project:

: Understanding and Assessing the Million Book Project - Denise Troll Covey, at Pennsylvania Library Association, October 5, 2003.

:Million Book Project Today - Gloriana St. Clair, at OCLC, October 21, 2003.

: Copyright Permission: Turning to Dust or Digital - Denise Troll Covey, at the International Conference on the Future of the Book, Cairns, Australia, April 22, 2003

: Million Book Project in U. S. and India - Gloriana St. Clair, at the International Conference on the Future of the Book, Cairns, Australia, April 22, 2003.

: Million Book Project (MBP) - Gloriana St. Clair, presented to the Coalition for Networked Information, San Antonio, Texas, December 5, 2002

: Million Book Project: Dreams and Realities - Gloriana St. Clair discussed MBP at PALCI (June and November 2002).

: Million Book Project FAQ - Project tackles key research issues.

The Innovation Engine

Jay Gohil

It's broken because we're wasting bright young people's almost limitless potential with stupid, narrow-minded education policies that are derived from outdated corporate control theories from the 80s and 90s. Absolutely unbelievable.

On the other hand, parents could also ask their kids to actually read a few books once in a while.

I think it will be hilarious to watch the pendulum swing the other way - when the US starts copying the eduction policies of, say, India.

Desi student selected for Rhodes Scholarship 2004

Jay Gohil

The newest class of Rhodes Scholars - 2004 from the United States, includes one Desi - Pooja Kumar, a second-year Harvard Medical student. She hopes to study what she calls "the intersection of health and war." During the past several years, the 23-year-old from Doylestown, Pa., has worked for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to help Congolese refugees at that country's border with Zambia, spent a year with refugees in Azerbaijan and worked in East Timor with charity Save the Children. The recipients of scholarships enjoy a two or three years of study at Oxford University, England.

Last years class includes four Indian-Americans: Dave Chokshi, Ankur Luthra, Devi Shidhar, Prateek Tandon. More information can be obtained from The Rhodes Scholarship website.

Private Schools for the Poor: Case Study from India

Jay Gohil

James Tooley and Pauline Dixon at the Center for British Teachers has an interesting report on the state of privatr schools in India. Here is an excerpt:

It is the accepted wisdom in development circles that it is a matter for governments and bilateral/multilateral agencies to solve the problem of achieving ‘education for all’. This is curious, for in other areas of our lives the opposite assumption is accepted – even by Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, who points to the crucial role of markets in achieving high economic growth, poverty reduction and freedom. Why is education an exception? Why isn’t the education community worried about the impact on the poor of the unaccountable ‘powerful bureaucracies’ cited by Sen as dangers of state-sponsored development? The emphasis of development experts is especially odd given studies that have shown the relative superiority of private over public education in developing countries, in terms of achievement and cost-effectiveness. However, although such studies have controlled for socio-economic status and self-selection bias, the assumption is that private schools serve the upper classes and so are irrelevant to debates about the poor.

This report challenges this assumption. It outlines research investigating the phenomenon of private schools serving low-income families in Hyderabad, India, and suggests that the development community’s dismissal of a valuable role for the private sector in meeting the educational needs of the poor is unwarranted.

Other relevant material includes Tooley's chapter in The Voluntary City and also my earlier post on this subject.

Private Schooling in India

Jay Gohil

The New York times reports on "an educational revolution" in India where the government schools are so bad that private schooling is exploding among the very poorest of the poor. Already over 17 percent of all kindergarten, primary and secondary schools are in the private sector and in the big cities the proportion is much higher. Jean Dreze, an economist who helped write a national assessment predicts "within 10 to 15 years, government schools will be almost wiped out."

A description of a public and private school next door to one another explains why a farmer earning $22 a month will spend nearly a fifth of his income ($4) sending his child to a private school.

In the government school, only two of the three teachers assigned for 273 students were present on a recent day. Around 50 children sat on the floor in a gloomy classroom, while 40 more sat on the grass outside, as their classroom had been under repair since August. One teacher did paperwork, while the other floated between the two groups, not actually teaching either. At the private school next door, where the teacher-student ratio is 1 to 25, a group of smartly uniformed children stood outside counting loudly in English under their teacher's watchful eye. They then marched in orderly single file into a classroom with blackboard and benches.

The children next door wrestled, and watched.

Amartya Sen complains that "no developed" country educates itself using private schools. Yet, the private schools of India have much in common with the private schools of nineteenth century England, Wales and America. Contrary to common belief, attendance and literacy rates in England and Wales, for example, were 90 percent or above before any major state involvment in schools. James Mill (father of John Stuart) illustrated the parallel with modern India when he wrote in 1813, "We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school. (Quoted in E.G. West's classic Education and the State).

Furthermore, India is not alone in relying on private schools in the wake of the failure of government. Private schools are even more common in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia and elsewhere.

For more information in this area, you can take a look at James Tooley's book - The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Economics, Cognition, and Society)