Issue 12 - January 2008

Teachers or educators are human beings. Their function is to help the student to learn not only this or that subject, but to understand the whole activity of learning; not only to gather information about various subjects, but primarily to be complete human beings.

The world over, we lament the state of education. We might observe directly the plight of a generation of young people weighed down by the burden of seemingly meaningless academic curricula and indifferent teaching practices, alongside spiralling aspirations for securing the ‘good life’.

Science and Society Though modern science is of relatively recent origin in human history, it has made very rapid progress and transformed outwardly the manner of our living.

In the silence of deep night and in the quiet still morning when the sun is touching the hills, there is a great mystery.

I am sure all of us have had occasions when we have felt a sense of dissatisfaction; days when we wonder why we are doing what we are doing, days when we wonder whether it is any use at all, whether teachers have anything to do with the learning of the child.

As Indians, we honestly believe that culture is in our blood and that this gives us an edge over other nationalities.

The U.S. has its own history and tradition of vocational education.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

The formation called Chakravyuha was used in one of the battles of the Mahabharata.

The story of life is lived by us. It is experienced first hand from day to day.

This article is based on my experience of teaching Environmental Education for Classes 9 and 10 for the past ten years.

Teaching environmental education has been part of our curriculum at the Rishi Valley School well before the subject was made mandatory for all students as per the orders of the Supreme Court.

It is nine in the morning at Kalligutta, a remote tribal settlement just outside the Kaundinya Wildlife Sanctuary, Andhra Pradesh.

It is almost received wisdom in alternative schools and other similar communities that rules are antigrowth; they restrict creativity and stifle the true cooperative spirit.

There is an implicit assumption widely shared by teachers in the Krishnamurti schools that preparing students to face examinations shifts focus away from learning a subject.

‘May we please go outside?’ a student pleads, batting eyelids as I walk into a noisy room of fifteen-year-olds.

This article is an account of a pilot project on learning in a mixed age group environment in the middle school classes 5, 6 and 7, initiated at The School, KFI, in Chennai in the year 2006-2007.

Teachers often see research as involving distance and separation from their work.