Education In India: Diverse Perspectives
Bhasker Sharma
EDUCATION AT THE CROSSROADS by Apoorvanand & Omita Goyal Niyogi Books, 2018, 260 pp., 495
June 2019, volume 43, No 6

The total spend on education in India (Central and State governments together) is 2.7% of GDP. Though lower than the spends by peer BRICS countries the budget alone does not account for the poor state of school education(primary and secondary) and tertiary education, as revealed in various surveys and reports  notably the ASER reports for schools and Asian or global rankings of universities and colleges. The new National Education Policy that was announced in 2014 is still not finalized. In this context the education ecosystem in the country, consisting of 290m students in 1.4m schools and 900 universities and 50,000 colleges and institutions, is certainly at the crossroads.

One caution at the outset is that the 18 essays in this collection are not classified or categorized and hence quite disparate. The common thread, as mentioned by one of the editors in the preface, is to provide different perspectives to the question, ‘What is education?’ This is done through each essay remarking on a specific dimension of education such as higher education policy, privatization of education(school and tertiary), MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), philanthropy in higher education, RTE, student selection practices, inequalities in household educational expenditure, role of parenting in education, gender issues in higher education, bilingual pedagogy and internationalization of education. This review provides a brief analysis of some of the essays representative of the various aspects covered in this book.

The essays were first published in the IIC Quarterly special issue on education––Winter 2015-Spring 2016, Volume 42, Numbers 3&4 which is referred to (without explicitly mentioning the quarterly) at the bottom of the first page of each essay.

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