Breaking the silence

Anjali Monteiro
As I sit down to write this, we are in the midst of a social media storm, which started with a #MeToo campaign, that sought testimonies from survivors across the globe, in order to establish the ubiquity of sexual harassment and rape.

Turning the lens on society

Sunanda Ali
‘Culture’ is a word which means so many different things; it can mean ‘values’, ‘beliefs’, ‘habits’, ‘conventions’. It can mean the bedrock on which a society is founded, the often unwritten ‘rules’ we live by, the lens through which a country sees itself, the collective will of a particular people…

Birthday parties, train journeys and vacations

Geetha Durairajan
Many of you who read the title of this article will probably wonder what the link is between these three phrases. “Write an essay / a paragraph on ‘how you spent your birthday’ / ‘your first train journey’ / how you spent your vacation’ are the three most common topics that we use in our English composition classes.

Cultivating a secular spirit

Sheel
The school as we know it today is a structured way of learning about the world, in which many of our traditional ways of life and cultural values, particularly those that carry a stamp of religion, are sidelined. India is a secular country, the word secular here implying rising above religion rather than a lack of religiousness.

‘Something from the ocean, something from the hills’

Chintan Girish Modi
My biggest grouse with most education conferences in India is the relative or complete absence of children from these spaces. Adults with a string of degrees to their name or years of teaching experience under their belt get together and discuss the finer points of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and school administration without inviting any insights from children, knowing that they would be unemployed if the children weren’t there.

Popular culture and its role in classrooms

Usha Pandit
Culture is identity. It represents immersion in social and ethical values that a society embraces, practices and cherishes. It has an emotional impact on people, many of whom fight hardships to preserve it against what they perceive as corruption or attempts at annihilation by outside forces.