IN THE MARCH ISSUE OF EW, 40 SCHOOL principals, vice chancellors and education leaders almost unanimously identified teacher training and development as the best solution for mending the country’s broken education system. While neglect of teacher education is indeed a major cause of the rock-bottom productivity of Indian industry, agriculture, government, judiciary etc, the poverty of judgement, and inability of the country’s top-ranked school principals and leaders themselves to separate grain from chaff is also a contributory factor.
The unexpected commercial success of EducationWorld, the country’s pioneer education newsmagazine, and in particular our annual EW India School Rankings, inspired the promotion of several knock-off education magazines which promptly began publishing preschool and school ranking league tables blatantly plagiarised from this publication. Despite these me-too publications having scant regard for truth or accuracy — e.g, a news item in Education Today (October 2017) reported the conquest of Mt. Everest in 2013 by a cohort of Lawrence School, Sanawar students as having happened on September 19, 2017 — and haphazardly concocting school rankings behind closed doors, often for a price, principals of the country’s top-ranked schools routinely accord them false equivalence. At a recent conference, a heavily awarded and acclaimed leader of one of the country’s largest chain of preschools, doubled up as the marketing manager of a cut-and-paste education magazine with dubious antecedents and objectives.
India’s education system is in the dumps also because principals and education leaders lack questioning minds and can’t differentiate gold from dross.