Until very recently, middle class parents in non-metropolitan India aspiring to provide high-quality English-medium education to their children had to move heaven and earth to enroll them in the few vintage primary-secondaries of the nearest city, or pack them off to boarding schools in the hills — both expensive propositions. Your editor was shipped all the way from Tanzania to boarding school in India at a tender age, because the best English-medium schools in that and neighbouring countries didn’t admit non-Caucasian children into their anyway-not-so-great campuses.
Considerable travel and tuition expenses apart, a high psychological price was also payable by way of prolonged absences from home in a tough environment without parental support and comfort. Perhaps to a lesser degree, pain of loss was experienced by all students sent to boarding schools to acquire half-decent education unavailable in the country’s smaller towns.
Nevertheless, children who had the benefit of good quality English education in the country’s renowned vintage boarding schools, and the small minority who squeezed into the best metropolitan schools were fortunate. Most middle class children in tier-II/III cities had no option but to learn what they could in parochial missionary schools. And the great majority of children — except those of privileged government employees who established high-end Kendriya Vidyalayas, Army Public Schools etc for their progeny — were even worse off in post-independence India’s notoriously crumbling state government schools infamous for aversion to English, inadequate drinking water and toilet facilities where teachers seldom bothered to show up. Little wonder, contemporary India grudgingly hosts the largest number (300 million) of wholly illiterate citizens.
Fortunately, despite the best efforts of leftist ideologues who abhor “commercialisation of education”, a new genre of post-liberalisation edupreneurs has succeeded in establishing private schools in small-town India, which offer globally-inspired modern education at all price points to aspirational middle class households. Our cover story in this issue acknowledges the huge contribution the country’s small town edupreneurs are making to education and the overdue modernisation of India. However, please note that the can-do education entrepreneurs profiled in our cover story are an illustrative, not exhaustive, sample.
The usual comment and opinion columns apart, there’s much else in this bumper issue of EducationWorld. Indefatigable managing editor Summiya Yasmeen believes there are vestiges of hope for the huge number of students aspiring for education loans. And with the help of Prashant Bhattacharji, a Hyderabad-based data analyst and promoter of the website thelearningpoint.net — notwithstanding the irrational refusal of the two Delhi-based examination boards to make this data public — we present the EW-Learningpoint India School Academic Rankings 2015 featuring Top 100 institutions which best performed in the CBSE and CISCE class XII exams held in March. In short, a scoop.
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