Articles by Peggy Mohan

Private schools in Delhi that buy land for construction at concessional rates have to make 20% of their seats available for children from the economically weaker sections. Everyone, except the educationists, knows that schooling is mostly about inclusion, about becoming a part of a group that is destined for success. A teacher from one such English-medium school with four EWS students assigned to her for remedial tuitions, traces their evolution over three years from sitting in incomprehension to enthusiastic participation.

Integration of non-fee paying students into 'elite' schools as envisaged by the Delhi government would work better if a 'government-assisted' approach, such as the government sharing part of the running costs of the school, were adopted. Experience of Trinidad.

India has a large number of non-English languages and dialects that are still thriving. However, these languages exist in a sector strongly associated with poverty, and with a failure of access to the open-ended world of modernity. But as India's poor enter a more empowered space they will sacrifice any languages that only expressed an era of poverty and helplessness. And, in exchange, people will be able to talk to each other as equals for the first time.

Education and Adults Peggy Mohan In the structured world of education as schooling as in the rest of the system, those who teach are 'divorced 'from those- who-learn. The thinkers of new thoughts are outnumbered by, and shut out from, the packagers of these thoughts who must reconcile this new and dangerous knowledge to the demands of the system. And those who implement official agenda become a generation removed from the original reasoning behind the agenda. An underclass of learners has ceased to believe, and is dropping out, reverting to its earliest programming and is finding realistic ways of looking after itself Globalisation has led to a bizarre generalised frame of mind here, there, everywhere: forget the world, tuck yourself in... ft is, in consequence, a dull, dull world. The same package of economic and social policies is getting prescribed for country after country Each and every nation is being cajoled into the whiningly identical doctrine: be self- seeking; think in terms of only your own private gains and losses; it does not behoove you to get involved in silly intricacies as those of social costs and social benefits; you take care of yourselves, while society will fend for itself; in fact, the more self-seeking you are, the more blatant the profit-seeking you render yourselves to, the loftier is the pinnacle Of prosperity.

Peggy Mohan Literary Urdu is not adapted, in India, for modern discourse of a technical nature. So you choose: if it is emotional it will be in Urdu; if it is scientific it will be in Hindi; if it absolutely must be in common 'Hindustani', it will be trivial and depthless. You mustn't jump from branch to branch of this language tree. But intuition and fearlessness have a wav of cutting through these man-made strictures.