Book Name: The Great Indian School Bazaar
Author: Dev Lahiri
Book Blurb: The Great Indian School Bazaar deals with a wide range of topics, including what drives parents to admit their children to certain schools, issues faced by principals, bullying, disciplining, and how school can be made ‘fun’. There is also a section on the relevance of our education system in the current global context, in addition to an area that is very rarely discussed: the transition from school to college.
Dev Lahiri brings in his decades of experience as an educator in India as well as in the United States to reassess the education we are providing our children.
Review: The Great Indian School Bazaar sums up the madness of the Indian education system in a very concise book. The author lists the challenges faced by the current education system and the lacuna prevailing in current practices.
While the Indian education system is better in many aspects, it also suffers from some inherent difficulties such as the “learning by rote” which is still prevalent especially at nursery and pre-school levels.
While Dev has chosen to focus on the school system, the administration, bullying and all other aspects, he has skipped one crucial aspect- the exorbitant fees charged and the donation system widely prevalent in many private schools in India.
It is no secret that the Indian education system is fast developing into a sort of mafia nexus very akin to the land mafia which was prevalent a few years back. While the RERA law helped put the land mafia into place, by and large, the education institutes and schools have so far had it easy. A person who is so widely experienced and has handled administrative level posts at schools should have delved into this aspect deeply.
Otherwise, this is a neat little book but does not offer any new insights.