FROM its inception in 1994 as a public charitable trust, ensuring that every child is in school and learning remains Pratham ’s main objective.The founders believed that to achieve universalization of primary education, a societal mission was needed – a movement in which citizens, government and others would come together to bring every child to school and help the child to learn well. A founding principle was also that any model or strategy that was developed should be replicable, and therefore low cost, so that every child could be reached.
Resources
Explore this section to look at the rich repository of resources compiled and generated in-house by RRCEE. It includes curriculum materials, research articles, translations, and policy documents, including commission reports, resources for teachers, select articles from journals and e-books. These all are collated under in user friendly categories, with inter-sectional tags. These resources are both in Hindi and English and cover a wide range of topics.
Reaching for quality in the countryside
OVER a period of twenty years, Rishi Valley Education Centre has created a multi-grade multi-level programme for elementary education known as ‘The School in a Box ’. The nomenclature is meant to reflect both the programme ’s compactness and its portability:like a medium sized suitcase it can be carried around by a single teacher. The Box, has in fact, been transported to many regions in India.
Training for the new economy
PEOPLE ’S knowledge and skills play a role in the development of society.The importance of human capital as a source of economic growth is gaining in emphasis, especially with the shift from an agricultural-industrial economy to a knowledge based one. India though rich in human capital is poor in human development. The challenge is to reduce this gap and the responsibility lies with the three major stakeholders: government, the education system and the labour market.
On curriculum framework
THE National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has prepared a new document called ‘National Curriculum Framework for School Education ’.The new document is being discussed in seminars and workshops at various levels. Sometime back the NCERT held discussions on another document,‘The Primary Years:Towards a Curriculum Framework ’;this was supposed to provide a curricular framework as well as serve as a curriculum document.
Public-private partnerships for universal quality education
WHILE the focus of education policy in developing countries such as India has largely centred on increasing the resource base and the number of government-run schools, the role of private fee-charging schools in the primary education sector has not been appreciated as much by academics and policy-makers. However, as several recent papers point out, private fee-charging schools increasingly cater to a substantial fraction of the primary-school going population in India.
India and the world of mathematics
MATHEMATICS appears to have acquired an identity as an independent branch of knowledge early on in human intellectual history. This identity became precise and firmly established thanks to the Greeks in the millennium before Christ. Two characteristics are vital to this identity: abstraction and logical deduction; these are of course present in all scientific enquiries but in mathematics they are defining elements.