"An Indian Education for Indian children: The family-school relationship and Indian arts" talk by Prof. Nita Kumar at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 1st August 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
Venue Info :  Events | About | Map | Nearest Metro Station - 'Race Course(Yellow Line)'

Event Description : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to a Seminar on ‘An Indian Education for Indian children: The family-school relationship and Indian arts’ by Prof. Nita Kumar, Claremont McKenna College, USA.

Abstract : What would it mean for us to have an "Indian education" for Indian children and why don't we have it?
This talk describes the main problem with Indian education to be the wide gap between the home and the school.  A discussion of "Indian children" takes us back to the colonial relationship between the school and the community, when the clear task of schooling was to reform the habits and ethics of the family, and equally to a blinkered understanding of modernity in the present, where certain definitions of knowledge make the family by definition backward and the school modern. Prof. Kumar discusses the layers within the discourse of the child in India. She looks at the structure of schooling in its range of schools, all of which have to different degrees lost the resources of the family--the arts of socialization, of learning and teaching, of narratives and symbols. Prof. Kumar proposes that, while the path to a resolution of Indian educational problems lies through efficient management, this efficiency can only come from correcting the historical-social anomaly of a family-school antagonism. Prof. Kumar also discusses how children's lives are barren of the arts and discusses how it is these "Indian" arts that can be used for resolving our educational problems and create an imaginative "Indian " education for Indian children.

Speaker : Nita Kumar is Professor and Chair of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College, California, USA; and author of The Artisans of Banaras (1988); Friends, Brothers and Informants (1992); Women as Subjects (1994); Lessons from Schools (2000); Mai—a translation (2001); The Politics of Gender, Community and Modernity: Essays on Education (2007) and An Indian Education for Indian Children: Managing a School in India (forthcoming).  She has been the Honorary Director from 2003 of NIRMAN, Varanasi, an NGO that works on education and the arts, in which capacity she trains teachers, makes curricula, and writes on education.

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