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Showing posts from April, 2017
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Classrooms or Prisons! -By Vijitha Rajan   Vijitha is currently a research scholar in Central Institute of Education, Delhi University Not until recently have I realized why Kumar’s (1991) description of a teacher as a ‘meek dictator’ has appealed me to the core of my understanding about Indian teachers and classrooms. As I went through his book – Political Agenda Of Education – second time during last summer, almost as an epiphany, I realized that the author, Kumar, was describing my life as a teacher and not just the colonial teachers. When he described the nature of teacher training and teachers’ work during the colonial times, I was reliving my own experiences of teacher training and work as a school teacher. Though there are changes in state standpoints and policy level reforms regarding our school and teacher education classrooms, the underlying processes that define our classrooms haven’t really undergone any fundamental change. And that is why the colonial