Notes on Education

  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mt._Nanda_Devi.jpg This note comments on a new higher education initiative in India, Pradhan Mantri Research Fellowships, which will be administered at IITs and other excellent institutes of higher Education in India as reported in the daily newspaper Times of India today.   As a deep IITian this author is certain that students will not call it by that name or PMRF and make up their own friendlier nick name for it. May I propose one here, Namo Prakash Fellowships since this proposal appears to be result of the Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi and his brilliant education minister the Right Honourable Shri Prakash Javedkar. At the route of success of nations through human history has been the existence of higher education institutions of excellence. Thus while it were the Buddhist Universities led by Nalanda in India during its golden age, it has been Universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the British ...

O ver the past five decades human population has increased hugely to touch a near seven billion now. As a consequence, there is a huge pressure on both urban and rural lands accessible by basic infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water. Humans are devising ways to manage with less and less land for their life and activities. The pressure is also influencing educational institutions that have to do with reduced land availability. Nevertheless, certain minimum requirements still exist for land for different types of educational institutions ranging from kindergarten to university. This author has written about such land requirement before for separate type of educational institutions. The present note summarizes all these findings in a single comprehensive table. An affiliated college is one that prepares students for a university level examination but does not have authority to grant university degrees on its own for which it affiliates itself to a university. A...

Feel free to copy and use anywhere you like I n the beginning education was part of religious schools both at school and University level. However religion has now been separated from education, rightly so, because of secular values and degeneration in many modern religions. Over the past few centuries education programs have become independent of religious education in the main but at first moral education was included as a component of education. In recent years even this component has been removed. Should moral and ethical education be a part of all educational programs? Education is a tool that empowers a human to do both good and bad, to build or destroy depending on how it is used. Like a gun it can protect or kill. It may empower a good human to perform service to the world or a greedy banker to run away with all the profits under disguise of a bonus. "When you educate a man in mind and not in morals, you educate a menace to society." ----Theodore Roosev...

Higher education is offered primarily in two types of Institutions. The first is a University. The second type of institutions that offers higher education is a college or institute affiliated to a University. There is considerable difference between the quality of education in the two types of institutions mentioned here. A university contributes to the creation of new knowledge through research that involves research by faculty, research personnel as well as doctoral and postdoctoral students supervised by faculty. Therefore, the university has sufficient expertise and staff to formulate curriculums and develop new programs. As compared to a college the university also requires extensive infrastructure and funding to carry out its functions. Compared to a university a college affiliated to a university does not develop its own curriculums but rather prepares students along the lines of a curriculum developed by a university. At the most it can give suggestions to a university. The un...