-The Hindu The Central Advisory Board of Education has decided to constitute a committee to revisit the ‘no detention' provision under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. The panel will submit a report in three months. The Advisory Board, at a meeting on Wednesday, also endorsed the government's initiative to create a Credit Guarantee Fund to provide better flow of credit to deserving students. The Rs. 5,000-crore...

The cartoon controversy provides the possibility of interrogating the functioning of the academic system to understand its relationship with the downtrodden masses. A new deliberation is needed in order to make the academic world more sensitive and responsive towards the issues and concerns of the subaltern-oppressed communities. This will be an ethical incentive for the present-day dalit movement in India and can bring greater democratisation to the education system. Harish Wankhede...

1. Whether we see the elimination of cartoons from Textbooks as involving issues of freedom of expression would depend on how we view the status of images in the text. Surely different genres of texts connote different forms of creativity. Contrary to what Bilgrami thinks, images in most of these NCERT Textbooks are not merely ‘illustrations' but are constitutive of the text, shaping the meaning of what is being said....

Political parties across the spectrum get into a tangle over an innocuous cartoon in a school textbook THE Textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) are in the news again. This time, it is not history but political science Textbooks that managed to get almost all Members of Parliament on their feet on an emotive issue and for reasons that defied logic. One day before the 60th...

The new curriculum sought to overcome the visual baggage of old Textbooks. Today, India debates whether or not cartoons should be included in school Textbooks. Such debates are welcome to improve our understanding of school education in general, and Textbooks in particular. But before the review committee throws all cartoons out of the school tub, it would help to understand a few facets of textbook preparation, especially the selection of visuals. Locating...