October 5, 2008, 12 pm – 12.45 pm
Manickam, Mekhala, Mouli, Anurag, Raghu, Keshav, Siddharth, Anirudh attended the meeting. The enthusiastic group discussed the concept of IRG and decided upon the meeting format over samosas and tea. The format is quite dynamic and flexible. We will try this out first:
- Everyone reads the assigned articles
- The ‘leader’ will make a presentation or come up with a list of talking points based on the assigned readings to initiate the discussion
- The ‘archivist’ will record the discussion
- The leader and archivist roles will rotate among the members
The next meeting will be on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 from 12 to 1.30 pm. The venue will be announced soon. Mekhala will lead the discussion and Raghu will record the minutes. The reading materials are listed below. Meanwhile, feel free to comment on this blog and initiate discussions. 
- The Challenges for Indian Education System (2005)
- Indian Strategies to Achieve Universalisation of Elementary Education (K. Gopalan)
- Annual Status of Education 2007 (Rural) Report, Pratham – The National Picture
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thought you guys might find this interesting:
“Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action. At any moment in time, by imposing uniform standards in housing, or nutrition, or clothing, government could undoubtedly improve the level of living of many individuals; by imposing uniform standards in schooling, road construction, or sanitation, central government could undoubtedly improve the level of performance in many local areas and perhaps even on the average of all communities. But in the process, government would replace progress by stagnation, it would substitute uniform mediocrity for the variety essential for that experimentation which can bring tomorrow’s laggards above today’s mean.”
Milton Friedman- Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
Thanks, Keshav. In the spirit of Friedman’s ideas, we are a private group of citizens who are assessing the possibility of individual action in the arena of education.
[...] The papers informing the discussion are listed in the previous post. [...]
Just to balance the first comment, this snippet from the Wikipedia article on Milton Friedman:
“Princeton University economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, while regarding him as a ‘great economist and a great man’, has criticized him by writing:[49]
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, there were many people saying that markets can never work. Friedman had the intellectual courage to say that markets can too work, and his showman’s flair combined with his ability to marshal evidence made him the best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It’s extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose.
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Private enterprise (including this one) is appreciated, lauded etc by us. But that doesn’t require an apotheosis of Friedman and his honchos.
Interesting reading material.