Travelling through the streets of any large city, one finds billboards screaming the promise of ‘world class’ education combined with a pledge to ‘create global citizens’ or ‘future ready’ graduates. Many of these promises and pledges come from schools carrying the tag “international”. They show pictures of happy pink-cheeked children smiling against a backdrop of spacious lawns or well furnished playgrounds; some show children performing activities ranging from playing the guitar to working on an airplane model, or interacting with a well groomed adult playing the role of teacher. Much before FDI in higher education became a reality, or even a hotly debated proposal, the international had seeped into elementary schooling. And arguably, it goes even farther back than most of us care to or are equipped to look. For years and years, we’ve had inputs from abroad coming into schools, whether in the form of textbooks that were clones of western readers, or pedagogy styles that had bee...
making sense of the everyday