Avijit Pathak
Avijit Pathak teaches at JNU
Wed, May 11, 2022
Avijit Pathak writes: As we experience violence in the name of religious nationalism, or violence in the name of education, Krishnamurti’s books and talks tend to acquire a new meaning and significance.
Tue, Mar 29, 2022
Avijit Pathak writes: To transform education we need to work on the quality of schools and pedagogy, honest and fair recruitment of teachers, relative autonomy of academic institutions and learn to value the uniqueness of each child.
Fri, Feb 18, 2022
Avijit Pathak writes: The new vice-chancellor must help cultivate a culture of conversation and dialogue and the courage to disagree.
Thu, Jan 27, 2022
🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: Amid the tyranny of the clock time and calculation of ‘productivity’, he showed how to live in the here and now
Fri, Dec 31, 2021
🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: For her, emancipatory education was supposed to be dialogic and experiential and a teacher always listened compassionately and without judgment
Sun, Dec 05, 2021
🔴 Avijit Pathak writes: It is not about repeating the scriptures like a parrot, wearing special uniforms, and following the crowd
Thu, Oct 28, 2021
Avijit Pathak writes: What they need is a learning community that makes them capable of distinguishing the soothing light of knowledge and wisdom from the glitz of falsehood and propaganda
Sun, Sep 05, 2021
Avijit Pathak writes: They hold the lamp of truth, and walk with their students to help them make sense of the world they live in.
Sat, Jul 03, 2021
Pandemic has exposed the limits of modernity. It is time to reflect on the illusory character of our inflated egos, the way we live.
Wed, Apr 28, 2021
The pandemic has forced us to rethink how we live our lives. We must also allow it to dismantle our exam-centric education system that only creates hyper-competitiveness and perpetuates inequalities.
Tue, Mar 23, 2021
Never mind what the bhadralok class thinks. The poll campaign has exploded the myth of Bengali exceptionalism.
Sat, Feb 27, 2021
As teachers, many of us become overly cautious so that every word we utter in our classrooms becomes "technically perfect", "legally sanctified", and is in tune with the dominant ideology of nationhood.
Wed, Jan 06, 2021
The university should be an ideal place to encourage students and teachers to engage with this plurality of visions, and even live with philosophic ambivalence.
Fri, Oct 16, 2020
In this world, there is no poetic wonder, no criticality of social science, and no enquiring spirit of science. High cut-offs in admissions are no reflection of standards, but a case of rote learning and hyper-competitiveness
Sat, Sep 05, 2020
Even in the virtual classroom, teachers are doing something more than just dictating the notes of biology and geography; they are touching and healing the tormented souls of their students. Let us salute them on Teacher's Day.
Mon, Mar 09, 2020
Education should sow the seeds of true religiosity and universalism: A mind that sees beyond borders.
Mon, Jan 06, 2020
From Jamia to JNU, from Hyderabad Central University to Aligarh Muslim University, and from even the IITs and IIMs, students are dissenting. In this non-violent and aesthetically enriched resistance, I have begun to see the return of the lost dream.
Sat, Oct 26, 2019
I ask myself: How was it possible for him to be religious, yet so elastic, dialogic, open and inclusive? Even though he chose the political domain as his field of sadhana, never did he allow religion to be reduced to an ideology of hatred and division.
Thu, Sep 05, 2019
They are not loyal soldiers, nor cogs in a bureaucratic machine. They must be free to be wanderers. And poets and philosophers
Wed, Jul 17, 2019
Normalisation of surveillance destroys what sustains a civilisation — human interaction filled with trust, care.
Thu, Jun 06, 2019
The standardised “ambition” that schools and anxiety-ridden parents cultivate among the teenagers makes it difficult for them to accept that it is possible to imagine yet another world beyond the “secure” career options in medical science, engineering and commerce.
Mon, Apr 08, 2019
We also need to see knowledge as an experience of enchantment, not an act of consumption. It is high time we took the debate beyond merely the content of knowledge — Aurangzeb or Shivaji, Savarkar or Ambedkar, Vedic rites or Nizamuddin Auliya’s verses
Thu, Feb 14, 2019
Education is essentially war. It is devoid of joy and humour, creative play and aesthetic celebration.
Thu, Jan 10, 2019
Multiple Choice Question format forces rigid standardisation, creates illusion that knowledge can be objective.
Fri, Nov 23, 2018
Why it is dangerous to reduce art to political rhetoric