Mukhopadhyay, Rahul and Mehendale, Archana
(2016)
A school by any other name...
Learning Curve (25).
pp. 56-57.
Abstract
World class universities in India might still be a
distant dream, but there is a world very close to
us populated by the Oxfords, Cambridges, and
Stanfords that strangely pitch for uniqueness
not through their singularity but through their
multiplicity. This very same space is also dotted
with anachronistic public figures – Vivekananda,
Martin Luther, Max Muller, Aurobindo, Netaji
Subhas Chandra Bose, Indira Priyadarshini, Nehru,
Mother Teresa, Isaac Newton, Alfred Noble, Rajiv
Gandhi, Annie Besant, including the one which
seems tinged with an ironical overture towards
our current ‘medium of instruction’ predicament
– Macaulay. Yes, indeed, these are the names of
private schools that dot the educational landscape
of Bangalore city and its nearby areas, as we found
during a recent study.Private schools across the country draw upon
a range of strategic nomenclature strands to
distinguish themselves in the rapidly proliferating
world of such schools in both urban and mofussil
areas. In the new education marketplace, a school
name goes beyond the mere necessity of defining
an institutional identity. In fact, it functions as a tool
that establishes a brand identity, so essential to woo
the confused but eager consumer-parents. Given a
general lack of systematic, complete, transparent
and reliable information available in the public
domain about schools, the school name becomes a
tangible proxy for judging school quality.
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