This self-paced course examines how India's education system sustains multiple forms of inequalities, and equips teachers, administrators, and policymakers with frameworks and tools for transformation towards a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.
The Indian education system faces varied challenges with issues of access, teaching-learning environments, curriculum design, and teacher preparation. As of academic year 2024–25, the system reaches 250 million students across 1.5 million schools, while also systematically reproducing inequalities of caste, class, and gender. Reimagining Education for Equity, derived from the results of a four-year, four-country research programme ‘Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures’ or TESF, examines how education policy and practice reproduce social hierarchies, many among them products of India’s colonial past. Central to this examination is a critique of meritocracy—interrogating how social mobility is imagined within education systems, how power operates between privileged and disadvantaged groups in learning spaces, and how inequality manifests in a system that positions education as a tool for equalisation. Across seven modules, the course centres the lived experiences of children, and engages with the progression of the Right to Education (RTE) act in safeguarding their agency and well-being. It also positions the education of teachers as foundational to any improvements in curriculum and pedagogy, and facilitates their engagement with complex ideas relating to education and social justice to make teaching and learning more equitable. You should enrol, if you are: • An educator, or a student-teacher • A school administrator • An education policymaker • A development practitioner working in or around formal education systems Why you should enrol: The course offers insights into the ways in which our education system is continually being shaped by historical, cultural, social, economic, and political factors, and how this impacts the way children learn and teachers teach in the classrooms. By the end of this course, you will: • Be able to trace India's education policy trajectory and its continued impact on schools and teachers • Know what children's rights mean in practice, and develop a sensitive and socially responsible lens to view their social and material conditions • Recognise how curriculum and pedagogy can act as tools for inclusion and social justice • Understand what environmentally and socially just societies require of their education systems













