Education - Shashikala Srinivasan

Education, Forms of Life, and Civilisation.

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 28, 2026August 30, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Education is often discussed in terms of institutions, curricula, methods of teaching, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Yet beneath these immediate concerns lies a deeper question: what kind of human being should education cultivate? This question cannot be answered independently of the civilisation within which education takes place. Different civilisations have embodied different conceptions of knowledge, formation, human flourishing and the good life, and these conceptions have shaped the ways in which succeeding…

Eudaimonia and the Indian distinction between Shreyas and Preyas

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 14, 2026August 28, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

In much of modern Western thought, ethics has increasingly come to be identified with morality. It is approached primarily as a domain of rules, obligations, and judgments concerning right and wrong. Even where ethics is treated as practical philosophy, action is often understood as derived from beliefs, values, or moral principles. By contrast, in the older Aristotelian understanding, ethics concerns the question of how to live well. Oriented toward eudaimonia—often translated as human flourishing—it belongs…

Classics and Ways of Thinking

By Shashikala Srinivasan | May 21, 2026May 27, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Initiating students into classics has long been considered central to the idea of a liberal education. These works are deemed “classics” because a tradition (or culture) confers upon them the status of greatness. Classics set standards and are taken to represent the most significant and refined reflections of that tradition. To recognize a work as a classic is also to acknowledge that it has taken part in our intellectual and cultural formation and continues to…

Making Sense of Superstitions

By Shashikala Srinivasan | March 5, 2024April 29, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Today, our everyday lives are fraught with some kind of larger intellectual conflict. This comes to the fore especially when youngsters are forced to take part in a ritual, say like a Shraadha, or a pooja. Aren’t these superstitions which any educated person should shed? Why are we being forced to perform these outdated traditions which are irrational and have no scientific basis? While it was alright to hold on to these practice two centuries…

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

By Shashikala Srinivasan | February 4, 2024April 25, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…