ABSTRACT
At a recent symposium on elite schools in India, in which I participated in New Delhi, a member of the audience who had worked over a long period of time within the Indian system of private schools asserted stridently, perhaps even aggressively, that the old elite schools established during the colonial period in India were now ‘finished … they have had their day … they pretend they are elite but they are not. Parents now want to send their children to the new modern private schools with good facilities and better teachers’. The extent to which this bold assertion is accurate or simply amounts to grandstanding in a highly competitive Indian educational market is an open question.
