The 11plus test, for some 10 and 11 year old students in the United Kingdom are brutally competitive tests administered to precocious minds in their final year of primary education, and determines their admission to English grammar schools and other secondary schools which use academic selection.
What is the 11 plus exam?
Google dominance as gatekeeper in online education
Over the last few weeks, India’s techies, developers, and startup founders have been involved in an ad nauseam debate on Twitter. While the social-media platform was made for such discussions, the topic of the heated debate this time around on Twitter is none other than the tech giant Google. The issue — which has its origin in the three-week-old pushback episode against Google led by Indian app developers and startups for taking down Paytm from its app store for allegedly violating the California-based company’s gambling policy — has snowballed into an all-encompassing conversation spanning everything from monetisation models of app stores to the need for an Indian version of the Google Play Store. Consequently, founders of various startups have joined hands to form an informal coalition to protest against Google’s policies. And the latest salvo from the group has been from Paytm, which announced the launch of its Mini App Store through full-page ads on major national dailies.Google, meanwhile, has bought time by postponing a controversial move to enforce its billing systems on more transactions and categories on the Play Store to April 2022 from September 2021.While it may come across as a temporary victory for those who were protesting, the real question is whether such symbolic victories are enough to push back the might of big tech companies.
