Education For All- The Route for Superpower Status
Posted : March 28, 2006 at 9:13 pm [IST]
Universal and good quality education is the basic requirement of our country. The task is gigantic. But it is doable. And it can then provide the competitive advantage to our country. So it is in interest of all well-wishers of the country to participate in this task. Imagine if all our young people were educated, how much easier it would have been for us to convince them regarding other essential things of life such as health related issues.
Some facts
There are still around 12 million children in the age group of 6-14 who are out of school. 93% of the children, about 156 million in the age group are in school.
Only one out of three children ends up completing 10 years of education.
Only 7 per cent of the population in the relevant age group (17-23) is enrolled in higher education, a figure, which is much lower than in many developing economies.
India has some 5 million teachers.
500,000 additional classrooms will be constructed and 150,000 more teachers will be appointed this year, as per the Budget 2006. Addition of teachers is only 3% on a base of 5 million.
Premji, the richest person of the country who happens to head Wipro also has written an article recently in ‘The Times of India’. His viewpoints are:
Two problems of present elementary education system:
1. Availability of quality school infrastructure - i.e. classrooms, toilets, teachers, teaching-learning material and a learning environment that is conducive to learn
2. Most children are not learning at a deeper level and schools are not able to help every child to discover and realise his/her potential
Premji’s solution lies in working on several fronts:
1.More money must flow into elementary education. The draft of the ‘Free & Compulsory Education’ Bill places on government the responsibility of ensuring that every child receives eight years of quality elementary education, and that all schools meet norms relating to school infrastructure and teacher-student ratio. The draft Bill needs to be pursued vigorously.
2.Both governance and effectiveness in the education delivery system need to improve dramatically. Current focus seems to be on spending the available money within a given time. It must become more outcome-oriented. Government must also create a more motivating environment for the people it employs. Present system is extremely demotivating and breeds indifference and lethargy.
3.The curriculum needs reform in such a way to encourage deep learning. NCERT’s recent ‘National Curriculum Framework 2005′ is an effort in tht direction. The current education does not let the child think independently. Every state must help schools and teachers appreciate what is worth teaching, how to teach it and how to measure what the child is learning. And this effort must reach to the grassroots levels.
4.We must help build capacity of our teachers, school leaders and resource persons at various levels. We will have to help trigger a process of self-development among them. This process requires sustained efforts over a long time. The task is indeed massive as we have five million primary school teachers.
5.We need to revamp public examinations and entry-level examinations to higher education. Most of these public exams merely promote rote learning. They are seen as make-or-break races leading to heavy coaching.
6.Information technology can be very motivating for parents to send their children to school and for children to engage in the learning process. IT can help in taking quality teaching-learning material to large numbers without any dilution; it can reach out to physically and mentally-challenged and it can help do things that are not possible through pen, paper and blackboard. Innovative deployment of IT can also significantly contribute to mass scale capacity building efforts.
I find many people well high up in the society building temples and other traditional institutions to get over the sins (?) committed or keep the memory of the dear ones alive. I think India has a little too many temples and that promote less of our religious values and create more beggars. Why can’t they put all the money for charity in building school or health care facilities? It will be a great service to the society. Government must provide certain incentive too to motivate these rich persons.
Amartya Sen advocates state interventions like compulsory education for children even if their families did not think it necessary. The government and the related NGOs doing the great follow-up work for ‘polio plus drive’ must include a drive to send all the school going age children to schools also under ‘Sarv Shiksha Aviyan’.
All companies and rich men having a profit of Rs 1 crore or a revenue of 1 crore per month can adopt a rural primary school and provide any additional help required for quality education.
The government and private investor in education sector must build sufficient number of world-class teachers training institutes for research and training of the teachers, 5 million in number.
- Indra
Category: Employment/Education |
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