Rethink School
Education @ shift
to private education is not good
The shift to private education is not good. Government schools ought to be the drivers of change
In
Uncertain Glory — India and
its Contradictions, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen begin their chapter
on education with a quote from Rabindranath Tagore: “The imposing tower of
misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the
absence of education.” This is as true today as it was nearly 90 years back.
While
India highlights its ever-improving literacy levels, educationally it is a
terrible under-performer, too embarrassed to participate in the OECD’s
Programme for International Student Assessment tests covering reading and
computational skills for 15-year-olds. Successive studies have repeatedly
established that a majority of those in each class in India have educational
attainments much lower than the one they are in. Data from the Ministry of
Human Resource Development show that only half of all students who enter
primary school make it to the upper primary level and less than half that —
around 25 million — get into the 9-12 class cycle. We have around a million
primary schools and only half that number at the upper primary level. The
number of secondary schools is less than 150,000 for a country of 1.3 billion,
and even this comes down to just 100,000 at the higher secondary level. While
there are around five million primary school teachers, at the secondary level
the number is just 1.5 million. India has persisted with a schooling system
that has long failed its young.
The
inexorable shift to private school education along with the Right to Education
Act represents a failure of the public-school system. It is government schools
that should be the drivers of change by becoming the first, not the last,
choice of parents to send their children to. For that to happen, our
public-school system must be swiftly and radically revamped, while our teacher
training institutions, of which the District Institutes of Education and
Training constitute an important part, speedily re-jigged to turn out
world-class teachers, of the kind that will encourage children to stay on in,
not drop out of, school.
If
only India had begun revamping school education at the start of economic
liberalisation, it would by now have had the world’s largest pool of
well-educated and highly trained workers. Fortunately, India continues to have
the largest number of young people anywhere. By ensuring they get a world-class
education over the next few decades, India will be well on its way towards
becoming a developed nation sooner than expected.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
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