JOIN USTime to reboot education
Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, a strong votary of bridging the gap between the country’s rapid economic growth and its dismal literacy rates, has argued that the root cause for most of India’s development challenges lie in the deficiencies in the education sector.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was also candid when he conceded that “we still have a very long way to go” in so far as education and building of knowledge society are concerned.
According to an ASSOCHAM report, India ranks last in primary education among the world’s seven largest emerging economies. Out of 133 nations evaluated in the 2009-2010 Global Competitiveness Index, India comes at 100th position in terms of the quality of primary education whereas China is ranked 42nd.
India also has the maximum number of adult illiterates - 270 million - compared to 71 million in China.
Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal might bask in the new-found glory of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, providing for free and compulsory education to children aged between 6-14 years, but experts opine that his series of reforms must pass the test of quality.
The Act makes only a passing reference to quality and does not provide for any quality enforcement mechanism to measure child-learning levels and competencies. It is all the more required as the Act talks about no-detention policy.
Giving due credit to the “good intentions” of the HRD Minister, noted education expert Vimala Ramchandran says, the reforms should have been backed with proper homework. For example, while espousing the no-detention policy, the Right to Education Act should have spelled out clearly how to determine what actually the child has learnt.
Even the duties of a teacher under the Act are assessed in terms of punctuality and attendance and there is no attempt to gauge qualitative learning outcomes. Recognition of schools is also based on infrastructure, pupil-teacher ratio and instruction hours.
While citizens might feel upbeat about the new measures like making Class X Board examinations optional or replacing marks with grades, what seems to have been lost in the cobweb of legislation and maze of new measures is the most important issue in education i.e “learning.”
Mathematical divide
According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), the largest annual survey of rural children done by a voluntary organisation called PRATHAM, among children in government schools in Standard V, the ability to do mathematical division problems has actually declined from 41 per cent to 36 per cent. Moreover, around 50 per cent of children in Class V in village government schools cannot read a passage prescribed for their friends in Class II elsewhere.
While Government might take credit for increasing elementary school enrolment by almost 60 million between 2003-2009, it is yet to take any concrete step to assess the quality of education being passed on to the future citizens of the country.
Measures to improve education failed miserably because the policy makers had a “narrow approach,” contends Arjun Dev, former professor of History in National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
To begin with, Sibal himself has, time and again, expressed concern about the shortage of trained teachers - the most crucial issue when one talks about quality education.
There is a shortage of 1.2 million teachers at the elementary level alone. At the Class XI and X levels, the shortage is over two lakh. Even at the university level, the vacancy level is as high as 33 per cent.
Faculty training
But when it comes to allocating funds, teachers’ training has fared poorly. Only 25 per cent of the total 11th Plan outlay has been allocated in the budgets from 2007 for strengthening the teachers’ training institutes.
Even though the Planning Commission has allocated Rs 4,000 crore for the five-year period from 2007-2012, Centre could set aside Rs 266 crore in 2007-08 budget, which was increased to Rs 285.2 crore next year. The amount was further hiked to Rs 450 crore in 2009-2010 budget, thus taking the total allocation to Rs 1001.8 crore in three years for the purpose.