Ram Rattan Sharma
There are large number of students who go abroad for higher education and do exceedingly well. On the other hand there is a sharp disparity between bright sparks and a large number of school students who struggle to acquire basic literacy and numeracy skill. Assertions of mechanically memorizing decontextualized bits of facts and information from prescribed text books with the primary objective of passing examinations around and are often found to be true. It is also recognized that there is skewed emphasis on the cognitive and an exclusion of the affective and other domains of child’s personality. There is also a constant questioning, reflection and suggestions proposed in various policies, programmes, work of various thinkers, for the need to provide meaningful education to children. The nature of education imparted is one significant concern of the Indian school system. The other is a differentiated education offered to its children, based on their social locations. There are schools which have the finest state-of-the -art technology, adequate infrastructure and qualified and highly competent teachers to teach children from privileged, Socio-economic back grounds. There are also schools which are struggling at all levels and have inadequate infrastructure, incompetent and demotivated teachers and unwilling and irregular students. There have been criticisms galore of the ills plaguing over education system some of which have emerged from relevant research and others which have been reactions to the performance of school children in achieving surveys conducted by national and international agencies. The issues of equality, equity and social justice go hand in hand and quality education cannot be restricted to a few children in limited pockets. The term quality in its various manifestations needs to have a universal meaning for all children and all school spaces. Most importantly, in a country like ours the primary responsibility of providing equitable, good quality education needs to lie with the Government and not the private players who venture into education to seek profits. The neo-liberal environment that the structural adjustment policies created in the early 1990’s seem to have swiftly swept the education space as well. Several low cost private players are now making forays into the space, offering education at a cost to those who usually go to free Govt. schools and are disillusioned with the kind of education that there wards get there. It is important to appreciate the land mark right to free and compulsory education for children, which made education a fundamental right in 2009. This act ensures free and compulsory elementary education for all children in the age group of 6-14 years, a few aspects of the act which are particularly important with respect to ensuring quality education in schools and have laid down the norms and standards relating to pupil teacher relations, buildings and infrastructure, school working days, teacher working hours, provision of prohibition of deployment of teachers for non-educational work other than census, elections to local authority, state legislatures and parliament and disaster relief, provision for appointment of appropriately qualified and trained teachers and prohibition of physical punishment and mental harassment, screening procedures for admission of children, capitation fee, private tuition by teachers and running of schools without recognition, while the provisions of this act are fundamentally sound in nature, it is important that mechanism for implementing them are properly spelled out and executed with utmost sincerity and accountability. The act also recognizes the importance of a contextualized, vibrant and meaningful curriculum, which accepts the agency of the child and pedagogy and environment where children can learn without fear. All our national policies on education and more recently, the national curricular frame work 2005, recognized the failure of our curriculum and schools to evoke the interest of children and retain them in schools. The issue of quality needs to be centrally linked with the educational experiences that children have in schools and efforts should be made in the direction of ensuring an all round development of children and building on their knowledge and experiences . It is important to examine the initiatives launched by the Govt. for strengthening our public education system. It has also been launching several schemes to enhance the quality of education across all stages of education Primary to higher, these schemes are comprehensive and address the needs of students from socio-culturally economically challenged backgrounds including those with special needs, improve access and bring about curricular and pedagogic reforms to reach out to a wider group and make the pedagogic transaction more dynamic. Technology is also now being leveraged to facilitate learning opportunities for students. Professors centrally funded institutions and central universities will offer free online courses to citizens of our country. This is a positive attempt to break the exclusivity of such institutions which have traditionally favoured only a selected few. Similarly national E-library has been envisaged as an online portal that will democratize access to knowledge by ensuring the quality content developed in central universities and other educational institutions is available in a digital format and easily accessed through laptops, smart phones and tablets.
In the field of school education the Human Resource Development Ministry proposes to conduct annual national assessment surveys through the national council of educational research and training, to develop an expenditure portal to centralize various sources of school education data in India. NCERT’s e-Pathshala-a novel idea, addresses the question of free and easy access to quality teaching, learning resources to all school students. There are many such schemes initiated by the Govt. to support the education of children in several ways, Several assessment surveys over the years have shown that all is not well with the learning of our school children, especially Govt. schools, one should focus on addressing concerns and factors for non-learning of children. While all teachers, irrespective of the places they are teaching need to be held accountable for the learning of the children under their charge. It is equally important that they be supported and structural irritants in the conditions in which they work, be removed. All the children have the right to good quality education, and therefore all efforts must be made to create an enabling environment in schools, where both teachers and students are involved in meaningful teaching and learning process. Attempts must be made to undertake curricular, pedagogies and assessment reforms.
(The author is former Dy Librarian University of Jammu)
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