A view point
Suman K. Sharma
I know of a Jammu family of modest means and still meager academic achievements. A joint family, it has five children who should be receiving education according to the society’s prevalent norms. The oldest, a 19-year old girl, passed her ninth grade from a well reputed public school, but due to unhappy circumstances at home, she could not go on with her regular schooling. She took the tenth class exam as a private student, and has failed in math for the third time. She is now fully devoted to household chores, the elders apparently having dropped altogether the idea of her studying further. The girl’s brother, a couple of years younger, carries an eighth-pass, ninth-failed certificate from the same school. Like a colt set free from any restraint, this boy goes frisking about the city most of the day. A third sibling, a 13-year old girl, studies in class seven in a nearby government-run school. She is good at social graces, can sing and dance and carry on intelligent conversation, but ask her to do a simple addition and she will jam up. Living in the same compound is a ten-year old girl, their first cousin. A class five student of a privately run school, she devotes three-plus hours daily at a neighbourhood coaching centre for more intense studies. Her doting parents take pride in her learning skills such as speaking English, doing all the math sums appropriate to her standard and her eagerness to participate in quiz contests. Her 4-year old sister – already a veteran of two years at an aangan vadi – can recite nursery rhymes and name parts of body and so forth. Her proudest hour is when she dons the uniform of her ‘Convent’ school that she joined some months ago as a lower-kindergarten pupil.
What does this picture bode of schooling in Jammu? One, there are adequate arrangements for schooling of children at all levels in the city; two, parents show enthusiasm to utilize the available resources to provide best of the facilities to the children who show promise; three, there are slow learners among the children and -lastly, the children who lag behind for whatever reasons are more or less left to their fate. The proportion of the stragglers and drop-outs is worrisome for more reasons than one. This problem needs to be to be tackled squarely.
But why, one may ask, should some children lag behind others and drop out altogether from the school? The causes may lie either with the school itself or else a particular child, the potential straggler, may not be getting the special attention required to cope with the education system.
There are schools aplenty in Jammu: government schools and private schools. But schools here have their problems, as schools elsewhere in the world. As pointed out by Professors Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, founder-directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the school year in India is only 140 days, each day lasting just 3 hours (420 hours a year). In contrast, children in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development) countries, yearly spend on an average 1,340 hours in their schools. Add to this the fact that one in five teachers is absent at one time or the other. Student absenteeism is also there. The classes are overcrowded. The private schools are often run with an eye on profit, compromising grossly the cause of education.
In this scenario, stragglers get a double whammy. They are at a disadvantage in the classroom to start with, and then the schooling system exacerbates their problems. The results can only be disappointing. According to Professors Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, 60 percent of children in India in grade 4 cannot read a simple story at grade 2 level, and 76 percent cannot do simple division. Would such children have a chance to improve their grades in the kind of schools they go? Little wonder it is that a sizeable number of them decide to opt out.
But all is not lost. Out of the box solutions are being adopted to help below-average students. NGO Pratham’s initiative of employing trained local high school girls with a week’s training to provide remedial education to the lowest performing 3rd and 4th graders in Vadodara (Gujarat) and Mumbai (Maharashtra) municipal schools has paid off well.
Another solution could be for teachers to enthuse their brighter students – under their guidance – to team up with their low-performing class-mates. The high-scorers will not only have the satisfaction of being able to render meaningful help to their mates, but in doing so, they will be rewarded with the ability and confidence to cope with their own weaker points. The low-scorers, on their side, will readily accept the help offered, as it would not carry the stigma or the bother of attending a separate class for remedial education. For the school-goers, nothing works better than the peer pressure.
Last, but not the least, as the Chairman of a prominent Bakshinagar school, said, teachers have to be more giving; and schools, less grasping.
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