Education is the birthright of every human that walks upon this planet… but is being human the only pre-requisite to get ‘educated’? What exactly is education apart from having a qualification? Only to eke out a living or to empower you with something, which blossoms you, helps you make a meaningful contribution to the society?
Education begins right from the day you are born...School is just a formal way of telling the world you have entered full-time into it. While some say education today is just ‘learn to earn’, while some optimists firmly believe it truly opens a new horizon within and without. Again it is all an individual effort, though there are many other factors playing key role, like environment, teachers, peer, parents etc. But at the end of the day experientially what the student carries home decides the quality of life he or she is going to lead. The question is all about this ‘quality’ which is being discussed all over but sparsely seen.
TCG decided to do a ‘quality check’ on our education, a decade ago and now and ten years down the line. We decided to begin with the roots, obviously, because
‘Its only when the roots are nourished that the fruits are seen’. Starting with Primary Education we interacted with different academicians, policy makers, students, teachers etc to bring out this story…
At Government level…
Statistics/earlier reports say that on an All-India level, there are roughly 200 million children in the 6-14 age group of which only 120 million are in schools and net attendance in the primary level is estimated to be merely 66 percent of enrolment. While in Karnataka, for example, nearly 98 percent of children are enrolled in schools, as high as 86 percent graduate from Grade 8, but this is not so in Andhra Pradesh. Among other factors, lack of learning in the classrooms is one of the key reasons for this outcome. In general terms, while it seems that DPEP and SSA have been quite successful in enlarging the coverage of primary schools, however, it is the quality of teaching in the rural public schools that is in need of the most attention.
As Ms B. Sheshu Kumari Director SCERT says, “Major hazards in Primary Education are enrollments, retention and dropouts.” In spite of this, she feels several government policies have catapulted the quality of education in schools across the length and breadth of the State. She feels schemes like midday meals act as incentives to attend the school, as most of the parents cannot afford to even satiate their hunger.
Policy-wise she feels AP is a forerunner in this field, right from the Operation Blackboard a centrally sponsored programme which was started in 1987 immediately after the Rajiv Gandhi NPE (National Policy on Education) of 1986 was released to supply the bare minimum crucial facilities to all primary schools in the country. The objective of the scheme is providing students studying in primary settings with the necessary institutional equipment and instructional material to facilitate their education. There is a provision to provide salary for an additional teacher to those primary schools that have an enrolment of more than 100 students or for a consecutive period of two years. In the ninth five year plan, the scheme was extended to all upper primary schools as well.
In an attempt to improve the implementation of this scheme a few additional provisions have been added. All teachers will be trained in using the materials provided by the scheme under a particularly designed teacher preparation programme. The state will provide for replacement of broken or non-functioning materials. At the local level, there will be some flexibility for purchasing additional items and teaching aids, which are applicable to the local situation. At least fifty percent of the teachers will be women, which in turn will affect the girl enrolment in school. School building will be designed according to local needs.
Mrs Sheshu says that empowering girl child with education would directly impact the marriage, early child birth and infant mortality, subsequently. This worked well, because if the woman of the family is educated many things fall in place, though not miraculously it will at least bring down child marriages.
Are the girls really interested in getting themselves educated? The answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’. Ms Sheshu says looking at the girl child’s interest government came up with VELUGU schools meant for girl child. There are 88 VELUGU schools all over AP today.
Also insisting women teachers helps to understand and educate a girl child, says the Director. Keeping this in mind school infrastructure, toilet facilities, teaching aids and all the necessary support is extended especially to the lady teacher, she being the ambassador of education.
How about the teaching-learning condition in all these schools?—Mrs Sheshu says, “teachers are the harbingers of change and they form the basic living unit of this system, if she/he is motivated enough to teach, miracles can happen, at the same time if they are not very committed it can spell doom.”
How about the recruitment process?
The Director thinks AP State teacher recruitment process is unparalleled in terms of quality, subjectivity and transparency though she feels enough coverage was never given. As per the Ministry norms, teachers should have a qualification of plus 2 and D.Ed for Primary school and B.Ed for the Secondary.
Talking about the evolution of Primary Education in Andhra, she says the State has been a pioneer and forerunner in several projects. The formal (so called) school which started with two small rooms with a verandah and two teachers, (in 1983) now flourished into a proper full-fledged school building.
Regarding Planning and Classroom Practices DPEP envisages linking district plans with school processes and classroom practices. It is an effort to bring together the pedagogical necessities and broader educational concerns. The ultimate objective is to improve the school processes and outcomes.
To many a planner, the operational efficiency of the units (schools) is an assumption and hence the action lies outside the classrooms. The conventional educational planner never enters into the classrooms and the typical pedagogue never gets out of the classrooms. While the vision of the former is too wide and broad to be understood and appreciated by the pedagogue, the vision of the pedagogue is too narrow and myopic to be considered seriously by the planner. Resultantly, the planner is isolated from the action and the actions are isolated from the plans. To build bridge between them is difficult, if not impossible. The programme makes a serious effort to link these two sets of actors.
Improving classroom practices and school management, no doubt, form the core to the success of educational programmes. The programme envisages create local specific facilitating conditions to improve teacher competencies through frequent in-service training programmes, improving school management through training in planning and management of educational functionaries. The efforts to strengthen state level resource organisations like SCERT; district level institutions like DIET and to create new structures at block and cluster levels and management training institutions like SIEMT provide the facilitating conditions.
When asked about any special programmes to unearth student talent, Ms Sheshu speaks about INSPIRE, which was well received and benefited many students.
In order to seed and experience the joy of innovation, every year two lakh school children in the age-group of 10 to 15 years i.e., 6th to 10th standards are being identified for the INSPIRE Award. Each INSPIRE Award envisions an investment of Rs.5,000/- per child. The scheme plans to reach at least two students per secondary school during the next five years.
For Inspired Research (INSPIRE)
"Innovation in Science Pursuit For Inspired Research (INSIRE)" is an innovative programme sponsored and managed by the Department of Science & Technology (DST) for attraction of talent to science. The basic objective of INSPIRE is to communicate to the youth of the country the excitements of creative pursuit of science, attract talent to the study of science at an early age and thus build the required critical human resource pool for strengthening and expanding the Science & Technology system and R&D base.
A striking feature of the programme is that it does not believe in conducting competitive exams for identification of talent at any level. It belives in and relies on the efficacy of the existing educational structure for identification of talent.
At Private Schools—
Corporatization has completely taken over with
privatization; this is what few experts feel, but what if that is so, because quality is ensured and along with the price comes the value, isn’t it? This is debatable issue. With categories of schools, which cater to their (eerie) needs, promising entry into top institutes in the country, parents are overwhelmed. Students face nightmares fulfilling the ambitious parents’ dreams, sometimes stifled with bouts of depression on one hand, on the other there are extreme go –getters in these schools who are equally (or even more) ferocious about marks than the teachers or parents themselves. Competition any day is good, but it needs to be healthy, not take dubious forms, says Sunitha, a Software Engineer whose kids are studying in a reputed International School in Hyderabad, for whom marks are fun-to-achieve target but not at gun-point. She says this was how she was brought up and believes in giving more freedom to the kids to choose what they like rather than imposing something on them. “This does not mean they do not study, they do, but not as a ritual or as a feverish exercise, but to do their best.”
Revathi, a bank employee whose kids go to Concept school says, it is a bit burdening for her kids to be in school just to study, and sometimes she pities their all work and no play schedule, but she says if they come up this way only will they know value of education and will ‘settle down’ in good jobs. We have no choice because we would like to scale up our living conditions and this can happen through this kind of education only.
Tulsi, a content developer with reputed group of schools, a ex-teacher Shloka school (Waldorf Concept) and a teacher trainer, laments today’s education is just Chalk and Talk. Creativity and thinking abilities are scarce, teachers just want to do their job, finish their syllabus (even if it is Kindergarten!) and get out. Very few are willing to try innovative teaching methods which leave lasting impact on the students. Even our syllabi needs to be blamed for this, she says. For example, why does the student have to learn about geography of a place they have never seen? She argues “Doesn’t it make sense for the child to know about the topography of the place they are living and explore it in a detailed manner rather than trying to discover alien geography or demographics?” She also feels for those who do not wish to pursue education, there should be a total freehand in opting vocational training.
To conclude this- Does progress means inculcating and building the ‘earning capabilities’ or does it mean to realize and utilize student’s potential to the best possible extent? If we think we want the former, we can continue with rote learning, hours and hours of monotonous drilling of concepts, rightly called Chalk and Talk. But if we want the student to actually apply their mind and taste the fun in it, we must open doors to hands on or application based learning. Let’s hope for the best for our future citizens.
Education begins right from the day you are born...School is just a formal way of telling the world you have entered full-time into it. While some say education today is just ‘learn to earn’, while some optimists firmly believe it truly opens a new horizon within and without. Again it is all an individual effort, though there are many other factors playing key role, like environment, teachers, peer, parents etc. But at the end of the day experientially what the student carries home decides the quality of life he or she is going to lead. The question is all about this ‘quality’ which is being discussed all over but sparsely seen.
TCG decided to do a ‘quality check’ on our education, a decade ago and now and ten years down the line. We decided to begin with the roots, obviously, because
‘Its only when the roots are nourished that the fruits are seen’. Starting with Primary Education we interacted with different academicians, policy makers, students, teachers etc to bring out this story…
At Government level…
Statistics/earlier reports say that on an All-India level, there are roughly 200 million children in the 6-14 age group of which only 120 million are in schools and net attendance in the primary level is estimated to be merely 66 percent of enrolment. While in Karnataka, for example, nearly 98 percent of children are enrolled in schools, as high as 86 percent graduate from Grade 8, but this is not so in Andhra Pradesh. Among other factors, lack of learning in the classrooms is one of the key reasons for this outcome. In general terms, while it seems that DPEP and SSA have been quite successful in enlarging the coverage of primary schools, however, it is the quality of teaching in the rural public schools that is in need of the most attention.
As Ms B. Sheshu Kumari Director SCERT says, “Major hazards in Primary Education are enrollments, retention and dropouts.” In spite of this, she feels several government policies have catapulted the quality of education in schools across the length and breadth of the State. She feels schemes like midday meals act as incentives to attend the school, as most of the parents cannot afford to even satiate their hunger.
Policy-wise she feels AP is a forerunner in this field, right from the Operation Blackboard a centrally sponsored programme which was started in 1987 immediately after the Rajiv Gandhi NPE (National Policy on Education) of 1986 was released to supply the bare minimum crucial facilities to all primary schools in the country. The objective of the scheme is providing students studying in primary settings with the necessary institutional equipment and instructional material to facilitate their education. There is a provision to provide salary for an additional teacher to those primary schools that have an enrolment of more than 100 students or for a consecutive period of two years. In the ninth five year plan, the scheme was extended to all upper primary schools as well.
In an attempt to improve the implementation of this scheme a few additional provisions have been added. All teachers will be trained in using the materials provided by the scheme under a particularly designed teacher preparation programme. The state will provide for replacement of broken or non-functioning materials. At the local level, there will be some flexibility for purchasing additional items and teaching aids, which are applicable to the local situation. At least fifty percent of the teachers will be women, which in turn will affect the girl enrolment in school. School building will be designed according to local needs.
Mrs Sheshu says that empowering girl child with education would directly impact the marriage, early child birth and infant mortality, subsequently. This worked well, because if the woman of the family is educated many things fall in place, though not miraculously it will at least bring down child marriages.
Are the girls really interested in getting themselves educated? The answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’. Ms Sheshu says looking at the girl child’s interest government came up with VELUGU schools meant for girl child. There are 88 VELUGU schools all over AP today.
Also insisting women teachers helps to understand and educate a girl child, says the Director. Keeping this in mind school infrastructure, toilet facilities, teaching aids and all the necessary support is extended especially to the lady teacher, she being the ambassador of education.
How about the teaching-learning condition in all these schools?—Mrs Sheshu says, “teachers are the harbingers of change and they form the basic living unit of this system, if she/he is motivated enough to teach, miracles can happen, at the same time if they are not very committed it can spell doom.”
How about the recruitment process?
The Director thinks AP State teacher recruitment process is unparalleled in terms of quality, subjectivity and transparency though she feels enough coverage was never given. As per the Ministry norms, teachers should have a qualification of plus 2 and D.Ed for Primary school and B.Ed for the Secondary.
Talking about the evolution of Primary Education in Andhra, she says the State has been a pioneer and forerunner in several projects. The formal (so called) school which started with two small rooms with a verandah and two teachers, (in 1983) now flourished into a proper full-fledged school building.
Regarding Planning and Classroom Practices DPEP envisages linking district plans with school processes and classroom practices. It is an effort to bring together the pedagogical necessities and broader educational concerns. The ultimate objective is to improve the school processes and outcomes.
To many a planner, the operational efficiency of the units (schools) is an assumption and hence the action lies outside the classrooms. The conventional educational planner never enters into the classrooms and the typical pedagogue never gets out of the classrooms. While the vision of the former is too wide and broad to be understood and appreciated by the pedagogue, the vision of the pedagogue is too narrow and myopic to be considered seriously by the planner. Resultantly, the planner is isolated from the action and the actions are isolated from the plans. To build bridge between them is difficult, if not impossible. The programme makes a serious effort to link these two sets of actors.
Improving classroom practices and school management, no doubt, form the core to the success of educational programmes. The programme envisages create local specific facilitating conditions to improve teacher competencies through frequent in-service training programmes, improving school management through training in planning and management of educational functionaries. The efforts to strengthen state level resource organisations like SCERT; district level institutions like DIET and to create new structures at block and cluster levels and management training institutions like SIEMT provide the facilitating conditions.
When asked about any special programmes to unearth student talent, Ms Sheshu speaks about INSPIRE, which was well received and benefited many students.
In order to seed and experience the joy of innovation, every year two lakh school children in the age-group of 10 to 15 years i.e., 6th to 10th standards are being identified for the INSPIRE Award. Each INSPIRE Award envisions an investment of Rs.5,000/- per child. The scheme plans to reach at least two students per secondary school during the next five years.
For Inspired Research (INSPIRE)
"Innovation in Science Pursuit For Inspired Research (INSIRE)" is an innovative programme sponsored and managed by the Department of Science & Technology (DST) for attraction of talent to science. The basic objective of INSPIRE is to communicate to the youth of the country the excitements of creative pursuit of science, attract talent to the study of science at an early age and thus build the required critical human resource pool for strengthening and expanding the Science & Technology system and R&D base.
A striking feature of the programme is that it does not believe in conducting competitive exams for identification of talent at any level. It belives in and relies on the efficacy of the existing educational structure for identification of talent.
At Private Schools—
Corporatization has completely taken over with
privatization; this is what few experts feel, but what if that is so, because quality is ensured and along with the price comes the value, isn’t it? This is debatable issue. With categories of schools, which cater to their (eerie) needs, promising entry into top institutes in the country, parents are overwhelmed. Students face nightmares fulfilling the ambitious parents’ dreams, sometimes stifled with bouts of depression on one hand, on the other there are extreme go –getters in these schools who are equally (or even more) ferocious about marks than the teachers or parents themselves. Competition any day is good, but it needs to be healthy, not take dubious forms, says Sunitha, a Software Engineer whose kids are studying in a reputed International School in Hyderabad, for whom marks are fun-to-achieve target but not at gun-point. She says this was how she was brought up and believes in giving more freedom to the kids to choose what they like rather than imposing something on them. “This does not mean they do not study, they do, but not as a ritual or as a feverish exercise, but to do their best.”
Revathi, a bank employee whose kids go to Concept school says, it is a bit burdening for her kids to be in school just to study, and sometimes she pities their all work and no play schedule, but she says if they come up this way only will they know value of education and will ‘settle down’ in good jobs. We have no choice because we would like to scale up our living conditions and this can happen through this kind of education only.
Tulsi, a content developer with reputed group of schools, a ex-teacher Shloka school (Waldorf Concept) and a teacher trainer, laments today’s education is just Chalk and Talk. Creativity and thinking abilities are scarce, teachers just want to do their job, finish their syllabus (even if it is Kindergarten!) and get out. Very few are willing to try innovative teaching methods which leave lasting impact on the students. Even our syllabi needs to be blamed for this, she says. For example, why does the student have to learn about geography of a place they have never seen? She argues “Doesn’t it make sense for the child to know about the topography of the place they are living and explore it in a detailed manner rather than trying to discover alien geography or demographics?” She also feels for those who do not wish to pursue education, there should be a total freehand in opting vocational training.
To conclude this- Does progress means inculcating and building the ‘earning capabilities’ or does it mean to realize and utilize student’s potential to the best possible extent? If we think we want the former, we can continue with rote learning, hours and hours of monotonous drilling of concepts, rightly called Chalk and Talk. But if we want the student to actually apply their mind and taste the fun in it, we must open doors to hands on or application based learning. Let’s hope for the best for our future citizens.
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