System Reboot
Schools and colleges need autonomy, teachers need training, and kids can’t be made to lurch from one exam to another. That’s no learning
No number of laws, or schemes, can fix the deep structural crisis in India’s education system, pre-primary to higher education. It is a struggle to, first, receive quality affordable education, and two, be work-ready and employable. For that to happen, the very approach to education needs total review – perhaps a rewind to words from the report of University Education Commission (1948-49), whose members included Radhakrishnan, Zakir Hussain, and Meghnad Saha. Cautioning against state control of education, because it stymies intellectual progress, the report mooted autonomy for higher education institutes: “State aid is not to be confused with state control over academic policies and practices.” And, notably, “…separation of skill of hand from skill of mind has greatly retarded the mastery of the physical world.” We were warned in 1949.
New govts, across states, keen to own India’s favourite ‘cause’, has resulted in inconsistency, patchy policy and/or political slugfests – the language debate, is one such. The deeper clash, and mess, is threefold. First, the spread of schooling, ‘access’, has accompanied a ‘narrowing’ of what is included in an education received – craftsmanship or skills training, for instance, is reduced to extracurriculars, considered subpar. Second, Tuesday was an extraordinary sight – 1,500 students in UP’s Fatehpur inter-college, staged a six-hour sit-in demanding clean drinking water, fans, toilets. Years of emphasis on ‘infra’, through multiple central and state schemes, still fails students – Fatehpur is no remote village. Third, years of emphasis on ‘access’, pushed to the backburner, ‘quality’ of education. As a result, school-level reading, writing and arithmetic skills are dismal, islands of excellence are no reassurance when the system is flailing.
Educationists have argued ad nauseam that problems of quality of education cannot be solved through testing, standardisation or tech alone. Classroom pedagogy can improve only when rote learning, repetitive drills are replaced by connecting lessons to children’s everyday lives, with experiments and problem-solving. That can happen only when the quality of teachers improves. Yet, teacher training and recruitment are in the news invariably for wrong reasons. Do our classrooms encourage children to think, question and explore? No. Digital devices or online platforms, without skilled teachers, cannot solve structural problems.
Which is how the coaching industry has hijacked the school-leaving-college transition. The politician-univ/college-coaching nexus has done immense damage to higher education, especially engineering and medicine: this bears repeating. Every child deserves a quality education, without having to hold a dharna.
https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/education/article30220102.ece
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
