The concept and phenomenon of education based on school-going is of modern origin in India. Education in the past was restricted to upper castes and the content taught was also ascriptive. However, today, to lead a comfortable life in this fast-changing world, education is seen as the most influential agent of modernization.
The educational attainments in terms of enrolment and retention in rural India generally correspond to the hierarchical order. While the upper castes have traditionally enjoyed and are enjoying these advantages, the Scheduled Caste and other backward castes children have lagged behind in primary schooling. Studies have revealed that children of backward castes are withdrawn from school at an early age, by about 8 or 9 years.
An important reason for withdrawal of children from school is the cost and work needs of poor households. Income and caste are typically correlated with lower castes having lower incomes and higher castes having better endowments in terms of land, income and other resources. Thus, one fact is certain that there is a clear divide in the villages, along caste lines, regarding access to schools.
The very poor children are enrolled in the municipal school because it provides a number of incentives such as lower expenditure on books, uniforms, fees, etc. The well-off children go to the private school, where English and computers are given more importance.
The tendency in favour of private schools in rural areas is influenced by people’s perception of private schools, as a means of imparting quality education in English medium. The poor rural girls, if not all, constitute a major junk of disadvantaged groups that are excluded from the schooling process, especially because they enter late into school and drop out earlier.
Parental illiteracy is another cause for lack of interest to become literates. Many rural children enrolled are thus first generation learners, who come from illiterate families thus, they have to single handedly grapple with school life, mastering language and cognitive skills without parental help and guidance.
Most of these illiterate parents do whatever is possible to educate their children because education for them acts as a vehicle of social mobility. Moreover, education and the subsequent attainment of town jobs is often looked upon by many of these rural families, especially families belonging to lower castes, as a means to break out of their position in caste hierarchy.
The religious beliefs and practices of a community can also largely impact the overall attitudinal and behavioural profile of an individual or group. In the Indian context, religion has a sway over people’s minds and exerts a great influence over their behaviour. The motivation and attitudes of the people towards education are also moulded, to a large extent, by their religious beliefs. The literacy rate for Muslims is notably lower compared to Hindus but not better than Christians and Sikhs.
Poverty among Muslims, who also happen to be one of the most economically backward groups, is the actual reason for their preference for madrasas (Islamic schools), because they are absolutely free and more flexible as compared to formal government schools. This seems to be the only option for poor Muslims, who often cannot afford to pay for the education.
1. Defects of Present System:
According to Amartya Sen, ‘Primary education in India suffers not only from inadequate allocation of resource, but often enough also from terrible management and organization. To him, management and organization of schools is still in a terrible State in India.
That means, there are three major defects in the present educational system. The first is the physical environment in which the student is taught, the second is the curriculum or the content, which he/she is taught, and the third is the teaching method or the teacher, who is teaching.
2. Physical Environment:
Today’s society clings to schools to such an extent that a co-dependent relationship is created between the broader and friendly notion of education and the manipulative reality of school. Education should not be limited to the sphere of the school.
It should have to encompass nearly every aspect of life. Schools should act as locations where the ideas of education are planted in the students and education has to become the foundation for how the students look at the world around them and how they interpret these things. Instead the present situation is that, the seeds of education are planted into the children in the schools but it does not go much further than the school system.
The public in general and rural people in particular, often think of schools as a place for teachers to instruct children on the ‘three Rs’—reading, writing and arithmetic. Schools are not considered as places, where the students are taught many life skills that will help them succeed in their future endeavors.
Access to school is no more a problem in most parts of India. Ninety eight percent of population has access to school within a walking distance of 1 km. The core problem is the unpreparedness of the school system for mass education. Classrooms in most primary schools in rural areas are typically uninviting, with leaking roofs, uneven floors and scraggly mats to sit on.
Added to that, most of the schools do not have electricity, drinking water or toilets. In some schools, students of different ages are made to sit in one room. These students squat in passive postures, even regimented columns, with often the ‘brightest’ and the socially advantaged sitting in front. At a given time, a typical school could have at most two teachers trying to ‘police’ children of all five primary classes.
The best teaching that these teachers may undertake is to make the students copy or recite from the textbook. Sounds emanating from the school are normally distinguishable from afar in the form of a ritual cacophonous chorus of children chanting their lesson, often shouting their guts out in a cathartic release.
Surprisingly, no normal sounds— of joyous laughter, creative play of words, singing or recitation of poems, animated participation, excited discovery, or even the irrepressible curious questioning the characteristic of every child of that age are found in schools.
The major drawback in these schools is that in the mechanical race to achieve ‘schooling for all’ the government seems to have completely missed out on what constitutes ‘learning for all’. Here, greater emphasis is placed on establishing schools but not on what goes on inside a school.
The result is high enrolment figure and equally high dropout rate. The students enrolled are compelled to attend school regularly and take all the exams, and the result is a sizeable number of students fail and are compelled to repeat classes. These students ultimately give-up the hope, resulting in high resource wastage of the government, while at the same time inculcating a sense of despair among the students, thus, reducing the potential of their human development.
The quality of education is the main issue. For a long time, the educationists had thought that the high dropout rate is because of parental poverty and disinterestedness rather than concentrating on the failure of the school system.
A paper by Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, titled ‘Determinants of Household Expenditure on Education in Rural India, which is based on the results of NCAER’s 1994 Human Development in India (HDI) survey, tries to clarify some of such myths that are associated with the education in rural India. The study mentions that the real household expenditures on education in India is not ‘virtually non-existent’, but is considerably higher.
Some of the observations made by this study are as follows:
1. First, there is a complete absence of ‘free education’ in India, regardless of a household’s socio-economic background, spending on education is very substantial even at the primary school level.
2. Second, ‘indirect’ costs, such as books, uniforms and examination fees, are very high, even in government-run schools, including at the primary level. According to National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), in 1995-96, the average expenditure per student pursuing primary education in rural India in a government school was Rs.219, and for students going to local body schools, private-aided schools and private-unaided schools, it was Rs 223, Rs 622 and Rs 911, respectively.
3. Third, given the absence of a well-developed credit market for education, expenditure on education is highly (and positively) correlated with income.
4. Fourth, willingness to pay and ‘compulsion to pay’ (i.e., the need to compensate for a shortage of government spending on education) are two important factors.
5. Fifth, government spending and household spending on education are not substitutes but complementary. An increase in government spending is associated with an increase in household spending (due to an enthusiasm effect, resulting from improvements in school facilities, number of teachers, etc.).
Conversely, a reduction in government expenditure leads to a decline in household spending on education. (Equivalently, the elasticity of household expenditure to government expenditure is found to be almost unitary, and positive.)
6. Finally, the provision of schooling in rural habitations, or the provision of such school incentives as mid-day meals, uniforms, textbooks, etc., are both associated with the increased household demand for education.
3. Defects in Curriculum:
The second reason attributed to high dropout rate is ‘most out-of school children are unable to study because they have to work’. The recent study by PROBE has refuted this reason as myth. It says that only a small minority of children are full-time wage labourers, while the majority of those, who work do so as family labourers at home or in the fields. According to this study, it is not because the children have to work that they leave school, but because they leave school they work. Then why do children leave schools?
The present education system is teacher-centric. From times immemorial, education has been expensive, as it is related to gaining and transmitting knowledge in India. ‘Information,’ the foundation upon which knowledge rests was and still is in limited supply.
A teacher, together with a united set of books, is the knowledge base, which anchors the education process. The teacher is the active agent, communicating information to the students, who are the passive receptors of information. Learning by rote is the method most favoured because the information transmitted is largely disjointed and the student is not really quite sure what the motivation behind knowing all those disparate facts is.
Curriculum-makers in India feel that children need to know a lot more to catch-up’ with the others living in advanced countries. So, they try to include as much ‘information and ‘knowledge’ as possible in the curriculum. While it is true that this century has seen an explosion of technologies that help to store large information, the capacity to understand these facts and concepts does not grow equally fast among the children.
Therefore, a crucial aim of children’s education should be to promote concept formation and enhance their capacity for theory-building. All children are natural theory builders, and from very early in life, they begin to construct their own explanations for the world they observe. The educational system presents a contrasting experience to these children.
These outdated school systems do not allow for a child’s mind and personality to develop. Moreover, the knowledge imparted is not continuous and are disjointed fragments of information that are arranged in the form of different pieces in the syllabus.
The curriculum-framers, while arranging such information, ignore the fact that the natural learning process in children is far from linear, and that they process information about the world in a much more holistic and integrated manner. The content taught, therefore, cannot be determined by what has to be ‘covered’ in higher classes, but by the children’s ability to comprehend the concept at a given age.
In the Indian system of education, what is taught is crucially linked with how it is taught and, more importantly, with how it is assessed. The examination system here is so distorted that it actually discourages good classroom practices by forcing children to answer contrived meaningless questions, suppressing their own curiosity and expression. It emphasizes on written questions based on trivial recall, and discounts all activity- based learning.
Another major drawback is that the curriculum prescribed in the textbooks to a great extent are found to be ‘irrelevant’ to the closer lives of rural people. The curriculum-makers, who come predominantly from urban middle-class background believe that the rural children need to be taught how to conduct their lives ‘properly’, and that only ‘positive’ situations from their lives must be depicted.
Thus, either highly prescriptive and moralistic lessons (about hygiene, cleanliness, hard work, etc.) or rather simplistic generalizations about the perceived ‘needs’ of the rural poor or over-idealized situations such as truly democratic panchayats, benevolent employers, well-equipped and functioning village hospitals, effective government schemes, etc., are described in the prescribed textbooks. They absolutely ignore the fact that the rural children, unlike those from protected urban homes, are much more conscious of the conflicts and complexities of life, which form a part of their reality.
They know very well that these lessons are contrived and untrue, but have no chance to critically question the contents that they must passively parrot. The village child is also far more knowledgeable about the natural world, and does not need to look at ‘pictures’ to count the legs of a spider, or to identify the eggs of a frog or the leaves of a neem tree.
Similarly, the teachers and other school authorities also neglect the fact that many rural children, especially the tribal children, are aware of rich bio-diversity around them. They become conscious only when some foreign companies pirate this information and patent it. Thus, in the name of relevance, most of the content taught in the schools is totally irrelevant to the prevailing situations of the rural children.
In recent years, there have been attempts to change the elementary school curriculum to make it more child-centred, joyful and activity-based. However, in most cases, there have been mere cosmetic changes accompanied by much ‘song and dance’, with no radical restructuring in the content and design. The education systems in this region are highly monopolistic and rigid, and are controlled by bureaucratic departments that are resistant to change.
Moreover, the people, who design school curricula have outdated notions about what constitutes ‘learning’, are burdened with the perceived demands of higher education, and are far removed from a typical average child of the country. They are also far too inflexible to learn from the experience of village teachers and field-based voluntary groups working in close contact with children. Some flexibility may be permitted in the curriculum for ‘those children’ in non-formal schools, but never in the highly guarded formal system for ‘our kids’.
4. Most Important Resource—The Teacher:
The protagonist of the educational system and the most important resource for quality education, the teacher, in reality has the feeblest voice in the matters of concern. The rural primary school teacher occupies the lowest position in the hierarchy. Apart from teaching, he/she is expected to bear the burden of many other assignments such as collecting census, propagating family planning programmes, conducting poverty surveys, etc.
The teacher in a village acts as the sole multi-purpose village functionary, and is expected to perform whatever function the government finds necessary at any time. This problem becomes most acute in the case of village schools, having a single or at most two teachers. For days together, the school may remain closed because the teacher has been summoned on ‘duty’, further discouraging children, who in the absence of support at home, need much more attention and extra time.
Another major problem that has come up in recent days is that, due to the ceiling on recruitments, there is insufficient number of teachers in many of these schools. A considerable proportion of available teachers do not have the requisite qualifications. Women teachers constitute only 31 percent of the total number of teachers in rural areas, which is supposed to be one of the causes for low literacy rate.
Lack of motivation on the part of teachers, who generally are academically low- qualified and have chosen this profession as a last resort, is a serious problem. Added to this, the teachers are burdened with unmanageable classes, irrelevant curricula, dismal working conditions, and lack of recognition of their efforts. Moreover, these teachers are lowly paid. The result is that the teachers tend to give up.
Has laoreet percipitur ad. Vide interesset in mei, no his legimus verterem. Et nostrum imperdiet appellantur usu, mnesarchum referrentur id vim.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean. 
.png)
0 comments:
Post a Comment