Elevating Education Standards in India

Need for A Bottom-Up Approach

It is a fashion these days to complain about the low standards of the syllabus taught at the intermediate level (+2 level we call it). Critics argue that the syllabus is not challenging enough to make students face competitive exams. And it makes students incompetent outside India.
This is just one side of the coin. Now let us see the other, they way my natives in the village see it.
My native place is a small hamlet near the Jejuri in Maharashtra. It has Population of around a few thousand people. And there are 40 students appearing for the secondary school exams, or std. 10th every year. The wise old men of the village started the local village school five years back and the passing students’ percentage has gone up from 24% to 80% since then. Isn’t it a remarkable achievement in terms of growth? Well but it is still not up to the mark….
I live in the city of Mumbai. When I gave my SSC exams, I was in a mediocre school which was fighting out to get a good result every year. Well a good result in Mumbai means passing percentage of 98%. And there are schools which have track record of 100% for consecutive years, approximately 3 out of 10 is the scene for such schools.
So, here there is a major paradigm shift isn’t it?
We cannot elevate the standards of the syllabus until the original has become obsolete to the core, that is, even at the rural level. But does that mean that we make the upper strata wait and suffer? No, it means that our first aim should be to bring an ‘equality of opportunities’ in education. We cannot simply strive for higher standards when there is major chunk of population which is finding it difficult to stand by even the present ones.
So, what do we need? We need good teachers. Again the problem of getting good teachers into government service is quite an old one. The good teachers want to be paid good money, and it is but natural that we can’t pay them as much as they would earn by boycotting the system and starting private coaching classes. So we need to be realistic. We need incentives for the good teachers.
The problem of pulling in good teachers is prevalent only in the urban class. The rural class however faces a different version of the same problem. The teachers are driven to teaching, but, they are not qualified enough. Exact opposites as we see them. So the solution also has to be different for both.
We need to educate the eager teachers in the villages. I have seen some teachers back in my native place taking classes under the tree-shade when there was no school in the village. And well we can’t play the same in the cities. We need to pay the teachers more then we do now. The meager salary the secondary school teachers get are not exactly the kind of future the ‘Promising youth of India’ may be looking forward to. If you want them, pay them, be professional. Their morale is proportianal to their salary!
The problem of teachers being cleared, there is again the receiving end, the students. The interest from the students’ side matters more. Their interest is proportional to the teachers’ morale. And their teaching abilities depend straight on their morale.
There might arise a paradox here, we are breaking our heads to educate a generation which may not want to get educated in the first place. But then are we looking at the entire population here? There is always a larger chunk right now which is interested. The situation we face is the chunk which is not interested, lowering the success rate of the country’s educational goals by their mere presence. This can only be sorted out by creating greater awareness and interest for education. We cannot of course outcast them. So we need to absorb them. This is a parallel process that has to go on.
Also, their might just be section of students that are interested on non-conventional study, like art, physical exercise or sports. Well there is a great initiative by the Education Minister of Maharashtra Mr. Phurke that must be noted. He has taken these alternate interests into consideration and included drawing and physical education as subjects that will affect your grading or percentage in the secondary school boards, as against the previous system wherein these subjects were only meant to be passed with any marks.
However, we have to note that public policy does not always have the desired effect. My brother’s physical education teacher gave him 49/50 marks without testing him at all just because he is a favorite! Well such things really spoil the purpose of engaging these systems.
As a conclusion, what we should do is to start from the lower strata of education and raise them up to urban standards and only then work on pulling up the whole system in one single elevator!
And for that as we have seen, public policy can’t really matter, unless realization starts from within us.