SCRAP THE STATE BOARD EDUCATION SYSTEM

Uniformity in administration brings about an effectiveness of policy execution in any country, or even in an organisation or an institute. It is this effectiveness which translates into a successful enterprise of governance and leads to stability. If there are double standards, it becomes very difficult for an effective administration to take shape – leading to utter commotion. This is an event which we must steer clear of. Yet, we in India thrive upon chaos, find success in anarchy and cleanse ourselves in a complete mess.
Education is an important pillar of any society. It is of utmost importance that we give it all the privileges it requires to flourish. If education blossoms, it showers us with a lot of effective instruments to progress in this competitive world. For a country like India, education takes prime position. Ours is a knowledge based economy and if we dilute the effectiveness of our educational system by introducing dubious administrative policies, Dr. Kalam’s dream of seeing India as an educational superpower will be drowned in the words of his book.
Our country has seen very many policies which seem to be heading towards some success, but then again for every good policy, there are multiple policies which seem to mar the prospect of a sound educational system. The ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ was a good step towards universal education and was pregnant with good causes and expectant with a hopeful execution. Then again, in its wake came the very unsavoury Reservation Bill and this completely manhandled the purpose of education.
The establishment of a few more IITs is an amazing step, yet the fact remains that they have begun operating in make-shift campuses or in the classrooms of the older IITs. IIM Ahmedabad won’t be allowed an additional campus in Mumbai till there is an excess, unwanted and unnecessary reservation for students of Maharashtra. What can we say about such administrative policies? Is there much to even discuss as to how clueless the babus are when they decide upon educational matters?
One facet of the Indian educational system which I believe is hampering our growth is the allowance given to states to formulate their own educational systems in addition to one existing in the centre, which is the CBSE or ICSE/ISC. With two or maybe three active educational boards existing in every state, there is a very thin line between a possibility of a chaotic environment, as a direct result of the dual board system, and a harmonious existence.
A single unified system is better because it helps us focus on what is important. It also helps the people to completely identify with the system of education prevalent in the country rather than be confused as to its implications. I have traveled a good measure of the country and have studied all around. I cannot even begin to describe the discomfort of fitting into the various systems of education which are in every state. Fitting into the different basics of each state syllabus can take a toll and is not a pleasant experience.
One might argue the presence of Central Schools across the parameter of the country, but how many families constantly on the move would make a choice of this system. Private schools offer more appealing options. Accommodation of students in this environment becomes troublesome with the addition of the state language in the curriculum. It adds to the difficulty. With personal experience I had to learn two state languages with enormous difficulty while I resided in Gujarat and Orissa.
A unified system of examination and education will also help facilitate college admission, especially in the places where prestigious colleges are placed. I have come across instances where good student and more importantly deserving students have failed to apply to the Delhi University admission process because the state board results have failed to come up in the time complying with the admission dates.
Then there is the dilemma of how the colleges and universities evaluate students of different educational background and give them admission into the courses offered. The biggest obstacle is to judge both the capabilities with judicious judgment so as not to discriminate one against the other. Still there are problems in this situation. There are no set guidelines as to how to separately evaluate every students presenting himself/herself from a different educational board. The government has not presented us or has not thought it to be prudent enough to draw up such procedures. It does not also help us when we understand that our admission procedure is all about marks and does not look at the over all student as a person.
With such kind of educational losses, which take place on both sides, it is necessary that the government lead by the HRD Ministry, needs to consolidate the entire process of education in the country thus bringing the entire faculty under one umbrella. It will help us unify the very disarrayed system of education. The problems discussed above will mitigate and help us to create an even more effective knowledge economy in the country

what ails India's education system...!!!

Amartya Sen is man of many parts -- Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, honorary doctorates from major universities across the world, and author of books including The Argumentative Indian (2005), and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) besides research in philosophy, welfare economics and the economics of peace and war.

He is the recipient of many awards including "Bharat Ratna" and Nobel Prize in economics. He will be speaking at the Nasscom Summit 2007 in Mumbai  on February 7. In an email interview with Leslie D'monte, he explains why he's not satisfied with the current state of India  education. Here are the excerpts:
What positives do you see in today's Indian education system?
Positives? First, our higher education system is widespread, and while the quality of it is very mixed, there are still a lot of people getting reasonable higher education.
Second, in some fields, especially in technical education, the quality of what is offered is indeed fairly high. Against these "positives" stand the huge neglect of primary education and also secondary education, and of course - as already mentioned - the highly variable
quality of university education (some of it not worthy of that name).
What are the major pitfalls?
The pitfalls of illiteracy include functional handicap, intellectual deprivation, and social disadvantage. When large groups are systematically neglected, like girls, especially from economic and social underdog families, the social penalties are gigantic.
Is technology is gradually helping in taking education to the masses?
The main causes of our uneven and highly unequal educational system are not technological underdevelopment but political and social neglect.
It is, of course, important for those who are masters of contemporary technology to take deep interest in removing the educational neglects that plague the country, but they have to look for the diverse ways and means of helping, rather than sticking only to their identities as "high technologists"!
Any sector that become as rapidly - and as convincingly - prosperous owes something to the rest of the society as well, but that is not the same thing as looking only to technology to solve all problems.
Technology can certainly help the spreading of education, for example in making the schooling of maths easier and faster, and even in monitoring the attendance and accountability of teachers and of school officials (I remember Ramadorai of Tata Consultancy Services explaining to me the possibility of using smarter technology in that work), or in making communication of elementary maths easier, but it is not the lack of a
"technological magic bullet" that is holding everything up.
We need IIMs and IITs and we simultaneously need to provide for primary and secondary education. What steps should the government take to ensure that neither one is promoted at the expense of the other?
The main "step" to take is to get on with it! The government has to speed things up. However, the government is not the only agency involved. Not only more money is needed in schooling - not just through raising salaries of teachers and officials - but also better organisation of teaching and better practices (not minimal schooling with maximal private tuition!).
For this we need cooperation between many agencies: governments (at different levels), teachers' unions, parent-teacher committees, civil society in general.
We have gone into some of these issues in a few small reports of the Pratichi Trust - a small Trust that I was privileged to set up in 1999 with the help of my Nobel money, one in India and one in Bangladesh.
The Indian Trust is particularly involved in elementary schooling and elementary health care (the Bangladesh Pratichi Trust has tended to concentrate especially on gender equity, including the training of young women journalists from rural background).

Education System In India: Make A Living or Make A Life?

By Pallavi Murthy:
Yet again a teacher sent to jail for having slapped a child and yet again a student at IIT attempted a suicide! On one hand is a teacher who threw acid on a girl’s face because she rejected his marriage proposal while on the other hand is a student who falls in love with his teacher because he finds her ‘hot’. On one hand is a student who finds it hard to take the pressure of clearing the examinations while on the other hand a student fails in all his exams but still gets promoted and gets a first class degree because of donation and bribery. These have become an everyday news headline now. So who is to be blamed for all this- the Education system, the teachers, the parents or the children?
First let’s start with the basic meaning of education and its purpose. Education is the process of imparting knowledge. In simple words it involves two main processes i.e. teaching and learning. The main purpose of education is to develop knowledge, skill and the character of a person. It is process of passing information from one person (teacher) to the other (student). We know the basic law of heat transfer. It states that ‘in a system, heat always flows from hot body to the cold body’ to maintain an equilibrium in the system. The same thing goes with education, where the ‘system’  is the ‘society’ we live in, ‘heat’ is ‘knowledge’  and the ‘hot body’ is a person with ‘more knowledge’  and the ‘cold body’ is the person with ‘lesser knowledge’. The need for education is to maintain a balance or equilibrium in the society.

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his
Mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e.,
Conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to
be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be
Equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”
-Ayn Rand

Educating the Educators???

Education is what moulds an individual and builds nations. In India today, the state of education is rather a mixed bag with glorious IITs and IIMs on one hand and comparably rather rampant illiteracy on the other. Not only this, primary education suffers from high dropout rates and secondary education lacks the creativity and infrastructure needed for a world-class education system. Looking at the global perspective as well, a lot of countries have problems with their education systems. At times, it is too formal, stifling creativity and at others, the standards are too low for the students to remain globally competitive. It may seem a wise idea to reconsider the role that education plays and why formal education may also be harming students.

Earlier Attempts

In the 19^th century, two British educators, Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, developed a “monitorial system” in light of the shortage of teachers and resources. The idea was to gather a large number of students, 100 perhaps, and then teach a smaller number of monitors that could then cascade the knowledge to their peers. Another quite idealistic theory called “Learning by discovery” was proposed by Rousseau in the 18^th century that called on for letting students explore and learn themselves rather than being taught. Unfortunately both attempts were futile and had to be abandoned.

The Present State

In today’s schools and universities, it seems like the true essence of learning and knowledge is being lost to pragmatism and expediency. Students are no longer interested in learning things, they just want to “mug” up facts and then just regurgitate all out on the exam day. There is little curiosity or creativity and in some cases, very little questioning the teacher or the textbook. This leads to little understanding of underlying ideas and concepts. These practices not only make students dull and mechanic, it hinders innovation and new ideas. Education is increasingly becoming a sort of brainwashing whereby students are made to realize that in order to live well, they need to memories book facts and get good grades so that they can get good jobs in turn. Colleges and schools are being “vocationalised” into being job-training centers and employment agencies rather than institutes of learning. Students are looked at by educational institutes as prospective investments and sometimes even commoditised in a degrading sense. Education and perhaps even society, is rather closing the students instead of opening them up by indoctrinating them with ideas of the practicalities of learning.

Undoubtedly, one needs to earn to survive but is money the only reason one needs to be educated? It is becoming hard to find genuine passion in students these days which should of growing concern to the educators. It has been passion that has changed the way we live. From the greats of Einstein, Van Gogh, Dickens and John Nash, it has been the passion that has driven them to achieve what they did and revolutionize their own fields.

What Needs to be Done

One thing is for sure, that if we want the scientific and technological advancements continue to transform the way we live, the arts to continue to enrich our lives, and the humanities to let us understand ourselves better, the impetus has to be on proper ideals of education. Young students need to be inculcated with a sense of passion and loving what one does. Certainly, society has to play its part as well. Schools need to fundamentally change the way things are taught by including interaction, exploration and creation in the student’s curriculums. Universities have an even bigger onus of producing genuine talent that is ready to challenge the preconceptions in their own fields. Opportunities need to be made available to the deserving ones and meritocracy needs to be encouraged in society.

The development of humanity critically depends on the way our youth is educated. As Agatha Christie rightly said, “I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.” The focus has to be shifted and the educators need to learn this fast.

 Sainyam Gautam

Education System of India...!!!

Why India is still a developing country and what is stopping it from being a developed country? This particular question strikes me every time when I read something about India’s education system. I see India’s education system as a stumbling block towards its objectives of achieving inclusive growth.

Let me inform you about certain startling facts. India is going to experience a paradox of nearly 90 million people joining the workforce but most of them will lack requisite skills and the mindset for productive employment according to a report in DNA. India has about 550 million people under the age of 25 years out of which only 11% are enrolled in tertiary institutions compared to the world average of 23%.

I wouldn’t be laying too much emphasis on the drawbacks of India’s public education system because it has been an issue well debated over in the past and the main flaws have already been pointed out before. I will be focusing on how the education system’s failure is leading to another social issue of income inequality and hence, suggest certain policies to improve India’s education system and reduce inequality.

The really critical aspect of Indian public education system is its low quality. The actual quantity of schooling that children experience and the quality of teaching they receive are extremely insufficient in government schools. A common feature in all government schools is the poor quality of education, with weak infrastructure and inadequate pedagogic attention.

What the government is not realising right now is that education which is a source of human capital can create wide income inequalities. It will be surprising to see how income inequalities are created within the same group of educated people.Let me illustrate this with the help of an example:

Let us take P be an individual who has had no primary or higher education. His human capital is zero and hence it bears no returns. Let Q be an individual who completed his MBA from S.P Jain college and let R be an individual who completed his MBA from IIM Ahmadabad. The average rate of return for an MBA student is 7.5% (hypothetical). Q gets a rate of return of 5% and R gets a rate of return of 10% due to the difference in the reputation and quality of the management school. Let the income of P, Q and R be 1.In a period of 10 years, P will be having the same income as he does not possess human capital. For the same time period Q will earn an income of (1+0.05)^10=1.63 and R will earn an income of (1+0.10)^10=2.59. Now lets see what happens when the rate of return on human capital doubles. Earnings of P will not change since he does not have any human capital. Now Q is going to earn (1+0.10)^10=1.63 and R is going to earn (1+0.20)^10=6.19. Flabbergasting! As soon as return on human capital increases proportionately income inequality increases. With return on human capital doubling, Q’S income increases by 59% and R’s income increases by 139%.

Hence, it is imperative for the government to correct the blemishes in India’s education system which will also be a step towards reducing income inequality.

Certain policy measures need to be taken by the government. The basic thrust of government education spending today must surely be to ensure that all children have access to government schools and to raise the quality of education in those schools. One of the ways in which the problem of poor quality of education can be tackled is through common schooling. This essentially means sharing of resources between private and public schools. Shift system is one of the ways through which common schooling can be achieved. The private school can use the resources during the first half of the day and the government school can use it during the second half. It is important to remember that the quality of education is directly linked to the resources available and it is important for the government to improve resource allocation to bring about qualitative changes in the field of education. Common schooling is one of the ways in which government can use limited resources in an efficient way and thus improve resource allocation.

Another reason for poor quality of education is the poor quality of teachers in government schools .Government schools are unable to attract good quality teachers due to inadequate teaching facilities and low salaries. The government currently spends only 3% of its GDP on education which is inadequate and insufficient. To improve the quality of education , the government needs to spend more money from its coffers on education.

Most economists feel that the only panacea to the ills of the public schooling system is the voucher scheme. Under the voucher system, parents are allowed to choose a school for their children and they get full or partial reimbursement for the expenses from the government. But however, the voucher system will further aggravate the problem of poor quality of education in government schools. Such a system will shift resources from government schools to private schools. This will worsen the situation of government schools which are already under-funded. Moreover, if the same amount given as vouchers can be used to build infrastructure in schools then the government can realize economies of scale. For example- The center for civil society is providing vouchers worth Rs 4000 per Annam to 308 girls. This means that the total amount of money given as vouchers is Rs 1232000. If the same amount can be used to construct a school and employ high quality teachers who are paid well then a larger section of the society will enjoy the benefit of education. A school can definitely accommodate a minimum of 1000 students.

I hope government takes certain appropriate policy measures to improve the education system otherwise inequalities are going to be widespread and India’s basic capabilities will remain stunted. Let us strengthen the case for a stronger education system.